Treatise on Instrumentation - Dover Books on Music Analysis | Essential Guide for Musicians, Composers & Music Students | Perfect for Study, Performance & Music Theory Research

This book goes through all the instruments you could plausibly expect to use in an orchestral composition, and goes through them showing first what is difficult, what should be avoided, and finally, what special effects can be used, focusing on uses you might not think about. What follows then is a huge number of examples from scores written by the masters. Your job, then, is to listen to a recording and ensure you understand what has been done. Many of the examples involve techniques that you will not find in the average academic course on orchestration. Of course, if you have to resort to a book like this, maybe care should be taken. It is one thing to see an effect in a score by Richard Wagner and another to actually use the technique in an amateur arrangement. However, the information on the limitations of instruments may also be of value for any compositional approach. There is a huge wealth of valuable information here, but what use you make of it is up to you.