Numbers
The size of a string section may be expressed with a formula of the type (for example) 10-10-8-10-6, designating the number of first violins, second violins, violas, cellos, and basses. The numbers can vary widely; thus in a large orchestra they might be 14-14-12-12-10; the band orchestra in Darius Milhaud's La création du monde is 1-1-0-1-1. Mozart's masses and offertories written for the Salzburg cathedral routinely dispensed with violas, as did his dances. Leonard Bernstein also left out the violas in his West Side Story. Famous works without violins include the Second Serenade of Brahms and Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, as well as Andrew Lloyd Webber's Requiem and Philip Glass's opera Akhnaten.
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Famous quotes containing the word numbers:
“Out of the darkness where Philomela sat,
Her fairy numbers issued. What then ailed me?
My ears are called capacious but they failed me,
Her classics registered a little flat!
I rose, and venomously spat.”
—John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974)
“Our religion vulgarly stands on numbers of believers. Whenever the appeal is made—no matter how indirectly—to numbers, proclamation is then and there made, that religion is not. He that finds God a sweet, enveloping presence, who shall dare to come in?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“What culture lacks is the taste for anonymous, innumerable germination. Culture is smitten with counting and measuring; it feels out of place and uncomfortable with the innumerable; its efforts tend, on the contrary, to limit the numbers in all domains; it tries to count on its fingers.”
—Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985)