Editing Arcangelo Corelli (section)

=== The conductor ===
Little is known about his performances as a conductor, except that he successfully played this role for many years at the head of the orchestras of the church of San Luis and the Academy of Drawing Arts and of countless groups formed for specific occasions, such as recitals in the private academies of the aristocracy, civic festivals and diplomatic receptions. The recognition he received was always very generous, and he was praised above all for the great discipline of the musicians he directed, always obtaining vigorous performances, with great precision in the attack of the notes and a powerful overall effect.<ref name="Treccani"/> Geminiani reported that "Corelli felt it was essential that the entire orchestra move the bows at exactly the same time: all up, all down, so that in rehearsals prior to performances, he could stop the music if he saw an out-of-range bow position".<ref name="Greenwood Group">Hager, Nancy. "Arcangelo Corelli (1653–1713)". In: Hager, Alan (ed.). ''The Age of Milton: An Encyclopedia of Major 17th-century British and American Authors.''</ref>

Corelli was of vital importance in the process of transformation of the traditional orchestra. In the previous generation, ensembles were quite small even for opera performances and only on very exceptional occasions were large groups recruited, especially for open-air festivals. The orchestra of San Luigi, for example, did not exceed twenty members, even on prestigious occasions, and most of the time it consisted of about ten or fifteen members.<ref name="Oxford University">Spitzer, John & Zaslaw, Neal. ''The Birth of the Orchestra: History of an Institution, 1650–1815''. Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 105–136</ref>

Thanks to the legacy of ancient polyphonic practices, ensembles made use of various instruments of balanced proportions, grouped in "choirs", each composed of several types of instruments. Corelli's generation began to change this balance of forces towards an increasing predominance of the string section, with an emphasis on the violins, significantly expanding the number of musicians, grouping the instruments into homogeneous sections and separating the singers from the orchestra. . Its spatial arrangement also changed, adopting a distribution that favored the typical language of the Grosso concert, with a small solo ensemble, the ''concertino'', separated from the large ''ripieno'' group.<ref name="Oxford University"/><ref name="Bukofzer">Bukofzer, Manfred F. ''Music In The Baroque Era: From Monteverdi To Bach''. Read Books, 2013</ref>

In addition to conducting and being a concertmaster at the same time, Corelli was responsible for recruiting musicians to form occasional orchestras, paid salaries, and performed all the functions of a modern event manager. On some occasions he employed an immense number of musicians, up to 150, far above all the standards of his time. According to Crescimbeni's testimony, "he was the first to introduce ensembles in Rome with such a number of instruments and such diversity that it was almost impossible to believe that he could make them play all together without fear of confusion, especially since he combined wind instruments with strings, and the total very often exceeded one hundred elements." Although the number of musicians varied greatly in each performance, the balance of Corelli's orchestras was constant, with at least half of the musicians playing violins and a quarter occupied with cellos, [[Violone|violons]] and double basses. The remaining fraction was filled with a varied instrumentation of violas, wind instruments, [[lute]]s, [[theorbo]]s, [[organ (musical instrument)|organs]], [[harpsichord]]s and others, and depended largely on the character of the music of the occasion. His intense activity at different levels in the field of orchestral music dominated the Roman scene and his role as organizer, dynamizer and standard bearer can be compared to that of [[Jean-Baptiste Lully]] at the court of [[Louis XIV]]. By extension, one could say that all the Roman orchestras between 1660 and 1713 were “Corelli's orchestra."<ref name="Oxford University"/>