Orchestration.

Orchestration (1914) is the classic manual on the technique and history of the modern symphony orchestra by Cecil Forsyth (1870-1941), the English composer and musicologist educated at the University of Edinburgh and the Royal College of Music under Charles Villiers Stanford and Hubert Parry, and known professionally both as the composer of a Viola Concerto in G minor, premiered at the Proms in 1903 and possibly the first full-scale concerto for the instrument by a British composer, and as a working viola player in London orchestras including the Queen's Hall Orchestra. The book describes 57 orchestral instruments as they stood at the beginning of the First World War, tracing the origins and historical development of each while also exploring the practical techniques of playing them and the psychological experience of the musicians themselves, an approach that the New Grove Dictionary of Music called for its time the most comprehensive treatment of the subject. Forsyth explains in his preface that his purpose is to describe where modern orchestral instruments sprang from, how they developed, and what they are today, and to trace the types of music reflected in these constructional changes, especially those most familiar since the time of Beethoven, arguing that without such knowledge the student is left working in the dark. Written with wit, grace, and good sense, the volume achieved lasting influence on generations of composers, conductors, and musicologists, and remained continuously in print through a modern Dover reprint edition, cementing its status as one of the standard reference works in the literature of orchestration despite Forsyth's own move to the United States in 1914 and the subsequent decline of his reputation as a composer in his native Britain.