Orchestration Analysis (2024) refers to the examination of how musical elements are distributed among different instruments within an orchestra, ensemble or any group of instruments. It involves analyzing how the elements of the music are positioned in relation to one another, how instruments are grouped together, and how different sections are related to each other. It helps to create an understand of how the individual instruments contribute to a given orchestration, and it provides insight into the creative decisions made by the composer and therebye enhances the appreciation of orchestration.

The book describes an approach to orchestration analysis called segment analysis. Segment analysis combines analyses of texture, orchestration methods, and perception. The three topics will, in order to keep them out of one another as much as possible, be introduced one by one, all though they are prerequisites for each other.  Therfore chapter 2 will only introduce texture analysis. Here, a distinction is established between the texture of the music and its orchestration. In texture analysis, music is described in terms of textural elements, such as melody, chord progression, and accompaniment. Classical texture types, such as homophony, polyphony, and heterophony, are referred to throughout. But new textural elements – singular and compound elements – and with them, new texture types are introduced.

Texture analysis is then used in Chapters 3 and 4 to explain the ways in which a textural element (e.g., melody) in a musical texture can be orchestrated. Chapter 3 focuses on how an element can be realized and positioned within the soundscape, while Chapter 4 exemplifies strategies for vertical and horizontal doublings, combination hereof, and partial doublings.

After this, segment analysis is established in Chapter 5 as an analytical method dividing an orchestration into segments and sub-segments.

In this book, texture analysis, orchestration methods, and segment analysis emerge from the score through visual observations. But orchestration is as much, if not more, about it’s sounding. Auditory cues and knowledge about them through perception are used to put the segment analysis into perspective. This happens in Chapter 6, where the focus is on the relationship between the segment analysis and the constraints of our auditory perception. In addition, perception are in this chapter used to explain some basic issues in both texture and segment analysis.

Finally, Chapter 7 exemplifies how segment analysis can be used to identify some general orchestration strategies in three orchestral movements by Maurice Ravel, Witold Lutoslawski and Salvatore Sciarrino respectively.

You can read Orchestration Analysis here: www.orchestrationanalysis.online