Hardest Instrument to Write for

[reith]

My belief that all instruments are hard to write effectively for. If you play an instrument you can appreciate its limits better. Howver, if you play one to an intermediate grade, writing might be scary.

M

[Thorolf]

Trying the actual instrument, is always rewarding!

Everybody writing should pick up any instrument that they are allowed to touch and play around with it for at least one hour.

It’s tremendous how getting the right kind of ideas emerges from just some rudimentary hands-on experience.

Regards

[Will Kirk]

An intermediate grade will give you better understanding, how could that make is scary? I was only a lower intermediate player on violin, and writing for it wasn't scary at all, but that's just me.

[Will Kirk]

Originally Posted by Thorolf

Trying the actual instrument, is always rewarding!

Everybody writing should pick up any instrument that they are allowed to touch and play around with it for at least one hour.

It’s tremendous how getting the right kind of ideas emerges from just some rudimentary hands-on experience.

Regards

Yes, I concur

[Thorolf]

Originally Posted by reith

My belief that all instruments are hard to write effectively for.

Not more difficult than making music in the first place

There’s no denying that any setup has its limits. The soloist is the freest of all, when it comes to phrasing, tempi and dynamics! As the number of players increase, the need for stable solutions to these matters increase accordingly. So there will always be a trade-off: Solo pieces offer limited complexity and sonority and greater freedom of expression in the performance, and vice versa for bigger ensembles.

So the key is to be inspired by the instrument itself, heeding the soloist possibilities of the instrument as you compose, and leave room for soloist expression to the player.

That said, of the modern instruments, the modern harp is notorious for it’s seemingly unlimited, piano-like qualities, but you are always limited to 7 diatonic steps, so you have to rack your brain continuously to find practical solutions to playing the things your inner ear might be used to, thinking piano. And some things can simply not be done, e. g. the rapid chromatic scale that’s relatively easily played on any other instrument is not feasible on the modern harp. You also have to consider the practicalities following the fact that the player only can shift the tuning of two string sets simultaneously, and not just any two: If two shall be changed simultaneously, the corresponding pedals have to reside on opposite sides of the harp…

So you really have to take every chromatic move into account, and actually image every move the harp player makes as you go.

This is “difficult” in some respects, but gives you a closeness to understanding the instument that is rewarding in its own right.



Regards

[Boneman]

I would say the conductors baton!

[Gryvix]

Well all instruments are hard to write for, they all have different things to worry about. their range, and their sound in that range.
Then technicalities: like harp for instance with pedalissues, als timpani got this issue since it takes time to change a timpani to another note. Then brass that can't have big intervals too often, can't play too high in their range and can't play too long otherwise they get too tired. certain instruments can't play as rapidly as others. Sliding of notes. For percussion, can they switch rapid enough to another instrument? This last one is a very common mistake.

Oh yea conductors, they don't listen to what the composer writes.
Tempi played wrong. I know of a very good conductor that if their is any kind of instruction about the piece, he just throws that page into the bin right away

[kenm]

Looking at it the other way round, the easiest instruments to write for are the ones that you play. Next come the ones that you play with. For me, this means that I am very familiar with horn, double bass and piano, and pretty happy with the woodwind (from playing in wind quintets and larger groups), brass (from brass band and orchestral playing) and orchestral strings (from orchestral and chamber music). Percussion begins to be a bit tricky: I have played xylophone, vibraphone and tubular bells a bit, but never became confident on them, so the problem is knowing how difficult one can make a part and still expect a good amateur to play it. Really difficult instruments for anyone who doesn't play them are acoustic guitar (easy to write chord symbols, but difficult to write counterpoint), orchestral harp (because of the constraints of the pedal mechanism), and other plucked strings, like lute and vihuela.

[Amythe]

The bass steel pan.
I compose and arrange for my school's steel band all the time, and the bass part has only an octave and a half to work with... not much you can really do there.

[MaestroX]

Interesting. How many steel pans are there in a steel band?