Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Choral Orchestration
    Choral Orchestration
    Choral Orchestration
    Ebook160 pages1 hour

    Choral Orchestration

    By Cecil Forsyth

    5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    This volume is geared toward organists seeking a brief, convenient guide to developing technical grounding for the scoring of compositions. Noted musicologist Cecil Forsyth takes readers bar by bar through a complete choral orchestration in this excellent and inexpensive tutorial.
    Forsyth discusses general principles in terms of their application to everyday orchestral necessities. He further presents a complete composition and explores each note, forming a friendly critical conversation with readers. Together the author and reader examine the work's musical difficulties, balance the orchestral possibilities of each passage, and explore the details of orchestral execution. Pianists and composers as well as organists will appreciate this accessible and complete study of orchestration.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDover Publications
    Release dateNov 20, 2013
    ISBN9780486782584
    Choral Orchestration

    Related to Choral Orchestration

    Related ebooks

    Music For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      T-time

      Mar 23, 2021

      T-time
      3 min read

    • Article

      Modal Harmony

      Oct 20, 2020

      Modal Harmony
      4 min read

    • Article

      Diatonic Chord Substitution

      Oct 22, 2019

      Diatonic Chord Substitution
      4 min read

    • Article

      François-Xavier Roth

      May 14, 2020

      François-Xavier Roth
      6 min read

    • Article

      Esa-Pekka Salonen

      Sep 3, 2020

      Esa-Pekka Salonen
      6 min read

    • Article

      15 Musical Works To Study To

      Feb 20, 2024

      15 Musical Works To Study To
      5 min read

    • Article

      What's Composer Max Richter Listening To? Pretty Much Everything

      Apr 5, 2017

      The genre-busting composer, who believes in classical music's "multi-dimensional space," brings a strikingly diverse playlist with him for a relaxed session of spinning tunes and talking music.

      10 min read

    • Article

      The Final Word

      Jun 17, 2019

      The cover art says it all. OPERA AS OPERA in big capital letters. The first “OPERA” in the title is given a pristine graphic treatment, the second resembles crumbling marble. It’s perfect imagery to sum up the impetus behind this book—that the operat

      2 min read

    • Article

      Richard Morrison

      Oct 28, 2021

      Most of us would agree that music is a language, arguably humanity’s most expressive and oldest language. What it doesn’t have, unlike speech and writing, is precision. Music can be used to express, for example, a feeling of love towards someone – as

      3 min read

    • Article

      Timothy Vernon + Jordan de Souza

      Nov 6, 2020

      JORDAN DE SOUZA: What was it like to discover Vienna as a young person in the 60s and 70s? TIMOTHY VERNON: When I arrived to begin my studies in Vienna in 1965, the Staatsvertrag, which created the Second Austrian Republic, was only 10 years old. Wor

      7 min read

    • Article

      Voices From The Past

      Jul 11, 2023

      Voices From The Past
      5 min read

    • Article

      Richard Morrison

      Dec 22, 2021

      A lfred Brendel tells an anecdote about switching on the radio midway through some piano recital, and thinking to himself: ‘My God, that player hasn’t got a clue’. Then came the inevitable announcement: ‘That was Alfred Brendel…’. At a somewhat less

      3 min read

    • Article

      Have Your Say…

      Mar 19, 2024

      Have Your Say…
      5 min read

    • Article

      Opera Reduced

      Mar 15, 2021

      Opera Reduced
      9 min read

    • Article

      Perfect Team-players: Why Orchestras Reflect The Best Of Us, And How They Should Reflect Us Back

      Jun 1, 2022

      When I was a young conductor stricken with impostor syndrome, my greatest fear was conducting anything by Mozart. As a child, his music had been a lifesaver; he was my confidant, my best friend. And for many years I avoided conducting this most treas

      3 min read

    • Article

      Karl Bartos

      Sep 9, 2022

      Karl Bartos might always primarily be associated with Kraftwerk, but he’s been no slouch outside of the group. As well as reliving his experiences as the second robot from left in his new book The Sound Of The Machine, Bartos explores his time as a c

      11 min read

    • Article

      Forgettable History Of Forgotten Music

      Mar 30, 2023

      THE EXTENSIVE LITANYof this book’s myriad problems is complicated by the fact that there is so little space in a review of this sort and the text itself is so amateurish. The aimless nature and flimsy discursive style of Dr Leah Broad’s text in the f

      5 min read

    • Article

      Raising The Tone

      Jun 4, 2021

      Raising The Tone
      2 min read

    • Article

      Have Your Say…

      Sep 2, 2021

      Write to: The editor, BBC Music Magazine, Eagle House, Bristol, BS1 4ST Email: music@classical-music.com Social media: contact us on Facebook and Twitter Thank you for the cover CD of Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 on your September issue. It is revolution

      3 min read

    • Article

      Paavo Järvi

      Jun 11, 2020

      Paavo Järvi
      5 min read

    • Article

      As We See It

      Jan 3, 2023

      THIS ISSUE: Two concerts at the new Geffen Hall and a very rewarding book. Since writing about Manhattan’s renovated Geffen Hall in this space in our January issue, I’ve attended two concerts there. I thought I’d report back. The first of the two per

      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Choral Orchestration

    5/5

    5 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      good I have to read it yet. but I have a little knowledge of chorus. origin of chorus I want to know.

