As one goes through life in the world of Music, one tends to develop relationships with pieces of music (or songs or tracks, depending on the style(s) one tends to listen to). I have certainly found that to be the case for me, and the more I work with the standard orchestral repertoire the deeper my relationships with different pieces get. I have performed quite a bit of the repertoire suitable to community and semi-pro orchestras at this point, and I’ve found myself playing some of the same pieces several times. I have also studied pieces that I haven’t performed (and some that I’m not likely to perform given their difficulty). These would tend to include the late romantic or early 20th century German composers like Bruckner, Richard Strauss, and a lot of Mahler, which tend to be more suitable for professional orchestras than community or semi-pro orchestras.

In this essay, I’m going to pick a few of my favorite pieces in the classical orchestral repertoire and discuss my relationship with each one. This may include my initial exposure, and the time(s) I’ve played them. I like quite a few more than I’ll discuss here, but these are some pieces that I have particularly deep relationships with.

I’m going to start with Franz von Suppe’s Light Cavalry Overture. Several people who I know have told me about their initial experience that made them excited about orchestral music as a kid. For some of them, it happened on a school field trip or when a local orchestra came and played at their school, and there was some piece that sparked their imaginations as 3rd or 4th graders. In my case, it was a “field trip” with my violin teacher, who took me and a couple of her other students to hear one of her older students, Sarah Wilfong, play with the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra. I think I was around 9 years old, and if that’s correct, then I would have just started beginner’s string orchestra at the Music Institute of Chicago the year before, and Sarah was also my summer teacher who gave me my first fiddle lessons that previous summer. It’s possible this concert was shortly before all that, but it was around that time. I don’t remember the other pieces they played on the program, but the overture was the Light Cavalry Overture, and there’s a trumpet soli part a little ways into the piece (not the opening fanfare, but the next trumpet moment a couple minutes in) that I fell in love with on first hearing that day. It then bursts into a full tutti on the same passage right after that, and I was very excited by that part specifically.

We had an extensive collection of classical recordings in our house growing up, and I had heard plenty of orchestral music before. I used to listen to music while going to sleep, and somehow back then I was able to fall asleep to Beethoven’s 9th symphony (not something I could easily do today!). But my memory is that the Light Cavalry Overture was the first piece I ever asked my dad to get a recording of for me. In typical kid fashion, I didn’t remember what it was called, I just assumed he could somehow find out. Somehow he did, and I listened to that recording enough that I eventually memorized the melody for the whole piece! I got the score several years later when I was in high school, and since then I have performed it 3 times in my orchestras here in Los Angeles, all on viola - once with the Glendale College Community Orchestra, once with the Pasadena Community Orchestra, and once with the San Fernando Valley Symphony Orchestra. I might even get a recording of my own someday! I look forward to the next three times as well 🙂

The next piece I’m going to discuss is Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 in A Major. This one is my favorite of his symphonies, and it has been ever since I did a detailed analysis of this piece in my Music Theory 2 class as a senior at New Trier High School. We got to the end of the school year, and as a final project for the class the teacher looked up what the Chicago Symphony Orchestra was playing around April / May of 2008. He chose Beethoven 7 as a piece we could analyze with the knowledge we gained that year, and we worked on it as a class. Then we got to go on a field trip as a class to watch the CSO play the piece downtown in Symphony Center. This was one of the last things I did in high school - it was actually the first week of my Senior Project, but I had to finish a couple of class things that week, one of which was this Music Theory field trip!

Fast forward a few years, and I’m out here in LA trying to find an orchestra to join a year or so after coming out here, in 2013. I found the Glendale College Community Orchestra, and e-mailed the conductor who invited me to come down and check them out. The feature piece on the concert that semester was Beethoven 7, so I got to play 1st violin on it at that point. I didn’t play it again until the post-COVID years, but in the last few years I’ve played it twice more, both on viola this time. Once with the GCCO (now the Symphony of the Verdugos), and then again a year or so later with the San Fernando Valley Symphony (and that one I do have a recording of!) I took Advanced Orchestration in the Fall 2024 semester at CSUN, and this was the piece we started with in that class as an analysis project, so I’ve done that again. I’m writing this in April 2025, and we just found out a week or so ago that the next Topanga Symphony concert in June will feature Beethoven 7, so that’ll be the fourth time for me playing it, third time on viola!

