Orchestration

Cecil Forsyth's book was a pretty comprehensive treatise on orchestration in its day (my copy informs me that it was written in 1914 and revised in 1935) but it has long been supplanted as the standard textbook by "Orchestration" by Walter Piston (Victor Gollancz, London 1969).

Of course, electronic instruments hadn't appeared in 1914, and while Piston does make some observations about the ondes Martenot (nearly right, Fanny!) the use of electronic instruments in the modern orchestra is a very specialised subject. There probably is a textbook on the subject, although I'm not aware of one (certainly not one in German, Hanswolfie!) but there are a number of guides on the internet that skim the surface of the subject. Just type 'use of electronic instruments in the orchestra' into Google and see what comes up. It's difficult to offer the same level of technical guidance to the student on electronic instruments as it is with acoustic ones because there's an almost an infinite variety of them, from the ondes Martenot and the Moog synthesiser onwards. In any case, modern music is much more likely to be aleatoric and improvisational than the standard repertoire and it seems to me that the only way to get to grips with it is by hands on experience, as it were.

Piston writes "The Technical equipment of the both composer and orchestrator must include a thorough knowledge of the individual instruments, their capabilities and characteristics, and a mental conception of the sound of each." But Piston, Forsyth and any other competent writer on the subject (for example, Gordon Jacob) will explain that possession of such knowledge is only the first step towards mastery of the subject. Thereafter, the student must consider types of texture (melody and accompaniment, part writing, secondary melody and so on) as well as the scoring of chords, voice-leading and counterpoint. Ultimately, to quote Piston again, "The true art of orchestration is inseparable from the creative act of composing music". Orchestration is as much an art as it is a science, but the competent orchestrator must have all the science at his or her fingertips before the art can be deployed.

If French orchestras sound different from German ones, that's not just because, to cite one example, a French bassoon is not at all the same instrument as a German bassoon but because three hundred years of tradition have gone into the mix in each case. If you start throwing electronic instruments in as well, the matrix becomes infinitely more complicated.

Final thoughts: if you want to hear the ondes Martenot in full flood, try Olivier Messiaen's Turangalîla-Symphonie. And Fanny, if memory serves, the spooky instrument in The Clangers was a swanee whistle and not an electronic instrument at all. For the sake of completeness, I should also mention that while the Stylophone did run on batteries, it's still an electronic instrument, although a pretty unsophisticated one. It also has unfortunate associations because of the nature of the man who was such an advocate for it, the disgraced Rolf Harris!