The word symphony is derived from the Greek word symphonia, meaning "agreement or concord of sound” and was often used in the place of the word consonance. Earliest incorporations of the word symphony began during the Baroque era. For most of this period, the terms symphony and sinfonia were used for a wide range of different compositions, including instrumental pieces used in operas, sonatas and concertos and were usually part of a larger work. By the 18th century, the opera sinfonia (Italian overture) had a standard structure of three contrasting movements: fast, slow, fast/ dance-like. It is this form that is often considered as the most prevalent of the orchestral symphony and the terms overture, symphony and sinfonia were often seen as …show more content…
Around the beginning of the century, a full-scale orchestra would consist of a full string section plus pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, trumpets, and a set of timpani. This is, for instance, the scoring used in Beethoven's symphonies numbered 1, 2, 4, 7, and 8. Trombones, which had previously been confined to church and theater music, came to be added to the symphonic orchestra, notably in Beethoven's 5th, 6th, and 9th symphonies. The combination of bass drum, triangle, and cymbals (and sometimes piccolo), which 18th century composers employed as a coloristic effect in more eastern-influenced music, came to be increasingly more popularized during the second half of the 19th century without any such alterations to genre. In addition to increasing in variety of instruments, 19th century symphonies were gradually augmented with more string players and more wind parts, so that the orchestra grew substantially in sheer numbers, with concert halls following suit. Some composers, including Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Carl Nielsen, continued to write in the traditional four-movement form, while other composers took different approaches. A concern with unification of the traditional four-movement symphony into a single, subsuming formal conception had emerged in the late 19th century. This has been called a "two-dimensional symphonic form", and finds its key turning point in Arnold Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony No. 1, Op. 9 (1909), which was followed in the 1920s by other notable single-movement German symphonies, including Kurt Weill’s First Symphony (1921), Max Butting’s Chamber Symphony, Op. 25 (1923), and Paul Dessau's 1926 Symphony. However, symphonies still kept hold of certain tendencies. Designating a work a "symphony" still implied a degree of sophistication and seriousness of purpose. The word