Instrumentation and Orchestration
The Devils of Loudun is scored for enormous musical forces, including nineteen soloists, five choruses (nuns, soldiers, guards, children, and monks), orchestra, and tape. The orchestra itself is of a great size too, making use of a very particular blending of instruments. The orchestra is composed of four flutes (alternating two piccolo and one alto), two English horns, an E♭ clarinet, a double-bass clarinet, two alto saxophones, two baritone saxophones, three bassoons, a contrabassoon, six horns, four B♭trumpets (alternating one D trumpet), four trombones, two tubas, percussion (4 players), twenty violins, eight violas, eight celli, six basses, harp, piano, harmonium, organ, and bass electric guitar. The percussionists play timpani, military drum, friction drum, bass drum, slapstick, five wood blocks, ratchet, guiro, bamboo scrapers, cymbals, six suspended cymbals, 2 tam-tams, 2 gongs, Javanese gong, triangle, tubular bells, church bell, sacring bells, musical saw, flexatone, and siren (not mentioned in the instrumentation list at the beginning of the score).
Nonetheless, this extraordinarily large ensemble is used with great moderation by the composer. In particular, Penderecki exploits the use of chamber ensembles coupled by their correspondence of timbre quality and specific coloristic effect. With the resulting pallet of orchestral colors at his command, Penderecki is able to provide a musical commentary and thus determine the expressive quality of a given scene. While the smaller ensembles predominate through the work, Penderecki resources to the full ensemble resonance for dramatic effect, emphasizing this way the most emotionally charged scenes, such as the exorcisms of the Ursuline nuns and the death of Grandier.
The orchestration is written in cut-out score format, that is with very little metrical guidelines, very few rests, and includes some aleatory effects of notes and tone-clouds in approximate pitches. Penderecki's work-method at the time was to develop his musical ideas in various colored pencils and inks, although the final score does not use color-coding.
The Devils of Loudun calls for the use of a number of extended techniques on its instrumental writing. The use of such techniques is also for coloristic purposes. These extended techniques are evidently associated with specific notational symbols. Some of these techniques are: bowing in-between the bridge and the tailpiece, bowing the right marrow side of the bridge, and bowing the string holder.
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