7 - Composing for Orchestra

Summary

This chapter demystifies orchestration by offering insights into how a good understanding of balance, timbre, and instrumental technique is used to imagine and create interesting sonorities. The chapter begins with an overview of the development of the modern orchestra, before explaining how composers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have explored the limits of idiomatic instrumental writing to create dramatic and compelling orchestral textures. It concludes with an explanation of how to approach orchestrating from a ‘short’ piano score.