What's the difference between orchestra and symphony?

Orchestra


Definition:

  • (n.) The space in a theater between the stage and the audience; -- originally appropriated by the Greeks to the chorus and its evolutions, afterward by the Romans to persons of distinction, and by the moderns to a band of instrumental musicians.
  • (n.) The place in any public hall appropriated to a band of instrumental musicians.
  • (n.) Loosely: A band of instrumental musicians performing in a theater, concert hall, or other place of public amusement.
  • (n.) Strictly: A band suitable for the performance of symphonies, overtures, etc., as well as for the accompaniment of operas, oratorios, cantatas, masses, and the like, or of vocal and instrumental solos.
  • (n.) A band composed, for the largest part, of players of the various viol instruments, many of each kind, together with a proper complement of wind instruments of wood and brass; -- as distinguished from a military or street band of players on wind instruments, and from an assemblage of solo players for the rendering of concerted pieces, such as septets, octets, and the like.
  • (n.) The instruments employed by a full band, collectively; as, an orchestra of forty stringed instruments, with proper complement of wind instruments.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) "Here's Munich's Philharmonic Orchestra composing and writing a song for F.C.
  • (2) The London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Francois-Xavier Roth in 2007.
  • (3) Although she's been performing since 2000 – in the punk-cabaret duo the Dresden Dolls , in a controversial conjoined-twin mime act called Evelyn Evelyn (they wear a specially constructed two-person dress and have been castigated by disability groups for presenting conjoined twins as circus freaks, an accusation she denies) – in her new band, Amanda Palmer And The Grand Theft Orchestra , she's suddenly become a kind of phenomenon.
  • (4) As Brooklyn-based Sudanese vocalist Alsarah put it: "We came in as separate musicians, but we're now creating a little orchestra with a new sound – a Nile sound."
  • (5) He opens the residency on 23 June with Ludwig van Beethoven , a composer he has never performed in London with this orchestra.
  • (6) The plans also follow the high-profile interruption by protesters of a performance by the St Louis Symphony Orchestra.
  • (7) "Little by little the vast orchestra of life, the chorus of the natural world, is in the process of being quietened.
  • (8) Photograph: Popperfoto The director, Paul Andrew Williams, best known for the acclaimed L ondon to Brighton , is a refreshingly unpretentious and unflappable director, despite having had to conduct an orchestra of several languages and locations.
  • (9) In a deconsecrated Mayfair church lit with Parisian-style globe lamps, Ronnie Scott's orchestra played jazz standards as waiters in traditional black linen aprons circulated with champagne.
  • (10) There was a long-standing anomaly that while the in-house symphony orchestras and the music broadcasts, including the Proms, were administered by Drummond's department, all the scheduling was in the hands of the controller of Radio 3, a post then held by Ian McIntyre, a journalist with no great sympathy for music.
  • (11) Strauss uses his vast orchestra to depict the experiences of his character on the mountain: a distant hunting party (listen for the 12 offstage horns), waterfalls, meadows, a dark, threatening forest, losing the path, the triumphant view from the summit and the best storm in music since Rossini's William Tell Overture (listen out for the wind machine).
  • (12) In 1936 Lee was briefly drummer with trumpeter Buck Clayton's Fourteen Gentlemen of Harlem and later toured with singer Ethel Waters's orchestra.
  • (13) The existence of two leading orchestras in one broadcasting organisation is a legacy of the allied occupation of Germany after the second world war.
  • (14) Their Prom in 2007 was the event of the decade in this country: a gig that transcended all the usual boundaries of a classical concert, such was the interest generated by the story behind the orchestra, and the commitment of its players.
  • (15) In attempting to fight off closure in the past couple of years, the orchestra had reached a new audience by playing concerts at community centres.
  • (16) Nick Clegg, 24 October 2010 Chopin's Waltz in A Minor played by Idil Biret Sunday Morning Coming Down by Johnny Cash The Cross by Prince Petit Pays by Cesária Évora Street Spirit by Radiohead Life on Mars by David Bowie Waka Waka 2010 World Cup theme, by Shakira Schubert's Impromptu No.3 in G Flat Major played by Alfred Brendel Book The Leopard, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa Luxury A stash of cigarettes David Cameron, 28 May 2006 Tangled Up In Blue by Bob Dylan Ernie by Benny Hill Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd Mendelssohn's On Wings of Song performed by Kiri Te Kanawa and Utah Symphony Orchestra Fake Plastic Trees by Radiohead This Charming Man by The Smiths Perfect Circle by R.E.M.
  • (17) His enthusiasm for new music was balanced by an acute historical perspective and a love of young people: he greatly increased the number of appearances by youth orchestras, upping it to five in the 1993 season.
  • (18) He oversees Radio 3 , the Proms, five BBC orchestras, the BBC Singers and the choruses attached to two of the orchestras.
  • (19) All of these ensembles are founded with different values from those of a conventional orchestra.
  • (20) You're as likely to see the entire brass section of the Halle Orchestra running across the road at the interval for a swift pint as you are a room full of drunken retired policemen.

