Widor was a great organist and teacher. During church services, he used to have improvisation contests with his assistant, a young Gabriel Fauré. His book was created as a supplement to the by-then outdated Berlioz Grand Treatise above. It’s useful mostly for its outlook and its charts of different techniques, like trills, tremolos, double-stops, and…
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To read this book is to step deep into the history of orchestration and instrumentation. It’s really the first manual of its kind and speaks to the enormous vision and originality of Berlioz. The updating and commentary by Richard Strauss make the book much more readable, though it’s still no kind of manual upon which…
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This book laid the foundation for all other English-language orchestration manuals, both in organization and in wit. But despite Del Mar’s zingers, this book remains the funniest, most insightful read on orchestration. It left a deep imprint on a whole generation of American and English orchestrators. Highly recommended.
Many orchestrators still feel this information is relevant today, and if you do a Google search you will find sites that have recorded the samples and offer courses based around the original text. What’s valuable to us here is that one of the greatest orchestrators ever, and incidentally Stravinsky’s teacher, preserved his working knowledge and…
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Belkin has a series of e-books on composition, which are available for free download on the internet, covering Form, Harmony, and Counterpoint. This particular book isn’t really a manual, nor is it essentially systematic. Rather, it’s a monograph in the old style, a collection of observations about a particular topic, that stretches out over 65…
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Kennan’s book was published as an alternative to the Piston text when it was becoming outdated. Then Norton updated Piston, and since then Prentice-Hall have updated Kennan, and are now competing against Adler with a CD set and so on. It’s all useful, but not as usable as Piston in Adler in terms of organization…
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A life’s work in codifying the principles of orchestral texture. In some ways, it’s a very narrow view into one specific element of orchestration, and it also is a somewhat personal set of guidelines for Brant’s own profound compositions. And yet it’s a good sourcebook for composers playing with ideas, and wanting to understand timbral…
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A superb, short treatise on the history of the orchestra, from its 17-century origins all the way up to Schoenberg and Stravinsky. The real value here is in understanding the context in which the orchestra developed. Bekker is strictly old-school, but his information is excellent and his view on the modern direction of orchestration quite…
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This book was written at a time when the Gordon Jacob text above was out of date, and composer William Lovelock wanted to offer an alternative. Unfortunately for Lovelock, Oxford University Press updated the Jacob, and his publishers couldn’t compete. The result is that this precious, remarkable book is now a collector’s item, and I…
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This book was written by composer Gordon Jacob as a kind of a “how-to-orchestrate” book rather than as an orchestration manual per se. There are thumbnail guides to instrumentation, but what Jacob really wants to do is get you to see how those instruments are used in practical, effective ways. Then he gives you very…
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