Cecil Forsyth · section 2 of 39

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 thereunder, 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.