Introduction

Instrumentation and orchestration have been defined as ‘the art of combining the sounds of a complex of instruments (an orchestra or other ensemble) to form a satisfactory blend and balance’. If the two terms are separable, ‘instrumentation’ concerns selection of the ensemble, including the study of the technical aspects which determine the choice of instruments for a particular purpose, while ‘orchestration’ is used for the application of skills in an artistic fashion. Thus an orchestral realisation of a musical conception may be an original work, without any existence prior to its orchestral realisation; or it may be a transcription for orchestra of music by the person orchestrating it, or by someone else.

Orchestration is thus more than the effective disposition of pitches (not to mention rhythms) among the instruments of the orchestra; but this skill remains indispensable, and advice on the craft of instrumentation forms a substantial literature. The first celebrated example, though not the first publication of its kind, was by the French composer Hector Berlioz, and was for many years incomparably the most influential and most widely used in teaching. Orchestration treatises concentrate mainly on technical details, including some description of instrument mechanisms and a comprehensive listing of the possibilities and impossibilities of the various instruments, with examples of recent usage. The creative, aesthetic dimension of orchestration is less open to explanation in a textbook, but more vital to the composer and listener. Orchestral sonorities form an integral part of musical thinking in the European traditions of concert music, and a vital element of its expressive language and rhetoric.