Priceless articles from Schoenberg

many of us may find it useful and enlightening :

SCHOENBERG ON ORCHESTRATION.pdf

This forum is like a black-hole, it seems. Informations are just swallowed without any kind of feedback; we forget that in a forum like this, nobody gains anything in terms of money or fame. The engine that keeps these forums running is the great human urge to share and to be shared. Even an one-liner or a thanks can inspire the originator of a thread.

I have in my HDD a lot of great material on music. It's a result of at least 1-1/2 year of surfing and P2P downloading. Initially I wanted to share them, but I am not sure if there is any taker here.

It may interest you to know that not all of us have enough free time to spend surfing through the threads we're interested in out of the 5,125 topic threads on this forum in order to find this particular one, read a 4-page informational article on orchestration and leave you an inspirational comment - all within 2 days of you posting it.

It's a nice article, but chill out and let people actually get to it, thanks. :)

At last I managed to incite someone into writing something!

Well, if this article kick-starts a good discussion on orchestration I shall be very happy.

Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment.

.......and the first step on the ladder of success is disappointment;)

I'll take the elevator, thanks. :)

HAHAHAHA..............

In this article, Schoenberg advocates modifications to the orchestra that would render it rather like a choir in terms of uniformity of sound color and equality of lines. This is an interesting notion, and the way he suggests executing this notion is even more interesting. He wants basically an equal number of each type of instrument in each of the separate "ranges" of the orchestra. Already this is a peculiar decision since we all know that, given a unison line with 6-10 brass and 6-10 strings, the strings might as well not even be playing, thanks to the high volume brass instruments are capable of producting. That's my first objection: Schoenberg's idea overlooks the fact that different instruments play at vastly different dynamic levels. (His attempt to explain why a trumpet or trombone 'sticks out' when they play solo is well-intentioned but wrong. We hear a trumpet soloist so readily because the trumpet is a loud instrument. Period.)

For the other main objection I have, let me return to the choir metaphor. In the world of choral music there is an age-old feud between choir directors and private voice instructors. The latter accuse the former of harming choristers' voices by telling them to sing in different ways in the name of the 'overall sound' of the group, while the poor choir directors desperately argue that they want everyone to sing in the most natural voice possible since that is what constitutes the best sound.

Now what does this have to do with Schoenberg's proposition? His idea would effectively eliminate the need for individual orchestral musicians to work on their tone. If you're playing the same line with 5 other trumpets and an equal handful of woodwinds and strings, then your individual color really doesn't matter. Personally, I think this is a loss. I like listening to orchestral passages in which there are solos, and hearing the various tone colors produced by individual musicians throughout the orchestra. This in fact is the great appeal of the orchestra to me -- the interplay between the musical value of the individual as such and the musical value of instrumentalists working together as a team to produce a coherent musical whole.

I WILL agree with the way Schoenberg suggests that composers often use orchestration as a thin veil for otherwise poor compositional techniques. That's why I love writing for the piano and listening to new music for the piano. With a homogeneous medium like that, you can't cheat. There's no covering up bad composition with pretty sounds.

Yeah, the less the number of instruments, the more the difficulty. I think every beginner should write for piano and / or string quartet before arranging the piece into orchestra.

Yeah, the less the number of instruments, the more the difficulty. I think every beginner should write for piano and / or string quartet before arranging the piece into orchestra.

ARRGHH! I hate this mentality. I can't really argue effectively for why I don't recommend doing things this way, but I'll try.

In my experience, I found that jumping right in and trying things out as you're learning and then ironing out mistakes makes for much more creative and unique results in your composition style.

But that's just me. Ah well.

No, most of us do what you do, but there surely are other folks who think this "trial-and-error" method is not the right method. Ask the teachers, for example!!

Yeah....THOSE creatures....