| Product
Description
The
third edition of this high successful orchestration text follows the approach
established in its innovative predecessor: Learning orchestration is best
achieved through familiarity with the orchestral literature; this familiarity
is most effectively accomplished from the music notation in combination
with the recorded sound. The text has been revised to reflect the most
informed reactions to the first and second editions, as well as Professor
Adler's revisions. For comprehensiveness, conciseness, and contemporaneity,
The Study of Orchestration remains without peer. An ancillary set of six
enhanced compact discs and a workbook are available separately to accompany
this textbook but are not included with the textbook.
About
the Author
Samuel
Adler, Professor Emeritus at the Eastman School of Music, is currently
teaching at the Juilliard School of Music in New York. He has held the
title of visiting professor at many schools throughout the country and
abroad, giving master classes in composition, orchestration, and conducting.
Professor Adler has gained considerable recognition as a composer (his
compositions have been performed by such ensembles as the New York Philharmonic
and the Chicago Symphony), and has received numerous awards and grants.
He has also been guest conductor for many prominent symphony orchestras.
By
Dr. Christopher Coleman I've used Adler's Study of Orchestration (2nd ed.)
each time I've taught orchestration, and the quality of the text coupled
with the CD examples make it by far the best standard orchestration text
I've seen. That the reader is able to hear not only examples taken from
music, but also able to compare various spacings, doublings, and orchestrations
of even single chords is invaluable. As I tell my students, it's not so
much who is playing a line, it is who is playing a line in a given place--and
the only way to learn what an instrument sounds like in its various registers
is to hear it there.
Especially
helpful are passages like Adler's discussion of woodwinds in the symphony
orchestra (Chapter 8) in which several possible orchestrations of a single
musical passage are illustrated, discussed, and presented on CD, allowing
readers to recognize and judge for themselves the relative quality. It
is this, that much in orchestration is not particularly wrong or right,
and that there are many many ways to score a particular passage, that makes
orchestration so difficult to teach; and Adler is sensitive to the issue.
But
any book of this scope is likely to have some problems, and this is no
exception. I'll mention only two that have struck me in particular as a
trombonist, neither of which are particularly serious in and of themselves,
but whose presence is at best unwelcome and perhaps even somewhat distressing
in a textbook. First, Adler's discussion of the trombone glissando (chapter
10) is inadequate and separated by several pages from his discussion of
the overtone series as it relates to the trombone. Given that the way a
trombone glissando works is inseparable from the overtone series, this
seems strange indeed. The situation is compounded by Adler's example from
Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra, of which he says "The following glissando,
first for the bass trombone, then for the tenor, is perfect, since it extends
from seventh to first position." Any trombone player will tell you that
in fact Bartok got it wrong, and the bass trombone glissando is impossible
without doing some serious cheating. On the bass trombone using an attachment
in F or E one can only play a perfect 4th, not a tritone, in that particular
harmonic; and bass trombonists have come up with all kinds of ingenious
tricks to play this devilish passage which looks so easy to the ill-informed.
It is FAR from perfect.
While
this little quirk of the trombone isn't really very important in the grand
scheme of orchestration it makes me wonder how many other instrumental
quirks have gone unnoticed. More important, however, are some oddities
of Adler's observations and discussions of the examples he chooses. In
chapter 11, in the unit on the brass choir as a homophonic unit, Adler
exerpts a passage from Hindemith's Noblissima Visione. He describes the
passage as "a 'dark' doubling" and ascribes this to the fact that "neither
the trumpets nor the horns ever go too high." Later he seems to contradict
himself. "The brilliance of this passage as it is scored comes from the
unison of the horns and trombones rather than of blaring trumpets." Never
mind the prejudicial "blaring" (surely a trumpet can be played in the high
register and sound brilliant without blaring); which is it--brilliant or
dark? Try as we might, neither my students nor I can ever hear this as
"dark". At best, the last measure of a five measure passage might be considered
so because of the low register, but in fact the trumpets, horns, and trombones
all do go fairly high in one of the preceding measures. If one fifth of
a passage is sufficient to consider the entire passage "dark", why isn't
one fifth of the same passage sufficient to consider it "bright"?
Adler
goes on to say "If Hindemith had wanted an extremely bright sound, he could
have transposed it up a third or a fourth and had the trumpets and the
horns at an extremely high register." Well, no....the passage is not complete
in itself, but part of a larger piece--a passacaglia, no less. In order
to transpose the passage, Hindemith would have had to either transpose
the entire movement (which would in turn have required a transposition
of the entire piece in order to keep the same key relationships) or have
written some modulating passage--unimaginable in a passacaglia. It is simply
wrong to consider that transposing a particular passage is an acceptable
way to orchestrate "brightness" or "darkness" without regard to tonal relationships
of the whole. That is not to say that the passage could not be brighter
or darker, but to do so with orchestration requires dealing with the instruments
and their registers, not the pitches.
If
Hindemith had omitted the horns in the first 4 measures, then brought in
horns and omitted trumpets in the final 5 notes, perhaps even putting the
first trombone up an octave on those notes the passage would have been
significantly brighter. There is even more that is problematic about this
discussion--in fact it seems the most poorly argued in the book, but I
believe I've made my point.
However,
as a classroom tool, The Study of Orchestration is as yet unequalled, and
examples like the Hindemith allow the careful teacher the opportunity to
develop the students' critical and analytical skills. The workbook has
its own problems, which I won't discuss here, but the book and CD are well
worth repeated study and thought. |
