     
|
No orchestrally minded composer or orchestrator should rely 100% on any book, of course; much of my subsequent experience in learning about instrumental culture has come from buttonholing and badgering players about their own instruments, and in the end this is the only real way to learn orchestration. A few minor points should, however, be mentioned for the student: for one, Forsyth would today have to list the chromatic harp among the obsolete instruments (the technique died with the last living teacher in the Paris Conservatoire, around World War II); for another, the average tenor trombonist now can reach nearly all the pedal tones Forsyth said were impossible; for a third, most saxophones now possess a Bflat key, extending the bottom range. Similar adjustments that should be made in understanding the scope of each instrument are best accomplished by asking instrumentalists themselves, as I suggested before, and a general check should be made on the same basis of the differences in instrumental ranges (particularly in keyboard percussion instruments like the xylophone) between Forsyth's 1914 British orchestra and the American orchestra of today. With this cautions I feel that Forsyth is still eminently usable and in fact is very likely the best general textbook on orchestration found today, avoiding as it does the encyclopedic cumbersomeness of the Koechlin and Casella multivolume works and at the same time eschewing the workmanlike humdrumness of most current orchestration manuals. For years I have recommended Forsyth to my students, and I am extremely glad that it will be easily obtainable again. ann arbor, 1982 WILLIAM BOLCOM
|
