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. Of these six men, Kastner, Berlioz and Gevaert were the change agents who laid the foundation for how orchestration was taught and learned. Jean Georges Kastner (1837) Hector Berlioz (1843) Francois Auguste Gevaert (1863, 1885, 1890) Ernest Giuraud (1892) Charles Marie Widor (1904) Charles Koechlin (1927) In chronological order, the list includes: 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). Over time, my research yielded two other French orchestration book authors, Jean Georges Kastner and Ernest Guiraud.
Of the seven, four were French authors (Berlioz, Gevaert, Widor and Koechlin). In alphabetical order these authors were Hector Berlioz, Cecil Forsyth, Francois Auguste Gevaert, Charles Koechlin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Ebenezer Prout, and Charles Marie Widor. 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.įurther review of my research elicited a short list of orchestration book authors that film composers routinely consulted. Next, I added new insights gleaned from well known film composers and orchestrators who agreed to answer my questions. This added new insights to what I had already discovered. After arriving in Los Angeles, I expanded my biographical reading to include what educators call the learning styles inventory. 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?Īnswering this question required reading lots of musical biographies.
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. 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. 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 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. 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.
My lifelong love affair with arranging and orchestration began when I was in high school as I began hearing full arrangements in my head.