Creative Orchestration, by George Frederick McKay
George McKay turns the table on most orchestration manuals, by getting all the ranges, registers, breathing, bowing, and other hard details of instrumentation over and done with in 34 tersely written pages – and then following this with a generous, 177-page treatise on the theory and philosophy of orchestration. As a theorist and philosopher myself,…
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Anatomy of the Orchestra by Norman Del Mar
I’ve read this book many times, for enjoyment as much as information. The wit, superb writing style, and breadth of information are all breathtaking as an orchestrator and professor takes you on a tour through the orchestra. But it’s really not an orchestration manual, in that it doesn’t lay out sample after sample with hard…
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Orchestration: A New Approach
Norman Ludwin teaches the next generation of film composers and orchestrators as a faculty member of the UCLA Extension Film Scoring Program, has orchestrated such blockbusters as Jurassic World and Star Trek Into Darkness, and has the inside perspective as a veteran of many concerts and film/TV scoring calls. But more than that: he’s a…
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Piston & Adler
I’m listing these two books together, as I’m constantly asked which books a beginning orchestrator should read. Here is my perennial reply: get the Piston text first. It is clear, concise, and well-laid-out, giving you valuable, usable information in simple, memorable words. Read it many times, and try out some of the assignments. Then, when…
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The Technique of Contemporary Orchestration, by Alfredo Casella, edited by Virgilio Mortari
Like most books and courses with the title “Orchestration,” this tome focuses only the building blocks of instrumentation, and not the actual “technique,” whatever the title may claim. And yet its perspectives are novel, and many bits of advice are priceless. It opens with a rare section on the science of tone production, and leads…
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