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From: maverick@mahogany.Berkeley.EDU (Vance Maverick)
Newsgroups: comp.music
Subject: Re: Timbre Perception and Orchestration
Message-ID: <1991Jun17.170258.17498@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 17 Jun 91 17:02:58 GMT
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Sounds interesting.  I'd love to see orchestration get a better rap
in music theory.  I'll bet (for example) that most analyses of the
"Tombeau" from /Pli Selon Pli/ look at its pitch content, even though
(at least for this listener) it's the orchestration that makes it go*
-- particularly since Boulez personally takes the position that
timbre is just icing on the cake of pitch.

Will you have time, in your thesis, to take on the pedagogical
aspects of the teaching of orchestration?  Surely the goal of an
orchestration course is to enable the composer to hear the
combination of instruments mentally; such apparent prescriptions as
R-K's dictum about flutes softening the combination of clarinets and
oboes may serve their real function when, armed with knowledge of a
score, the student listens for this effect, and hears, not
"softness", but the sound of flutes, clarinets and oboes.  Do you
think computer representations of the sounds of instruments are far
enough along that we could write software to help teach composers
this skill of the mental ear?

	Vance

* until it stops going, before the ludicrous entrance of the voice....