Symphony


Definition:

  • (n.) A consonance or harmony of sounds, agreeable to the ear, whether the sounds are vocal or instrumental, or both.
  • (n.) A stringed instrument formerly in use, somewhat resembling the virginal.
  • (n.) An elaborate instrumental composition for a full orchestra, consisting usually, like the sonata, of three or four contrasted yet inwardly related movements, as the allegro, the adagio, the minuet and trio, or scherzo, and the finale in quick time. The term has recently been applied to large orchestral works in freer form, with arguments or programmes to explain their meaning, such as the "symphonic poems" of Liszt. The term was formerly applied to any composition for an orchestra, as overtures, etc., and still earlier, to certain compositions partly vocal, partly instrumental.
  • (n.) An instrumental passage at the beginning or end, or in the course of, a vocal composition; a prelude, interlude, or postude; a ritornello.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Mahler's Second Symphony - that song of love, renewal, and spiritual growth that Abbado has been singing for more than 40 years.
  • (2) The London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Francois-Xavier Roth in 2007.
  • (3) I mean, normally, if you have already recorded one cycle of symphonies, people don't want you to publish another, so there must be things that are better in these new recordings than the old ones.
  • (4) Sometimes it's because of a personal connection - the Shostakovich Preludes and Fugues my grandfather loved the most, which we listened to together, or the Bruckner symphony I associate with our family home in the highlands of Scotland - but the welling-up can also come completely out of the blue.
  • (5) Meanwhile he is preparing a new double piano concerto by Kevin Volans with the Labèque sisters for a concert at the Edinburgh festival next week, and he tells me with a glint in his eye about ideas for the next two seasons: concert performances of Don Giovanni this October, more Brahms symphonies, and more Berlioz – an ambitious plan to realise the gigantic drama of Roméo and Juliette on a chamber-orchestral scale, following up his rapturously received performances of L'Enfance du Christ in February.
  • (6) The plans also follow the high-profile interruption by protesters of a performance by the St Louis Symphony Orchestra.
  • (7) There was a long-standing anomaly that while the in-house symphony orchestras and the music broadcasts, including the Proms, were administered by Drummond's department, all the scheduling was in the hands of the controller of Radio 3, a post then held by Ian McIntyre, a journalist with no great sympathy for music.
  • (8) The Recessional Organ Music will be C. M. Widor’s Toccata from Symphony No 5.
  • (9) Nick Clegg, 24 October 2010 Chopin's Waltz in A Minor played by Idil Biret Sunday Morning Coming Down by Johnny Cash The Cross by Prince Petit Pays by Cesária Évora Street Spirit by Radiohead Life on Mars by David Bowie Waka Waka 2010 World Cup theme, by Shakira Schubert's Impromptu No.3 in G Flat Major played by Alfred Brendel Book The Leopard, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa Luxury A stash of cigarettes David Cameron, 28 May 2006 Tangled Up In Blue by Bob Dylan Ernie by Benny Hill Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd Mendelssohn's On Wings of Song performed by Kiri Te Kanawa and Utah Symphony Orchestra Fake Plastic Trees by Radiohead This Charming Man by The Smiths Perfect Circle by R.E.M.
  • (10) He has taken various elements of the war, and translated their brutality into elegiac works, as with Freedom Qashoush Symphony, a delicate song which starts with rattled off gunfire, the symphony culminates in an urgent instrumental cry of freedom, inspired by Ibrahim al-Qashoush, an early symbol of rebel martyrdom.
  • (11) On the other hand, the Brahms Third Symphony that he brought to London with his orchestra in 1998 still revealed a masterly control of ebb and flow in a work which Abbado had always regarded as one of the most difficult to conduct from the technical point of view.
  • (12) His chaotic yet coherent masterpieces of the late 1960s, such as his Eight Songs for a Mad King, in which a violin is smashed to pieces every time the work is played – a moment that still draws gasps from any audience – through to his later cycles of concertos, symphonies, string quartets and music-theatre pieces,, as well as the dozens of pieces he has written for communities and amateur musicians to perform, make his a unique achievement in 20th and 21st century music.
  • (13) And I think that listening to something like Mahler’s 6th or 9th symphonies, you realise that the music knows what the author doesn’t.
  • (14) Last year, his composition The Masque of Time was given its world premiere by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra.
  • (15) Evacuated to Bournemouth at the outbreak of war, Drummond went to hear the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and a recital by Kathleen Ferrier, whose biography he was to film 20 years later in what was probably his most successful television production.
  • (16) It was with Mahler's Second Symphony that Abbado made his debut with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1965, when, aged 32, he was invited by Karajan to conduct the orchestra at that year's Salzburg Festival (he recalls his teacher in Vienna, Hans Swarowsky, one of the century's great conducting pedagogues, ironically complimenting him after the performance, "Ah look, the new Toscanini!").
  • (17) Soskin, in his 1946 textbook, stated that insulin may be regarded as the dominant instrument in the symphony of endocrine action that results in normal carbohydrate metabolism.
  • (18) And I knew that if I really did go in six weeks, I wouldn’t finish the bloody symphony.
  • (19) From the Third Symphony (1985) onwards, the tuned percussion fades away and the palette becomes much more classical.
  • (20) To assess the risk of noise-induced hearing loss among musicians in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, personal dosimeters set to the 3-dB exchange rate were used to obtain 68 noise exposure measurements during rehearsals and concerts.