samuel adler the study of orchestration cd

Anthologies for score-reading and analysis cover the great orchestrators and composers from the classical era to today. He has a series of six e-books titled Orchestration: A New Approach that comes with detailed illustrations breaking down the functions of a page of orchestration, backed up by audio samples.

And yet his direction is unique, original, engaging, and quite thorough. His approach, out of all other orchestration text writers I’ve read, is the closest to my own. But more than that: he’s a great explainer, with a very thorough level of understanding in the way the orchestra works. 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. Please click through the link to order his book. UPDATE – a subscriber has very kindly pointed out that McKay’s estate has now published many of his compositions and writings on music.

So if you want to buy it, act quickly – there are a few, scant copies available for sale on the internet, some of these priced far beyond any reasonable budget for an actual working musician. But like most such gambles, this one didn’t win the toss scholastically, and therefore it’s a rare book. With that in mind, the book is organised around a series of exercises and assignments, all of which would be immensely useful for the student orchestrator.

Like William Lovelock’s answer to Gordon Jacob, the publication of this book was a gamble, betting on the hope that its new, radical approach to thinking about orchestration would become the new norm for university instruction. The biggest thing this book will do for an orchestrator is to tell them how to organise and categorise their thoughts about texture, and such a simple and direct approach is desperately needed. As a theorist and philosopher myself, I don’t necessarily share all his conceptualisations – and yet there’s solid, usable advice and information. 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.

Samuel adler the study of orchestration cd