on orchestration for musical effects. Tchaikovsky, however, became noted for the "sensual opulence" and "voluptuous timbrel virtuosity" of his orchestration. Like Glinka, Tchaikovsky tended toward bright primary colors and sharply delineated contrasts of texture. However, beginning with the Third Symphony, Tchaikovsky experimented with an increased range of timbres Tchaikovsky's scoring was noted and admired by some of his peers. Rimsky-Korsakov regularly referred his students at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory to it and called it "devoid of all striving after effect, [to] give a healthy, beautiful sonority". This sonority, musicologist Richard Taruskin pointed out, is essentially Germanic in effect. Tchaikovsky's expert use of having two or more instruments play a melody simultaneously (a practice called doubling) and his ear for uncanny combinations of instruments resulted in "a generalized orchestral sonority in which the individual timbres of the instruments, being thoroughly mixed, would vanish". Pastiche (Passé-ism) In works like the "Serenade for Strings" and the Variations on a Rococo Theme, Tchaikovsky showed he was highly gifted at writing in a style of 18th-century European pastiche. In the ballet The Sleeping Beauty and the opera The Queen of Spades, Tchaikovsky graduated from imitation to full-scale evocation. This practice, which Alexandre Benois calls "passé-ism", lends an air of timelessness and immediacy, making the past seem as though it were the present. On a practical level, Tchaikovsky was drawn to past styles because he felt he might find the solution to certain structural problems within them. His Rococo pastiches also may have offered escape into a musical world purer than his own, into which he felt himself irresistibly drawn. (In this sense, Tchaikovsky operated in the opposite manner to Igor Stravinsky, who turned to Neoclassicism partly as a form of compositional self-discovery.) Tchaikovsky's attraction to ballet might have allowed a similar refuge into a fairy-tale world, where he could freely write dance music within a tradition of French elegance. Aesthetic impact Maes maintains that, regardless of what he was writing, Tchaikovsky's main concern was how his music impacted his listeners on an aesthetic level, at specific moments in the piece and on a cumulative level once the music had finished. What his listeners experienced on an emotional or visceral level became an end in itself. Tchaikovsky's focus on pleasing his audience might be considered closer to that of Mendelssohn or Mozart. Considering that he lived and worked in what was probably the last 19th-century feudal