Edit 2: since I'm adding info anyway, there is also (at least one) orchestration method based on color charts, the Spectrotone Chart. The colors represent timbre and allow you to find the correct range for obtaining that timbre or combining instruments. With the Acquisition of the Spectrotone Chart, Alexander Publishing Changes the Game for Learning Orchestration – Film Music Institute. Production Process sheet which is the organizational tool used to teach Learner’s the steps to writing and producing their own music.

By Peter Lawrence Alexander

My lifelong love affair with arranging and orchestration began when I was in high school as I began hearing full arrangements in my head. But what was I hearing so I could write it down? That was the question that not only drove my search to learn, but also drives others who would learn to effectively arrange and orchestrate, too.

So for many, the first steps in the desire to learn orchestration and arranging starts with identifying what you’re already hearing in your musical memory, while going after new combinations to add to it.

This learning path is important because it illustrates both how music people learn and the goal of musical education for composers: to build musical memory so that intuition has something to draw from.

So when I and others like me started out, we often did so with a beginning set of unidentified musical memories that we couldn’t fully draw on until we knew what it was we were hearing, coupled with learning new scoring devices along the way, either from writing or score study.

With electronic scoring we create a new category: sounds that have never before existed which we must then learn, through application, how to use and score with.

While I was in college, a second question formed: How did the great composers teach themselves? This was later followed by, Who were the great orchestration teachers and how did they learn and ultimately teach orchestration to others?

Answering this question required reading lots of musical biographies. After arriving in Los Angeles, I expanded my biographical reading to include what educators call the learning styles inventory. This added new insights to what I had already discovered. Next, I added new insights gleaned from well known film composers and orchestrators who agreed to answer my questions.

What resulted from adding film composer interviews and the learning styles inventory to my existing research was a list of learning procedures that were consistent across all types of composers, even into the 21st Century, and modified only slightly with the inclusion of selective new technologies.

Further review of my research elicited a short list of orchestration book authors that film composers routinely consulted. In alphabetical order these authors were Hector Berlioz, Cecil Forsyth, Francois Auguste Gevaert, Charles Koechlin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Ebenezer Prout, and Charles Marie Widor.

Of the seven, four were French authors (Berlioz, Gevaert, Widor and Koechlin).

Over time, my research yielded two other French orchestration book authors, Jean Georges Kastner and Ernest Guiraud.

The addition of these two French authors now yielded a timeline for how orchestration was taught in Paris and across Europe over a 90-year period from 1837 (Kastner) to 1927 (Koechlin). In chronological order, the list includes:

Jean Georges Kastner (1837) Hector Berlioz (1843) Francois Auguste Gevaert (1863, 1885, 1890) Ernest Giuraud (1892) Charles Marie Widor (1904) Charles Koechlin (1927)

Of these six men, Kastner, Berlioz and Gevaert were the change agents who laid the foundation for how orchestration was taught and learned.

Pedagogically, what’s significant about these three is that they tapped into how music people learn and the goal of orchestration instruction and its method for composers: to build musical memory so that intuition has something to draw from.

What is equally significant, is that although he gets credit for it, the foundation as to how orchestration should be learned was not set by Rimsky-Korsakov, but primarily by Kastner, Berlioz, and Gevaert as it’s they who established the mentor model of teaching orchestration in print. And these men will be our focus to set the stage for both how music people best learn orchestration and how the Professional Orchestration series builds on this model for both individual study and classroom use.

Jean Georges Kastner
Kastner was an excellent composer, and a prodigious student who in his youth, mastered several instruments, including the piano and organ. By ten, he was playing in church on feast days. Early in life, his experiences in learning various instruments planted the seed for writing a work on instrumentation.

As he got older, his Lutheran parents wanted him to pursue theology, which he did, but the music within was so powerful that before he was twenty, Kastner had completed his first opera. So rather than pursue the ministry, he pursued composing. He completed three symphonies, five overtures, marches, and other works. He became the bandmaster of the Strasbourg National Guard where he developed into a respected conductor, and a beloved teacher.

At the age of 25, Kastner began writing his General Treatise on Instrumentation after having already written method books for voice, violin, cello, flute, oboe, clarinet, trombone and other instruments. In 1837, at the age of 27, the book that set the foundation for how orchestration would be taught was published, and shortly thereafter, adopted by the Paris Conservatory.

Having written methods for roughly one third of the orchestra’s instruments, and being a successful composer and conductor in his own right, Kastner was in an excellent position to determine just what such a work should contain.

What Kastner didn’t write is as instructive as what he did write.

Given his reputation, Kastner could have easily written a mini-method book for each orchestral instrument. Instead, he organized his instruction by les renseignements les plus essentiels, the information most essential, not the obvious, but the information that young composers have to search for, including the most suitable way to use each instrument in the score, and from a conductor’s experience, the good, or bad, effect it produces in one circumstance or another.

Thus, Kastner was the first to provide what I call instrumentation notes for each instrument. Their purpose was to give the composer just what he needed to know how to write playable parts, and for anything else, ask the musician.

Kastner’s model has been the standard ever since, modified only in 1914 by English composer and musicologist, Cecil Forsyth in his book Orchestration. Here, Forsyth essentially wrote the mini-method per instrument that Kastner and others had avoided. Forsyth’s model was followed by Kent Kennan, Walter Piston and others and has become the standard teaching approach in American academia. I call these texts the Reference Model. But to be sure, Jean Georges Kastner is at the heart of these works as they still follow his outline.

Kastner advised two additional steps for learning effective instrumental writing. The first was to get method books for each instrument and the second, as I’ve already mentioned, was to talk with and question competent musicians to gain their insights.

In short, Kastner set student expectations by letting them know, quietly, that they weren’t going to leran everything they needed to know from his one book. To learn the craft, they would still have to exert effort on their own beyond the printed page.

His sage advice holds true today.

Hector Berlioz
Berlioz was mostly self-taught. By the time he went to Paris to study medicine and to follow in the footsteps of his father, a successful physician, Hector was proficient on the guitar, the flute, and the flageolet. To learn and master harmony, he purchased books and worked his way through them on his own. When arriving in Paris, he went to the library of the Paris Conservatory to study the scores of Gluck, which he copied by hand to learn from the great master.

After earning his degree, he decided to pursue music full time, at which point his father promptly cut his monthly allowance in half. Unlike Kastner who had married into money, Berlioz had to scramble to make a living. Fortunately, he was as good with words as he was with notes, and for thirty years, Berlioz supplemented his income by writing concert reviews. He also became an excellent conductor, known for conducting his own works and those of others.

By 1837, the year Kastner’s book came out, Symp