Preface

Preface

Main ideas:

This handbook on orchestration takes a different approach than existing treatises by focusing on the range of experience and requirements of the average music student. The book includes comparative studies of compositional styles to establish corollary styles of orchestration, with particular emphasis on establishing idiomatic orchestral textures and spacings for music originally for keyboard instruments. Keyboard idioms and patterns are analyzed and classified in terms applicable to orchestral instruments, with illustrative examples carried through idiomatic scoring methods for each section of the orchestra.

The book also includes a short survey of the evolutionary phases of orchestration to establish technical data necessary for score reading and an understanding of transpositions, wind instruments' operating principles, and brass parts' irregularities before the nineteenth century. Instruments are evaluated according to their independent and supplementary capacities, playing characteristics, exceptional peculiarities, and interrelationships. The timbre, tonal strength, and weakness of each instrument are examined in the perspective of musical contexts covering a normal gamut of compositional styles and techniques.

Orchestration requires the recognition, assimilation, and evaluation of purely technical elements of musical structure before being practical or possible. The book recognizes this aspect of the subject as a prerequisite of scoring and a core of a sound, workable scoring technique. Exhaustive knowledge and understanding of orchestral instruments can only have limited value without the correlation of this vital element.

Keyboard music of all periods and styles serves as accessible source material for applied study of orchestration. The book recognizes that the use of keyboard music is of special significance for the average student orchestrator since the general tendency is to think of music in terms of the piano. The orchestrator's task in working with this source material calls for idiomatic conversion of musical values of one medium to those of another, without the loss of pertinent details or musical style.

The Reference Chart of Keyboard Idioms and Patterns recognizes and facilitates, by a systematic and specialized study plan, the orchestral adaptation of keyboard music's most common stylistic technicalities. The study plan outlined stimulates creative thinking by dealing with multiple voice parts in kaleidoscopic combinations of mixed colors, strengths, and intensities. The book also includes a Workbook with numerous examples of scoring, with direct reference and relationship to all the entries contained in the Reference Chart of Keyboard Idioms and Patterns.

The book's practicality is considered from a conductor's point of view as well as from that of a composer. Its emphasis is directed toward the realization of the greatest possible effect with the least possible means, facilitating methods of procedure and recognizing the variable technical proficiency of orchestras. The book incorporates equal proportions of textures and timbres as basic text materials because teaching experience over many years showed conclusively the regularity of common errors dealing essentially with purely technical aspects of structural problems.

The author acknowledges Miss Helen Reichard and Prof. A. Kunrad Kvam of Douglass College (Rutgers University) and Felix Greissle for their valued assistance and cooperation. A special note of thanks is also rendered to Nicolas Slonimsky for his scholarly suggestions, to Arthur Cohn for his expert reading of the final proofs, and to the author's wife for her untiring efforts in the preparation and proofreading of the manuscript.

Joseph Wagner