Books about Orchestration - any recommendations?

Norman del Mar - thanks for the tip!

Most composers are instantly recognizable by dint of their own peculiar instrumentation (which makes a large contribution to their own peculiar "style"). But the first man to produce truly inspired pieces of orchestration as such was I feel Dvorak. And subsequently, as I say, there came many more examples from Debussy, Ravel, Shtrafinski, and others as the twentieth century progressed.

No doubt all the books on orchestration tell us about the possible ranges and playing techniques of all the instruments; something much more difficult would be to tell us how to write inspired passages of the kind mentioned - beautiful effects never before heard. I would be interested to know whether any books even attempted it in the past.

And then come the true modernists of the past twenty years or so, who appear to be striving for novel orchestral effects at the expense of every other musical attribute; that is to say, they have altogether abandoned the idea of music as a combination or succession of tones, and concentrate their efforts on the obtaining of novel orchestral sounds or "colours." I suppose since that has been going on for twenty years or so there must be a book or two about it all in the pipe-line.