Next I’ll talk about another Beethoven symphony - this one is one that most people probably don’t think about that much, but I have a personal history with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 8 in F Major as well. Beethoven was asked once why No. 7 was more popular than No. 8, and his answer was supposedly “because the 8th is so much better.” Audiences seem to love No. 7, while it is true that No. 8 is not played as much. But this one has the distinction in my life of being the first Beethoven Symphony I ever attempted to perform, back in Summer of 2007, just before my senior year of high school. I played with the MIC Philharmonic, the top “regular” youth orchestra at the Music Institute of Chicago (they had a more advanced one for people who were seriously working on getting into high-level conservatories). One of the Chicago area community colleges, Wright College, asked for some people to help fill out their sections a bit, so I joined them for a concert in August that year. We only got the call a few days before the concert, so I wound up with one rehearsal and about 36 hours to learn the 1st violin part for this program (which also featured Mendelssohn Hebrides Overture and Grieg Holberg Suite - not the easiest program I’ve done, particularly with a day’s notice!). It didn’t go terribly well for me, but it was an interesting experience to say the least. 

Nearly 10 years to the day later, in August 2017, I had joined the Topanga Symphony Orchestra here in LA on viola, and they programmed Beethoven 8 on that concert. I had a full 6 weeks to learn that part, and it went much better!

My most recent meaningful experience with the piece actually wasn’t a performance, but I took Symphonic Literature as an elective at CSUN in the Fall 2024 semester with Tomasz Golka, and as part of that class he gave us a pretest to see where his students stood on orchestral historical knowledge. One component of the test was to look at a random page of a score with no name attached and to try to say what we could about it - ideally name it, but mostly things like texture, instrumentation, and through those things, guessing at period, nationality, classical genre (symphony, tone poem, concerto, etc), and maybe the composer if you wanted to take a stab at it. I thought I recognized part of the last movement of Beethoven 8, so I guessed that and it turned out I was right! I noticed the rapid-fire triplet motive that appears throughout, Beethoven’s signature octave timpani trick, and a 3-against-2 pattern at one point (also it was in F major). The professor was so impressed I got that one by name that he actually called me out by name in front of the class when we reviewed the results of the pretest a couple of weeks later! (I later found out that one of the other viola players at CSUN was the one who got that right in his class a couple years earlier, so I guess viola players just have strong orchestral knowledge 🙂, or at least we know our Beethoven Symphonies!)

The final piece I want to discuss right now is The Planets, by Gustav Holst. If you’ve looked at my theory guides section on my site you might see I have a fondness for this piece - I used it as the example in two of my theory guides, Orchestration Analysis and Sonic Forest - Notation Trees. I first ran across this piece when I first got serious about building my score collection at the end of Jr. High. My dad had gotten a few Dover miniature scores for me when I was in middle school, and I read those quite a bit in my earliest years studying orchestral music - there were six of them: Beethoven Symphonies 5 and 9, Mozart Eine Kleine Nacht Musik etc, Handel Water Music / Royal Fireworks, Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, and the Bach Brandenburg Concerti. In 8th grade, I got a copy of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Principles of Orchestration, and he recommended getting full scores of the pieces he excerpted in that book. I asked for Scheherazade, and my dad also got me Debussy’s La Mer, and Holst’s The Planets.

I had been a space nerd for most of my school days (I even got to help “teach” the space unit in 1st grade!), and I also liked Star Wars and Sci-fi in general, so I decided to start with The Planets out of that batch, and fell in love with the piece immediately. In fact, I might go so far as to say if you want to get kids excited about classical music, you might want to try playing this piece for them! I wore out my miniature score copy of The Planets from listening to it and studying it so much. This was actually the first piece I ever tried analyzing for orchestration on my own back in high school - the hymn passage from Jupiter, the same one I wrote up nearly 20 years later for my orchestration class at CSUN in the Fall 2024 semester and on my website. My analysis is a bit more sophisticated at this point 🙂

Back when I was at Berklee, we played just Mars and Jupiter in the Berklee Contemporary Symphony Orchestra. That was the semester I got moved from 2nd violin to 1st violin, so I played both parts at some point during the semester. Fast forward 14 years later, and I just got to play the whole suite at CSUN in the Fall 2024 semester, this time on viola! It has been on my “bucket list” of pieces to play someday for longer than I’ve had a formal list, pretty much the whole time I’ve been playing in symphony orchestras. So I was very excited to get to do it last semester, and playing in CSUN’s Soraya hall is always a good experience!

There are a lot more pieces I have some sort of relationship with. I might write up a few others at some point down the road, but these are some of the most personally meaningful pieces for me, and now you know why! These are reasons that go much deeper than just whether the pieces are good or fun or interesting musically. They are personal history reasons that other people can’t have - they can certainly have their own personal stories for pieces, but no one else will have my specific history with these pieces. I’m sure all of us who live and work in this world have similar stories about our own set of pieces, but no two will be the same, and that’s one of the things that makes this world so interesting!