Electronic Orchestration

Regardless of obvious importance of instrumentation and orchestration for achieving emotional impact, and despite orchestral masters such as Korsakov, in circles of traditional classical music instrumentation and orchestration are second rate citizens. Emphasis is on melody, harmony and rhythm, while orchestral texture is regarded as less substantial. “Everything can be learned in music, except one thing: how to write a good melody”, speaks the classical musician. When Dvorák told to Brahms the he currently studies instrumentation, Brahms replied: “I didn’t know there is something to learn there, if one has common sense.”

But with arrival of electronic studios, it started to make an impact on audiences and musicians that “arrangement” and orchestration are much more important than this. With electronic music, orchestration and instrumentation are becoming subtle art, as opposed to just “common sense”, a few simple decisions and book-clichés. There is an abstract relationship and balance between harmonics, that constitute an important part of electronic music.

This I realized as a youngster thanks to a particular feeling that puzzled me. I had it for the first time when I heard Equinoxe 4 from JM Jarre somewhere in the town, a tune I knew before, but in the moment of hearing it I was suddenly surprised that it somehow sounds much better and more masterful than I remembered it, and I realized that it comes from arrangement. I couldn’t believe that sounds can make such a difference; and it was not about individual sounds and theirs quirkiness, but about the way on which different sounds are put together. I had this feeling quite often, most often again with other JM Jarre’s pieces - say Oxygene 5 or Equinoxe 1, where much of the “trick” is in this harmony of sounds. I remember when they played Equinoxe 1 as an introduction to a story about a Serbian painter who works in Paris; the way sounds were coming together was incredibly subtle. My sister – who despises electronic music on pure principle – said after only ten or so second of listening to this same Equinoxe 1: “a man has to be born to make music like this”. So there was something in the orchestration, vibrations of the sounds, the way timbres were coming together that was genial and structured. There are pieces whose sound, organization beyond melodic, harmonic and rhythmic, sounds more musical than others.

When I first put my hands on a synthesizer - on an electronic instrument – I suddenly realized, that for the first time in music, you could act as a painter, (working) with frequencies and sounds. Jean Michel Jarre

With electronic music, it could be said that “orchestration” takes on itself much of what is considered musical craft and compositional technique. Lately the expression “sound design” almost took hold between musicians to refer to electronic orchestration peculiarities, although this phrase suggests that a musician first has abstract melodic and harmonic ideas, and then searches the sounds for them, through “experimenting with sounds” – which could, but does not have to be the case. I heard some composers use the expression “arrangement spirit” when talking of this new contemporary electronic arrangements. I think this is a much better phrase because it corresponds to the fact that it’s the spirit, the artistic idea, contained within the arrangement.

Electronic orchestration changes the way of thinking about composing. Instead of writing for those several instruments, composer have to start think about oneself as a writer in pure sound, which is a great change. If music is mathematics, then traditional composing, that concentrates on abstract basics, can be seen as working with elementary shapes – spheres, cylinders, prisms etc., while electronic music, which much deals with texture, brings fine details and is working with more “organic”, less basic, less “angular” bodies.