The Orchestra by Michael Hurd
The Orchestra
An Illustrated History of Orchestral Evolution, Compositional Legacy, and Conducting Masters from the Sixteenth Century to the Modern Symphony Era
An Illustrated History of Orchestral Evolution, Compositional Legacy, and Conducting Masters from the Sixteenth Century to the Modern Symphony Era
Bibliographic Specifications
- Title: The Orchestra
- Author: Michael Hurd
- Publisher: Phaidon Press Ltd, Oxford / London
- Publication Date: 1981
- ISBN-13: 9780714821702 (ISBN-10: 0714821708)
- Edition Details: First Phaidon Edition.
- Binding: Original publisher's premium black cloth-covered boards with bold gilt-stamped typography to the spine; complete with original illustrated dust jacket.
- Physical Format: Quarto (4to), 224 pages. Richly enhanced with an expansive archive of historical monochrome portraits, manuscript facsimiles, structural orchestral diagrams, and full-colour lifestyle performance plates.
- Language: English
Official Condition Report
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The Book: Very Good Plus (VG+)
- Exterior / Boards: The original black cloth boards remain flat, rigid, and completely square. The gilt lettering along the spine is untarnished and brilliant. The corners are sharp with no significant trace of friction or bumping. The spine panel is uncreased, upright, and structurally flawless.
- Interior: The text block is robustly bound, crisp, and remarkably fresh. Internal pages and historical plates are completely clean, bright white, and entirely free of reader annotations, highlights, dog-ears, or thumb marks.
- Provenance: Pristine state; entirely free of previous owner signatures, institutional library stamps, or dealer pencil marks.
- Protection: Kept pristine and safely enclosed within a custom archival-grade protective cellophane sleeve.
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The Dust Jacket: Very Good Plus (VG+)
- Condition: Clean, complete, and unclipped. Displays only very limited, superficial signs of minor handling and trace storage friction at the extreme edge tips, entirely consistent with careful archival shelf housing. Free of major chips, fading, or edge tears.
Synopsis & Historical Value
Published by the prestigious house of Phaidon Press in 1981, The Orchestra is a sweeping, authoritatively composed visual and musicological history of western classical music’s premier performance apparatus. Written by the highly regarded musical chronicler Michael Hurd, this volume masterfully charts the complex evolution of the orchestra across four centuries—tracing its humble genesis from the intimate court chamber ensembles of the 16th century through the baroque, classical, and romantic eras, culminating in the monumental multi-instrument symphony configurations of the modern era.
Rather than offering an insular look at musical instruments, Hurd's text comprehensively evaluates the profound, symbiotic influence of history's greatest composers and conductors on orchestral structure and performance dynamics. The volume breaks down how innovators like Beethoven, Berlioz, and Mahler demanded entirely new physical geologies of sound, alongside the rise of the specialized maestro conductor. Complete with a comprehensive international musical gazetteer indexing world-famous concert halls and orchestras, this beautifully protected volume stands as an indispensable reference work for global collectors of classical musicology and premium Phaidon monographs.
Author Profile: Michael Hurd
Michael Hurd (1928–2006) was a distinguished British composer, musicologist, and author who spent his career advancing the understanding of classical and choral music. Educated at Pembroke College, Oxford, Hurd was widely celebrated for his deep erudition and highly accessible, narrative-driven prose style. His expansive bibliography includes definitive composer biographies, youth guides to classical arrangement, and comprehensive historical studies of music industry structures, making his out-of-print Phaidon editions highly prized by classical musicians and institutional library archives alike.
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