Bernstein: "What Is Orchestration?" (Young People's Concerts, 1958)

The lesson

What Is Orchestration? was broadcast by CBS on March 8, 1958, in the first television season of the Young People's Concerts. Starting definition: orchestration is the way a composer distributes music among the instruments, whether the orchestra has seven or a hundred musicians. Bernstein uses the image of clothes: the notes are the body, the orchestration is the outfit, and the wrong outfit makes even a beautiful body look awkward. Good orchestration makes the music heard in the clearest and most effective way.

What the orchestrator needs to know

• The range and character of each instrument.
• How to blend and balance the instruments so that none covers the others.
• How to choose among the countless possible combinations.

The demonstrations

• The families: woodwinds (with the horn as the family's "adopted relative"), strings, brass, percussion. Examples: the cat's theme (clarinet) from Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf; Mozart, Serenade for 13 winds; Beethoven, Quartet Op. 131 (pizzicato, sul ponticello); Vaughan Williams, Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis; Gabrieli, Sonata for brass; Sousa, The Stars and Stripes Forever; a percussion canon by the timpanist Saul Goodman.
• Mixed groups: Ravel, Introduction and Allegro (harp, flute, clarinet and strings); Stravinsky, the march from the Histoire du soldat (seven instruments from all the families).
• Right and wrong orchestration: Rimsky-Korsakov, Capriccio espagnol, first with the original orchestration (four musical ideas distributed among trombones, violins, woodwinds and horns, timpani and trumpets, percussion) and then with a deliberately wrong orchestration; the opening of Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune played by the flute (right) and by the trumpet ("too fat"); the opening glissando of Rhapsody in Blue on the clarinet (right) and on the viola (it loses the jazz character); Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 played by the brass.
• Vocal experiment with the audience: the same two notes sung with different vowels and sounds to imitate organ, strings, woodwinds, brass: just a few notes can have many "colors."
• Ravel, Boléro: the demonstration of the full orchestra. The snare drum keeps the same rhythm throughout the piece, while a two-part melody passes from instrument to instrument, growing to the climax.

The conclusions

• You can orchestrate "within the family" (homogeneous groups: string quartet, wind quintet) or in a "social" way (mixing the families, as in the symphony orchestra).
• The music itself suggests the choice: the right music, played by the right instruments, in the right combinations, at the right moment is good orchestration.

What a producer learns

• Timbre is part of the idea: before choosing a preset, ask yourself which "outfit" the melody wants (breathy? percussive? bright? dark?). The same riff on a pluck, on a pad or on a sax changes genre and meaning.
• Balance: in the orchestra you balance with the number of instruments and the registers; in the mix with volume, EQ and space, but arrangement choices come first. If two parts are in the same register and with the same timbre, no EQ will truly separate them.
• The Boléro principle: a theme that doesn't change, a fixed ostinato and a purely timbral crescendo (adding instruments, doublings, octaves). It is exactly how you build a build-up in an electronic track.

Exercise

1. Write an 8-bar melody.
2. "Orchestrate" it in four ways in the DAW: woodwinds only (flute, clarinet, bassoon), strings only, brass only, mixed (flute + violins an octave higher, horns for the harmony, cellos on the bass).
3. Then create a 64-bar mini-Boléro: repeat the melody eight times, adding an instrument or a doubling at each repetition and gradually raising the volume.

Related entries

Bernstein: What Is Melody, Analyzing an orchestral score, Orchestration: families, ranges and blends, Strings: ranges, clefs, registers and ensembles, Woodwinds: ranges, transpositions and registers, The march.