In the last years and month I saw it on LinkedIn and other social media, I hear it in conversations, I see it in job descriptions and many different places: Orchestration.
But, what is it?
And, what is an orchestrator? What do they do?
Is everybody now a musician or music thinker?
Is it important? And Why should we care?
What challenges surround orchestration exist in different fields, and can music, music thinking, or the grandmaster of orchestration, Rimski-Korsakov, help?
Here is a quote from the foreword of his famous Principles of Orchestration from 1891:
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.
In this short episode, I discuss my pre-research about this in different fields.
Note: (update September 2025): Please find the released paper here:
The Analogy Of Orchestration In Systemic Co-Design
Listen now to What is Orchestration?
You can also listen to it on Spotify, Apple or any other player.
Show notes
- Pre-research survey: https://forms.office.com/e/MJchG9yEgP
- Principles of Orchestration by Rimski-Korsakov on Project Gutenberg
- Everything about Orchestration with Robin Hoffmann (professional film orchestrator)
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