The Study of Orchestration: Samuel Adler
W.W. Norton & Company
Hardcover - 640 pages
2nd edition (April 1989)
reviewed by Christopher Coleman for amazon.com
Without peer, but not without problemI've used Adler's Study of Orchestration (2nd ed.) each time I've taught orchestration, and the quality of the text coupled with the CD examples make it by far the best standard orchestration text I've seen. That the reader is able to hear not only examples taken from music, but also able to compare various spacings, doublings, and orchestrations of even single chords is invaluable. As I tell my students, it's not so much who is playing a line, it is who is playing a line in a given place--and the only way to learn what an instrument sounds like in its various registers is to hear it there. Especially helpful are passages like Adler's discussion of woodwinds in the symphony orchestra (Chapter 8) in which several possible orchestrations of a single musical passage are illustrated, discussed, and presented on CD, allowing readers to recognize and judge for themselves the relative quality. It is this, that much in orchestration is not particularly wrong or right, and that there are many many ways to score a particular passage, that makes orchestration so difficult to teach; and Adler is sensitive to the issue.
But any book of this scope is likely to have some problems, and this is no exception. I'll mention only two that have struck me in particular as a trombonist, neither of which are particularly serious in and of themselves, but whose presence is at best unwelcome and perhaps even somewhat distressing in a textbook. Others have commented on several errors regarding the information on the plucked strings.
First, Adler's discussion of the trombone glissando (chapter 10) is inadequate and separated by several pages from his discussion of the overtone series as it relates to the trombone. Given that the way a trombone glissando works is inseparable from the overtone series, this seems strange indeed. The situation is compounded by Adler's example from Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra, of which he says "The following glissando, first for the bass trombone, then for the tenor, is perfect, since it extends from seventh to first position." Any trombone player will tell you that in fact Bartok got it wrong, and the bass trombone glissando is impossible without doing some serious cheating. On the bass trombone using an attachment in F or E one can only play a perfect 4th, not a tritone, in that particular harmonic; and bass trombonists have come up with all kinds of ingenious tricks to play this devilish passage which looks so easy to the ill-informed. It is FAR from perfect. While this little quirk of the trombone isn't really very important in the grand scheme of orchestration it makes me wonder how many other instrumental quirks have gone unnoticed.
More important, however, are some oddities of Adler's observations and discussions of the examples he chooses. In chapter 11, in the unit on the brass choir as a homophonic unit, Adler exerpts a passage from Hindemith's Noblissima Visione. He describes the passage as "a 'dark' doubling" and ascribes this to the fact that "neither the trumpets nor the horns ever go too high." Later he seems to contradict himself. "The brilliance of this passage as it is scored comes from the unison of the horns and trombones rather than of blaring trumpets." Never mind the prejudicial "blaring" (surely a trumpet can be played in the high register and sound brilliant without blaring); which is it--brilliant or dark? Try as we might, neither my students nor I can ever hear this as "dark". At best, the last measure of a five measure passage might be considered so because of the low register, but in fact the trumpets, horns, and trombones all do go fairly high in one of the preceding measures. If one fifth of a passage is sufficient to consider the entire passage "dark", why isn't one fifth of the same passage sufficient to consider it "bright"? Adler goes on to say "If Hindemith had wanted an extremely bright sound, he could have transposed it up a third or a fourth and had the trumpets and the horns at an extremely high register." Well, no....the passage is not complete in itself, but part of a larger piece--a passacaglia, no less. In order to transpose the passage, Hindemith would have had to either transpose the entire movement (which would in turn have required a transposition of the entire piece in order to keep the same key relationships) or have written some modulating passage--unimaginable in a passacaglia. It is simply wrong to consider that transposing a particular passage is an acceptable way to orchestrate "brightness" or "darkness" without regard to tonal relationships of the whole. That is not to say that the passage could not be brighter or darker, but to do so with orchestration requires dealing with the instruments and their registers, not the pitches. If Hindemith had omitted the horns in the first 4 measures, then brought in horns and omitted trumpets in the final 5 notes, perhaps even putting the first trombone up an octave on those notes the passage would have been significantly brighter. There is even more that is problematic about this discussion--in fact it seems the most poorly argued in the book, but I believe I've made my point.
However, as a classroom tool, The Study of Orchestration is as yet unequalled, and examples like the Hindemith allow the careful teacher the opportunity to develop the students' critical and analytical skills. The workbook has its own problems, which I won't discuss here, but the book and CD are well worth repeated study and thought.