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Warsaw's salons, especially those principally dedicated to musical gatherings, provided the most interesting venue for serious music making. This chapter discusses the professional and amateur musicians who were active in the salon scene, repertories favored within the salon settings — piano, vocal, and chamber music in particular — and the specifics of music-making in musical salons, especially those at the homes of Joseph Christoph Kessler and Józef and Anna Cichocki. For Chopin, much musical education came in the guise of salon chamber concerts, which included chamber transcriptions of orchestral music. Performances of this sort gave him the opportunity to become acquainted with repertories not heard in concert (by listening to or participating in performances). They also provided him with a venue through which he could test and customize his own compositions.

This chapter examines a selection of music written for the classical clarinet, organized by the following genres: opera and concert arias; choral music; concertos; orchestral music; and chamber music. Important opera composers include Jean Benjamin de La Borde, Thomas Augustine Arne, François-Joseph Gossec, Johann Christian Bach, Matia Vento, André-Modeste Grétry, Christoph Willibald Gluck, Tommaso Giordani, Giovanni Paisiello, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Joseph Haydn, Niccoló Isouard, and Carl Maria von Weber. Significant concertos were written by Johann Stamitz, Michael Haydn, Franz Xaver Pokorny, Carl Stamitz, Johan Mahon, Josef Beer, Mozart, Franz Wilhelm Tausch, Bernhard Henrik Crusell, Louis Spohr, and Weber. Important orchestral music was written by Johann Stamitz, Gossec, J. C. Bach, Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven. Solo works without accompaniment were written by Abraham, Anton Stadler, and Amand Vanderhagen. Duets were written by William Bates, Valentin Roeser, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Gaspard Procksch, Vanderhagen, and others. Important sonatas were written by Jean Xavier Lefévre, Anton Ebert, and Weber. Other chamber music was written by Florian Gassmann, Georg Wagenseil, Johann Baptist Vanhal, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Weber, Reicha, Danzi, and others.

This chapter examines the orchestral, instrumental, and keyboard music of Johann Sebastian Bach. The distinction between orchestral and chamber music was not very clear during Bach's time. The public face of Bach as an orchestral composer can be seen in his four orchestral suits and in secular cantatas he composed during the 1730s. However, most of these compositions were intended for the same kind of music-making as the chamber works.

It is not long since orchestral music had only two forms at its disposal: the symphony and the overture. Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven did not write anything else; who would dare to depart from their example? Franz Liszt dared. To dare, in art, is the most terrible thing. In theory, nothing is simpler. There are no laws against the arts and artists being free to do whatever they like; who is there to stop them? In practice, everything stops them. The new forms that people ask for and desire, or at least appear to, inspire terror and repulsion. In order to accept new forms and grasp their meaning, the mind has to make an effort: those people willing to make this effort are rare. Liszt realized that, if he wanted to impose new forms, he had to make them seem necessary. He set out to create the symphonic poem.

The dispute between the Philharmonic and its landlord was about who would control orchestral music in New York City, how that music would be organized, and how it would be presented to the public. There was new perspective on the growing presence of orchestral music in mid-nineteenth-century America, its increasing marketability, and the changing preferences of American audiences in entertainment and music. Bernard Ullman, one of the most successful musical managers in the United States, negotiated a multiyear lease for the Academy of Music, lasting until September 1861, with an option to renew. He tried to force the Philharmonic Society out of his theater so he could develop his own orchestral performances free of direct competition. Moreover, Ullman's creative negotiations in regulating Alfred Musard and his monster orchestra revealed that there were as many different kinds of orchestra as one could imagine.

