The orchestra's famed dynamic control took on two aspects which represented an advance over Baroque instrumental practices. First was the ability of the full orchestra to accompany a soloist without covering them, which requires that every member of the orchestra master playing with utmost softness without sacrificing clarity. In the Baroque period, composers avoided this difficulty by reducing the instrumentation of solo passages, but since the Mannheim orchestra members were all virtuosi, the composers who wrote for them were able to create new orchestral sounds by capitalizing on this new development. The second innovation was the famed "Mannheim crescendo," where the whole orchestra would transition from very soft to very loud within a very short time. In contrast, Baroque music's dynamics were mostly uniform, either ''piano'' or ''forte'', but without effects such as crescendo or diminuendo. | The orchestra's famed dynamic control took on two aspects which represented an advance over Baroque instrumental practices. First was the ability of the full orchestra to accompany a soloist without covering them, which requires that every member of the orchestra master playing with utmost softness without sacrificing clarity. In the Baroque period, composers avoided this difficulty by reducing the instrumentation of solo passages, but since the Mannheim orchestra members were all virtuosi, the composers who wrote for them were able to create new orchestral sounds by capitalizing on this new development. The second innovation was the famed "Mannheim crescendo," where the whole orchestra would transition from very soft to very loud within a very short time. In contrast, Baroque music's dynamics were mostly uniform, either ''piano'' or ''forte'', but without effects such as crescendo or diminuendo. |