Principles of Orchestration

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Customer Reviews:

This is really extra reading AFTER you have had a course in orchestration [Posted on 2006-02-11]
OK. This is an important book and offers a great deal of interesting information for the right audience. However, there are MUCH better modern books for the working musician trying to learn orchestration or a source to reference for a detail (Kent Keenan, Alfred Blatter, and Samuel Adler come quickly to mind). In order to use this book you will need to know a great deal of the music of Rimsky-Korsakov (the written samples are provided in the back, but you still need to know how it SOUNDS, right?), the differences between 19th century orchestras and the instruments used today, the mechanics of transposition, and a great comfort in reading music.

This is really more about how to create orchestral sound and effects. It assumes that you already have a solid grounding in all the basics of music, notation, and transposition. The text of the book is only about 150 pages and the rest consists of the musical examples.

So, if you have already had your basic orchestration courses, go ahead and read this as a way to understand the thinking of a very talented composer for the orchestra. You will, of course, have to break with his thinking to write your own music. However, Stravinsky did pretty well after studying with this master, right?

Doesn't cover the "Principles" or basics. [Posted on 2006-05-01]
This book should be entitled "Tasteful Orchestration" or something similar. Despite the title, the book assumes that the student is well beyond the developmental stage of learning the principles of orchestration, the prerequisite theory and arual skills to hear complex examples in the mind by glancing at excerpts of conductor's scores and complex passages for piano, etc. Perhaps I would give it a higher score if the the title matched the text, but I bought the book expecting that its subject matter would match the title, and I was let down.

19th century Orchestration [Posted on 2007-01-11]
Rimsky-Korsakov's treatise deals with many of the common issues of orchestration but is steeped in the music of the 19th century when it was written. The modern student of orchestration needs to study orchestral techniques of the 20th century as well as the techniques of the earlier musical periods. Another failure of this treatise is that Rimsky-Korsakov only uses extracted examples from his own compositions. This limits the breadth of the work and provides no understanding of other composer's methods. Overall this book has some useful information provided by a clever orchestrator but should be seen more as an addendum to the broader, more modern, more detailed and less egocentric works of Piston and Adler.

Excellent book for who wants to wirte music. Most practical book [Posted on 2007-12-21]
I don't think any book can come close to this book. In terms of the organization and practicallity. RK is the most famous for its colorful and decent orchestration. Just to let you know, there is an Online version of the book perfectly done by Gary Garritan Team at www.northernsounds.com. But still you need to book for a further information.

The book and website have been already adopted by many school. Plus it is very cheap and almost all examples can be listened and read using Macromedia Flesh.

Excellent resource [Posted on 2008-02-09]
Rimsky-Korsakov does an excellent job describing instrumental qualities within a section of an orchestra in "Principles of Orchestration." His book addresses "resonance" better than most other orchestration books. If you're looking for a reference on properties of instruments this book will come up short. This book has helped me to gain a deeper knowledge and appreciation of how and why to score things properly. As stated in other reviews, this shouldn't be your only orchestration book, but it is absolutely an excellent one to have.

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