Berlioz: Master of Orchestration?

Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique is filled with eerie musical passages and sounds that often seem to overwhelm our senses. As complex as his music may be to a listener, however, the oddity of Berloz' sounds may lie in the instruments he uses and how they are arranged together in the symphony. Berlioz has an uncanny knack for using instruments in new ways and producing new, often disturbing sounds. The slight feeling of unease one often feels when listening to his music, however, comes in part from how incredibly human some of the orchestration sounds.

In the 5th movement of la Symphonie Fantastique, particularly, we are assaulted by a series of weird, almost grotesque sounds that could truly be the cackling laughter of a goblin army. First, we have the low pitch brass instruments at the very beginning of the piece playing one note three times successively, each time backing away quickly and leaving almost an echo behind. This sounds like a deep guffaw.

Then we hear the high pitch, grating sound of an e-flat clarinet playing one long note, followed by a series of shorter formulations of that one note; this pitch which is then held out one last time and allowed to slide  and decay as it ends. This passage by the e-flat clarinet which is repeated several times over the course of the movement distinctly sounds like an unpleasant high-pitched cackle.

Then as the texture of the movement becomes more thick, we hear these instruments again that we now associate with a certain character (cackling witch, guffawing ogre, or even snickering woodsprite) and we come to hear them almost as voices, speaking and shouting amidst the cacophony. In the 5th movement, we can hear this babble especially well at 3:26 after the first set of bell tolls and the coupling of the two brass instruments (one of a slightly lower pitch) in a passage that mimics the inflection of a human voice. It sounds like a demonic chant straight from the depths of hell.

The human qualities we give to these instruments stems from the fact that we have been given some context via the program, but also because our ears have been trained by Berlioz in the earlier segment to pick out certain instruments and associate them with some type of monster. This connection, which occurs mostly in our minds is what truly brings this piece to life. Berlioz may be an exceptional composer, but I do not believe that this piece would be as disturbing and consequently as powerful if he had not prepped our imagination to leap ahead and enrich his music with our own personal interpretations.

And now that we understand the power of visualization, here is a potential visual image of the scene that Berlioz describe from one of my childhood favorites, The Black Cauldron. Skip to 1:18, the goblins are pretty convincing.