Wind Quintet

Five wind instruments that never blend, patched together rather than mixed

Related

Chamber MusicFluteBassoonFrench Horn

A wind quintet is scored for flute, oboe, clarinet, horn and bassoon, five colours that never blend, so the result is patched together rather than mixed.

Origins and era

At the end of the eighteenth century players in Paris and Vienna fixed the five winds into a standing ensemble, and Cambini wrote the earliest sets in the 1780s. In the nineteenth century Reicha and Danzi produced a large repertory and the horn became the hinge between woodwind and brass. In the twentieth century French and German composers made the group a mainstay of chamber music and a training ground for wind writing.

What you hear

Each instrument keeps a strong identity, the flute cool, the oboe nasal, the clarinet round, the horn distant, the bassoon dry and short. Writing usually gives one part to each player, the theme passing around five lines while horn and bassoon fill in the harmony. Uneven volume is normal, the oboe loudest and the flute weakest, so composers balance by swapping parts and shifting registers. Follow the theme and notice how its register and breathing change as it moves between instruments. Three or four movements are usual, a first in sonata form, a slow movement that lets the horn sing and a rondo finale that lines up short phrases across the five players. Intonation is the hardest part in rehearsal, since woodwind fifths and the horn's harmonic series often quarrel inside the same chord. To keep all five lines audible, composers put the theme in the oboe's or clarinet's change of register and hand the accompaniment to the flute's low range and the bassoon's high one.

Key figures

Cambini's three quintets are the earliest sets, Reicha and Danzi fixed the scoring, Beethoven's Hess 19 uses oboe, three horns and bassoon and shows the line-up was still fluid, and twentieth-century French composers made the group a laboratory of colour.

Lineage

It comes from eighteenth-century wind ensembles and divertimentos and leads to the modern wind quintet repertory and experiments in wind orchestration.

Common misunderstandings

A wind quintet is not five woodwinds, since the horn is brass and stays in the group as a founding member. Nor does it aim at a blended sound, because composers often want all five lines to stand out.

Sources

• The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., entry Wind Quintet, 用于核对编制形成的时间
• Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, Vol. 2, 用于核对十八世纪巴黎管乐合奏的背景

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.