How to Write Music for Orchestral Instruments

Understanding the nature of musical instruments is essential to good orchestration.

Great music requires more than technical elements such as harmony, melody and rhythm. The world's finest music is also inspiring and invokes an emotional and physical response. If we listen to a symphony by Mahler or a film score by John Williams, we can appreciate the fact that the art of orchestration--writing music for orchestral instruments--is essential for bringing creative musical ideas to life. As with an artist's palette, composers and arrangers choose from a colorful array of instruments. To master orchestration requires knowledge about each instrument, as well as a sense of how instruments sound playing together.

Difficulty:

Challenging

Instructions

Technical Parameters

1. Write music that is within the practical pitch range of each instrument. Consult an orchestration manual or website that has descriptions of instruments and their ranges. It is acceptable to occasionally write notes higher than the normal range for an instrument for special effects. But bear in mind that your composition will demand greater skill from the performer.

2. Pizzicato, plucking the strings, is a common technique for stringed instruments, cello image by Mat Hayward from Fotolia.com

   Write music that takes full advantage of the performance techniques possible for each instrument. For example, stringed instruments such as violins, violas, cellos and double-basses can be played with a bow or plucked with the finger tips. Also, percussion instruments have varying techniques, such as drum rolls, rim shots and cymbal crashes.

3. Trumpets are often used for solos. trumpet brass instrument play music image by Paul Retherford from Fotolia.com

   Write solos for instruments that are well suited for melody, such as flute, oboe, clarinet or trumpet. With experience, you can creatively push the boundaries of convention. For example, you could write a solo for the tuba or double-bass, as some composers have done.

4. Notate music appropriately for instruments that transpose and play the notes higher or lower than the written pitch. Clarinets and brass instruments, such as trumpets and horns, are transposing instruments. Know the correct interval offset for transposing each instrument.

5. Combine instruments carefully to achieve the best sound and musical balance. the clarinetist image by Pix by Marti from Fotolia.com

   Combine instruments or groups of instruments that sound well together. When combining a trumpet with a violin section, it's preferable to give a solo to a trumpet, which is louder, and write an accompaniment part for a violin section, which plays softer. You can develop a keen sense of how to balance instrumental sounds by listening to live or recorded orchestral music and noting which instrumental combinations result in aesthetically pleasing music.

Attributes and Uses of Instruments

1. Woodwinds include instruments such as the clarinet. the clarinetist image by Pix by Marti from Fotolia.com

   Write woodwind parts to take advantage of their distinct characteristics. Flutes and oboe are very agile instruments and especially suited for rapid and brilliant musical passages. Clarinets are versatile, combine well with other instruments, and may be used for solos, doubling melodies and for accompaniment. Bassoons often play the same notes as the double-basses or reinforce the rhythm with staccato notes.

2. Brass instruments are an important section in bands and orchestras. brass band image by Arkady Chubykin from Fotolia.com

   Write brass parts to take advantage of their loudness and carrying power. Trumpets are especially brilliant and powerful, but can also be muted to produce an echo-like effect. The typical brass section in an orchestra consists of four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and one tuba. The technique for sounding all brass instruments is the same. Combine the brass instruments to produce pleasant and well-matched tones.

3. A xylophone is a percussion instrument with definite pitch that is suitable for melody. music.xylaphone.musical instrument/percussion image by L. Shat from Fotolia.com

   Write percussion parts to enliven a score with rhythmic energy. Drums, tambourines, cymbals, wood blocks and triangles are examples of percussion instruments of indefinite pitch. Vibraphones, glockenspiels, bells and xylophones are examples of instruments with definite pitch and are valuable for their melodic and percussive attributes. Percussion instruments, when combined, result in a variety of colorful rhythmic and tonal effects.

4. Harps add harmonic arpeggiated accompaniment to orchestral music. play music wood string instrument harp sound image by Paul Retherford from Fotolia.com

   Write parts for harp to achieve brilliant glissando effects and effective arpeggiated chordal accompaniments. Both harp and piano may be used to double the melody of another instrument and lend more brilliance and accent to the composition.

5. Stringed basses are the foundation of the orchestra's string section. concert image by jeancliclac from Fotolia.com

   Write parts for the stringed instruments to take advantage of their wide dynamic range and expressive capacity. Different types of sound result from playing techniques such as bowing, or plucking the strings, harmonics, muting the strings, or striking the strings lightly with the wood part of a bow to produce a mysterious light percussive effect. A typical orchestra consists of two sections of violins--each with their own parts, and one section each of violas, cellos and double-basses.

Score Layout

1. Mark off sections of similar instruments using brackets when notating a music score. Woodwinds, brass, percussion and strings should appear together in their traditional order with brackets to make it easy to identify each section. See an orchestration manual for details about the order of instrument parts in an orchestra score.

2. Use standard clefs for each instrument and ensure that the meter and key signatures are correct. The clefs vary for the different orchestral instruments. Refer to an orchestration manual for details about which clefs are used in an orchestra score and for information regarding transposing instruments.

3. Use appropriate notation and other symbols when writing music for orchestra. Most instruments use a standard type of round music notation on a five-line staff. However, percussion instruments use a variety of note types depending on the instrument and frequently are written on a single staff rather than the more common five-line staff. Percussion notation is the least standardized of the orchestral instruments. Thus, it's recommended to refer to an orchestration manual and published musical scores for ideas.

Tips & Warnings

• Three popular works that introduce the instruments of the orchestra are Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf," Saint-Saens' "Carnival of Animals," and Britten's "Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra." By searching Amazon, eMusic, iTunes or other online music vendors, you can find inexpensive albums containing all three works. If you're interested in something a little more advanced, obtain the score for Maurice Ravel's orchestration of "Pictures at an Exhibition" by Mussorgsky, along with a recording of that work. Ravel was not only a famous composer, but also a skilled orchestrator; his version of "Pictures" is a brilliant showcase of the instruments found in a modern symphony orchestra.

References

• Introduction to Music--Orchestration
• Contemporary Orchestration Techniques

Resources

• Bernstein Favorites: Children's Classics
• 8 Notes: Mussorgsky, Modest: Promenade from Pictures at an Exhibition: Sheet Music