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Orchestration: An Anthology of Writings.

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Orchestration: An Anthology of Writings. Edited by Paul Mathews. New York: Routledge, 2006. [230 p. ISBN 10: 0-415-97683-9. $35.00.] Bibliography, index, music examples.

In his preface, Paul Mathews declares Hector Berlioz's Grand traite d'instrumentation et d'orchestration of 1844 "a watershed moment in the history of orchestration" (pages unnumbered in the front matter). While books about instrumental practice had been published periodically since the sixteenth century, no one as prominent as Berlioz had done so as extensively, nor had the case been made that orchestration--to Berlioz, the balancing of appropriate numbers and types of instruments, considering their differing timbres, characters, and ranges of expression--was a craft beyond mere instrumentation.

Since Berlioz, many composers have written on this topic. Mathews began to collect those writings to use in the classes he taught on the subject at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University. Along the way, it occurred to him that they documented the evolution of orchestral style in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and comprised a useful history of philosophy and practice in this domain. The resulting anthology includes writings only by composers, and further eliminates excerpts from twentieth-century orchestration textbooks, such as those by Walter Piston and Samuel Adler, on the grounds that their purpose is less speculative and more technical.

The texts included are grouped into six chronological sections, each introduced by Mathews. He divides nineteenth-century practice into three styles: French, with mainly homophonic textures; German, predominantly contrapuntal; and New German, combining homophonic...

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