A product of romanticism, Anthony Philip Heinrich shared a vision of America similar to that of the Hudson River school of painters. This chapter focuses on the life and musical career of Heinrich. It begins with the rise of Cane Ridge, a mass movement that originated in Kentucky and ultimately swept the American west, and how Lowell Mason, a banker from Savannah, Georgia, countered the unrestrained hymnody of the west through his sacred music. It looks at the shift from sacred church music to secular instrumental music that saw psalmody give way to symphony, and the emergence of romanticism embraced by Heinrich. It also examines how Heinrich synthesized his own brand of romanticism that revolutionized American music and how he exploited his own legend as the “log cabin composer.” The chapter considers Heinrich's years in Boston and Europe, including London, his special fondness for Felix Mendelssohn, his orchestral music, and his time in New York City. Finally, it describes the total eclipse of Heinrich's reputation after his death.

This chapter presents the text of George Gershwin's letter to one of his best friends, Mabel Schirmer, dated February 28, 1928. In this letter, he details his upcoming trip to Europe which resulted in his completion of the orchestral music An American in Paris. He also refers to his desire to find a composition teacher in Europe during his visit.

This chapter presents the text of Deems Taylor's narrative guide in December 1928 for George Gershwin's orchestral music An American in Paris. This guide discussed Gershwin's experience during his visit to Paris, France. It also described how Gershwin completed the composition of his walking themes and the song An American in Paris.

This chapter presents the text of music critic Samuel Chotzinoff's review of George Gershwin's performance of his Concerto in F at the Carnegie Hall with the New York Symphony Orchestra (NYSI) in December 1925. Chotzinoff noted that the announcement of Gershwin's first attempt at symphonic form generated more anticipatory excitement than Deems Taylor's symphonic poem Jurgen. He also described the composition as one that cannot be explained with certainty.

This chapter examines the radical nature of Henry Cowell's orchestral music in the years 1957–1961. In the four years between his return from Asia and his next trip abroad, in the spring of 1961, Henry composed twenty-four substantial pieces and an equal number of tiny birthday, anniversary, wedding, Christmas, and similar occasional pieces for his wife Sidney and their friends. His work included three symphonies; concertante pieces featuring accordion, percussion, and two violas; and four other orchestral works. These pieces can hardly be considered conservative. To begin with, most of Henry's later music was conceived as pure melody. While all the orchestral works have very startling qualities, Ongaku and the Madras Symphony are as unconventional as his wildest early piano pieces. His solo and chamber music of these years also has many unusual features, while his previously vilified early piano music was embraced as an icon of modernism.

This chapter examines the music culture of the village complex of Pakantan in south Tapanuli, North Sumatra, with particular emphasis on the Mandailing raja tradition. It aims to reconstruct the historical and aesthetic context of Pakantan's pre-Muslim ritual orchestral music in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the village was ruled by a chieftain (raja) of the original Lubis clan. The three ritual orchestras, which are differentiated by their respective sets of either five or nine tuned gordang drums or two untuned gordang drums, possess indigenous religious and aesthetic meaning. After providing an overview of the Mandailing people's cultural history, the chapter discusses the social role, aesthetic thought, and ritual practice of their ceremonial music. More specifically, it considers the gordang sambilan performed at major ceremonies, funerals, weddings, and clairvoyant rituals. It shows that each musical item on ceremonial occasions, whether played on a gondang or a gordang ensemble, is named after its totop, or fixed drum rhythm, and serves as an invocation.

When King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia died in July 1840, he was succeeded by Friedrich Wilhelm IV. The new king, who as crown prince had taken a close interest in Felix Mendelssohn's activity in Düsseldorf, wanted to secure his services and bring him to Berlin. Christian Karl Josias von Bunsen and Wilhelm von Humboldt, both of whom knew Mendelssohn personally, persuaded Friedrich Wilhelm that Mendelssohn was the only person fit to be director of the musical division of the Academy of Arts. Despite his initial reservations, Mendelssohn moved to Berlin at the end of July, but remained open to the possibility of a return to Leipzig. The decision gave Mendelssohn the opportunity for composition. At the king's request, he composed orchestral music for productions of Sophocles's Antigone and William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Despite his duties in Berlin, Mendelssohn did not have to sever his ties with the Gewandhaus orchestra in 1841.