Project Lessons in Orchestration

Abstract

Project Lessons in Orchestration, by Arthur E. Heacox. (Oliver Ditson Company.) Many good treatises on orchestration have been written, but it has remained for Professor Heacox to give us a thoroughly practical yet comprehensive and musicianly textbook. Nothing that has come to my notice can adequately take its place. Moreover, that place is a basic one. It is precisely the sort of work that should prove most effective and helpful to nine-tenths of the thousands who constitute the classes in orchestration in our music schools. They would learn, instead of yearn, by the use of this book. Its excellence springs from many factors, all consistent and all integrated in a clear-cut method that arises out of easy familiarity and long teaching experience. First, the method is pedagogically sound and modern "project lessons," skillful and clever, form the course from the very first. Then there is elimination of profundities that would only fill the mind of the learner with confusion and discouragement and that are usually included (when they are) for no better reason than that the author wishes to forefend himself gaainst suspicion of superficiality or ignorance, no matter whether the pupil profits or suffers by his inappropriate display of erudition. And the result here is not superficial, it is lucid and stimulating. At no point are the higher peaks of the art of scoring absent from the horizon; but the learner properly fixes his attention upon his present ascending steps through the foothills. There is nothing new in the book, of course, but there is a deal of the old that never got itself said so clearly before. The things that every competent composer for orchestra knows are said here. The things that even many competent composers do not know but that are usually included in books on the subject are left unsaid. But not unsuggested! Allusion, quotation, bibliography, directions for extension study, are such that no teacher could follow Professor Heacox in teaching the course without adding those overtones that in all study must be brought in to give proper character and richness to the fundamentals. It is an admirable book and appears destined to extraordinarily wide use. WILL EARHART. * * *