Contemporary Orchestration Techniques

It’s an age old question…

“Is parallel motion between two voices OK?”

This often takes the form of a heated discussion between a music teacher and a student.  Most likely, the teacher has said something along the lines of…

“Don’t use parallel fifths.”

This is followed by a Bach-style harmony assignment.  The student, somewhere in there, uses some parallel fifths and gets scolded.

The student then gets annoyed, walks up to the piano, and pounds out a few bars of his favorite rock song.  Parallel 5ths and octaves abound.

“See!  It sounds good!”

Somewhere, Bach rolls over in his grave and the teacher can sense his unsettled soul.

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One topic that garners quite a bit of confusion (and admittedly, a bit of tedious boredom) is the basic layout of a page of orchestral score.  For a moment, let’s look at a page of score—minus all of the notes—and look at the brackets, sub-brackets, braces, etc.

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One point of confusion I see in a lot of student scores is a confusion between slurs and ties.

They look very similar.  They are both curved lines connecting 2 or more notes.  However, they have very different functions.  Ties are used to connect two notes of the same pitch, essentially turning them into one note.  Slurs are used to connect two notes of different pitches, ensuring a legato performance.
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A lot of people ask me what I listen to.  The short answer is a lot of orchestral concert music–and a little orchestral film music as well.

Of course, it is a new era for listening to music, and one of my favorite listening experiences is now to create a playlist in iTunes that includes a variety of pieces.  I find it fun (and challenging) to put together a playlist that holds together logically over a 40 minute (or so) span.  Sort of an exercise in long-term musical form.

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I thought I’d take a moment to talk about the files used to make notated scores versus the files used to make audio mockups.  My personal opinion is that these two processes are quite different and are best kept separate. (more…)

I know I’ve been blogging about this one chord for a month now, but I wanted to mention one more thing before moving on. 

This post will be about the horns.  (more…)

In the last post, we talked about voicing a chord like the overtone series.  This is a common recommendation found throughout orchestration literature.  One of the observations about the overtone series is that the spacing of the overtones begins wide and becomes tight as the series rises in pitch.  This often leads to a general recommendation – avoid tight spacing of chord tones in the low register.

In this post, I thought I’d talk a bit about whether I thought that recommendation was sound and when it should be followed.  I’ll go through two examples of tight voicings in the low register, one that works well and one that doesn’t. (more…)

One of the most common guidelines you see in orchestration literature is to “emulate the overtone series when voicing chords”.  I’ll state up front that I generally believe this is good advice.  In this post, we’ll take a look at the overtone series and how this compares to the Tchaikovsky chord we’ve been discussing.

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I saw some good questions on that last post, so I thought I’d take a quick minute and respond.

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Over the next couple of posts, I thought we’d take a quick look at a chord from Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6.  The chord is a G major triad and comes near the end of the third movement. It is a short, accented, climactic hit.

First, here is the full chord as scored for full orchestra. It is scored for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, one tuba, timpani, crash cymbals, and strings.  (more…)