    Book preview

    Choral Orchestration - Cecil Forsyth

    Ending

    Preface

    THE number of anthems and other choral works written each year by English and American composers is enormous. Most of these are rarely performed with orchestral accompaniment. But the proportion is increasing; and it is most desirable, in the interests of musical culture, that this increase should continue, however small the orchestral force employed may be.

    Organists constantly inquire for a short handy book which will give them a technical grounding in the scoring of their compositions. And it is for their use that this slim volume has been written. It makes no pretence of taking them into the high sun-smitten pastures of modern orchestration. But it does claim to lead them to the foothills there-under, and to deal practically with the routine problems which face them on every page of their compositions.

    General principles have by no means been avoided—indeed, they are the foundation of the book. But they are shown mainly in their application to every-day orchestral necessities. When once these applications have been grasped, there is nothing to prevent their extension into the more elaborate fields of instrumentation, according to the musical ability of the individual composer. A foundation-technique is the thing to aim at, a technique that gives one ease and certainty of orchestral method.

    The plan of the volume is, I think, new. It amounts to this: that the reader is presented with a complete composition, and is then taken through it bar by bar, almost as if in conversation with a friendly critic. First, the musical difficulties of the work are considered in large blocks, as it were; the orchestral possibilities of each passage are then balanced one against the other; then, when a decision has been made, the details of the orchestral execution are taken up and explained.

    In this way it is hoped that organist-composers may be encouraged to a better study of the subject of orchestration, not as a platonic text-book affair that is wholly outside their own sphere of action, but as a practical part of their profession. An organist who can give even one performance a year of a work written and orchestrated by himself may find that he is sowing seeds that will produce a crop of musical fruitfulness far beyond his anticipations. In small towns, remote from the great centres of national activity, he really owes this to the community in which he lives. And it is a species of healthy provincialism to which every lover of art should accord his heartiest support.

    These ideals call for much musical planning and much quiet preparation. Let us then remember the answer that Aristotle is said to have made when he was asked where the Muses dwelt: In the souls of those that love work.

    CECIL FORSYTH.

    Choral Orchestration

    Choral accompaniment is not the main business of an orchestra. It is a secondary and occasional task, usually undertaken by the players without much pleasure, and often carried out in a way that does not bring any great joy to the audience.

    Pitted against the chorus each player has an uncomfortable sense of loss in his own personal value. His daily experience has given him an unerring feeling for current orchestral dynamics, and in time this scale becomes almost a second nature to him. He regards it much as a philosopher regards the law of gravitation; and—it must be confessed—he often claims an aristocratic proprietorship in the law and its workings. Then comes the choral performance, at which the big democratic planet Vox Populi swims into his ken. He finds that what he has been considering the immutable has become the transitory. Vast readjustments are necessary: but for these there is neither time nor encouragement. Hence comes much rough and careless orchestral playing, and a general effect of muddled mezzoforte—the worst type of orchestral criminality.

    Meanwhile, the man in the audience holds on to his chair and wonders why all this unmusical wickedness should be visited on him only at a choral performance. He does not complain—Anglo-Saxon audiences never do, except by the practical method of staying away from the next concert—but he registers a mental crescendo of irritation at all the fuss and pother, at being forced to hear the things which he does not wish to hear, and at having to leave unheard the things which he does wish to hear. Finally he ends by saying that choral concerts are a blatant nuisance. And, when he is in that frame of mind, it is the merest chance whether the next wind will blow him into a quartet performance or into the movies.

    But, it may be asked, what is the composer doing all this time. Surely it is his business to foresee and overcome these difficulties. Being a choral composer he has limitless wealth (from royalties), and therefore unlimited leisure. Why is he such an incompetent bungler?

    Well, the fact is that, like the rest of the world, he is doing his best. But he labours under certain disadvantages. To begin with, as a student he is not likely to hear much about the proper presentation of choral music. That is perhaps unavoidable. His youthful days are filled with aspirations and counterpoint exercises. Then, if he turns to books, he is likely to find himself somewhat undernourished mentally. In general works on orchestration space cannot be spared for the adequate illustration of this particular topic. From them he will probably learn no more than this: that choral works should be scored thickly and solidly; but that, as choruses vary in number from fifty to five thousand, any examination of principles or setting-forth of rules is so much waste of time. The consequence is that, even if he has had two or three choral works performed, he will probably rely on a miserable rule of thumb which has no relation to the true analytic that precedes all useful artistic attainment. And what is more, he will possibly go on to say that there is no method for accompanying choral music; that it is nothing but accident and fake from beginning to end; and that therefore the best way is to put down as many notes as possible and leave the result to chance. Q. E. D.

    All this is, of course, the merest nonsense. The factors in the problem are just as easily

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1