ounov and
Tschaikovsky--have brought this side of musical art to its zenith;
they have eclipsed, as colourists, their predecessors, Weber,
Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn, to whose genius, nevertheless, they are
indebted for their own progress. In writing this book my chief aim has
been to provide the well-informed reader with the fundamental
principles of modern orchestration from the standpoint of brilliance
and imagination, and I have devoted considerable space to the study of
tonal resonance and orchestral combination.

I have tried to show the student how to obtain a certain quality of
tone, how to acquire uniformity of structure and requisite power. I
have specified the character of certain melodic figures and designs
peculiar to each instrument or orchestral group, and reduced these
questions briefly and clearly to general principles; in short I have
endeavoured to furnish the pupil with matter and material as carefully
and minutely studied as possible. Nevertheless I do not claim to
instruct him as to how such information should be put to artistic use,
nor to establish my examples in their rightful place in the poetic
language of music. For, just as a handbook of harmony, counterpoint,
or form presents the student with harmonic or polyphonic matter,
principles of construction, formal arrangement, and sound technical
methods, but will never endow him with the talent for composition, so
a treatise on orchestration can demonstrate how to produce a
well-sounding chord of certain tone-quality, uniformly distributed,
how to detach a melody from its harmonic setting, correct progression
of parts, and solve all such problems, but will never be able to teach
the art of poetic orchestration. To orchestrate is to create, and this
is something which cannot be taught.

It is a great mistake to say: this composer scores well, or, that
composition is well orchestrated, for orchestration is _part of the
very soul of the work_. A work is thought out in terms of the
orchestra, certain tone-colours being inseparable from it in the mind
of its creator and native to it from the hour of its birth. Could the
essence of Wagner's music be divorced from its orchestration? One
might as well say that a picture is well _drawn_ in colours.

More than one classical and modern composer has lacked the capacity to
orchestrate with imagination and power; the secret of colour has
remained outside the range of his creative faculty. Does it follow
tha