Study of Orchestration, Third Edition

I have no classical training in music at all so I can't give an indepth analysis of the information presented. I can offer my impression on how the information is presented though, from my "non-trained" point of view.

The book is generally straight forward and easy to understand. I find it to be intelligently written and thoughtfully layed out. This book does assume some prior knowledge of music though. I have never actually learned to read music so for some exmaples I had to dig out an old school book on music theory.

The accompanying CD's are professionally produced and have great examples of different playing techniques and the like.

A couple of things that irked me though; No matter what CD you want to look at (there are 6) You first need to load up CD no6 and sit through the intro. From there you are presented with a main menu. If you want to look at strings it will pop up a message saying; "Please insert cd no-1" There is no way around this. This becomes annoying as the cd's are clearly marked with their content. You know that percussion is on disc 4 but you still have to go through the procedure described above, each and every time.

The intro features what looks like a student orchestra playing a short piece. This is interesting enough to watch the first few times but becomes downright annoying after that. There is no option to skip the intro which is a big mistake in my book. I studied multimedia at college and some of the things mentioned above were specifically what we were told NOT to do when producing a CD ROM.

Another interesting point to note; Throughout the book it shows examples of music and different playing techniques. In the book, next to an example it will have wording like; CD1/Track 4

For a while I assumed these were music tracks in the CD Rom production itself. On closer inspection though, there was no track listing of songs at all. I loaded a cd into my computer and browsed it's contents. There was one folder called "videos" and nothing else. I was starting to think that they had made a mistake and not included the audio tracks at all. I then went to folder options under windows and selected "show hidden files and folders" - still nothing.

Finally, as a last resort, I opened up Windows media player and clicked on the cd. Suddenly 97 untitled tracks of audio appeared. I clicked on the first one and a voice said; "Chapter 3, Example 1" (or words to that effect. I'm at work at the moment) Suddenly the book took on a new dimension. Every example I had been reading through had an audio example backing it up. I am now starting back at the beginning of the book to hear exmaples of what I have been reading this whole time.

The other main gripe is that it is almost impossible to tell at Amazon or anywhere else whether or not you get the book when you purchase the cd's. You don't. I bought the cd "package" and after a week received nothing but the cd's themselves. I had to place a second order for the hardcover book.

Hopefully my trials and tribulations will save someone else some time and heartache. I should say, I am really impressed with the book and cd's for the sheer amount of information contained in them. THe ability to hear audio examples of what I am reading really blows me away too. I just think some refinement needs to be done on the integration of the cd's and the book, and the presentation of the information.

Regards, Scott.


Question   September 19, 2002
 7 out of 12 found this review helpful

I found the CD to be helpful but the last CD seems to have a problem. The CD won't install! It does not even have a program file to install. Only the audio file shows. Does this happen to everyone who bought this 6 enhanced CD? Please reply. Thanks.


Without peer, but not without problem   March 19, 2001
 96 out of 98 found this review helpful

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.


Comprehensive, occasionally to the point of excess   April 9, 2000
 25 out of 26 found this review helpful

"The Study of Orchestration" is a well-composed instructional course for the composer or music student. Samuel Adler's detailed considerations of such concerns as string harmonics, woodwind keying difficulties and the inclusion of good representitive musical examples make this a book worth having. My only realy problem with the work is that, in writing it, Mr. Adler apparently felt a need to include instruments about which he knew very little. The section of the book on plucked strings (which rarely appear in orchestras, to be fair) includes a poor overview of the classical guitar, a very bad example of "typical" music written therefor (extremely difficuly fingerings and using an improper clef) and an incorrect range (a standard classical guitar can play a fifth higher than the author says). The section on the banjo is at times quite inaccurate with regard to the instrument's use, standard tuning, range and nomenclature (Adler uses the term "tenor banjo" to describe a five-string banjo, but they are entirely different creatures, the former being a four-string instrument tuned c-g-d'-a' like a viola).

Plucked strings aside, I would highly recommend this text. Just please ignore the sections listed above, or you may make a guitarist quite unhappy come concert day.