About the instrumentation of bass and melody line in Leoš Janáček's Sinfonietta and Mládí

Leoš Janáček's orchestral and chamber music works belong to the most significant compositions of the first half of the 20th century. Besides his numerous stage works Janáček created a series of orchestral works, such as Taras Bulba (1915-18), Balada Blanická (1919) and Sinfonietta (1926). Due to their expressiveness, complexity and numerous instrumentational refinements they belong to the most exciting orchestral works of the interwar period. While a whole set of musicological treatises deal with formal, thematic and motivic aspects of his orchestral music, the finesses in instrumentation of his orchestral oeuvre remained largely unexplored. The aim of this paper is to look at the design of the bass and melody line in Janáček's Sinfonietta from a music-analytical perspective. The following aspects are presented in details: instrumentation of the bass line, octave doublings of the melody line within a movement, as well as the participation of the low strings and the brass section in the performance of the melody.