Instrumentation and Orchestration

Alfred Blatter

The second edition of this well-regarded survey of instrumentation and orchestration offers a complete introduction to writing and scoring for each instrument in the orchestra. Its comprehensive coverage combines the best features of a textbook for students and a reference book for professionals. Chapter one is a primer on preparing scores and parts. Chapters two through five cover instrumentation techniques for strings, brasses, woodwinds, and percussion. Chapters six and seven cover a wide range of additional instruments, including harmonica, and the human voice. The essentials of accomplished orchestration - the combining of diverse instrumental qualities in ensemble performance - are covered in the next two chapters. Here, step by step, Blatter proceeds from the basics of musical lines to scoring for various instrumental groupings. Chapters ten and eleven explain the techniques of transcription and arrangement while chapter twelve discusses the performance dynamics of chamber groups and larger ensembles. The appendixes provide quick access to essential technical information: transposition of instruments, electronic sound modification, MIDI, the harmonic series, and fingerings. The second edition features a new discussion of the bugle, information on percussion instruments of American and African origin, an extensively rewritten section on the organ, and the addition of Spanish terms to the existing English, French, German, and Italian. Appendixes on MIDI, guitar fingering, and guitar chords are new to the second edition, and the material on electronic instruments and electronic sound modification has been revised and expanded. The revision also includes nearly 100 new musical examples.