The craft of making new music — melody, harmony and arrangement treated as decisions a writer makes rather than rules to obey.
10 topics · 4 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Music as a Language: Victor Wooten at TEDxGabriolaIsland
Victor Wooten · 2013
Argues that music should be taught the way children learn spoken language, through immersion and mistake-filled play with fluent speakers, rather…
Primary sources and full treatments.
A Treatise upon Modern Instrumentation and Orchestration
Hector Berlioz · 1844
Catalogues the technical capability and character of every orchestral instrument and argues that orchestration is itself a compositional decision,…
+2 more at this level
4 works
Victor Wooten
Argues that music should be taught the way children learn spoken language, through immersion and mistake-filled play with fluent speakers, rather than through rules taught before any playing is allowed.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Hector Berlioz
Catalogues the technical capability and character of every orchestral instrument and argues that orchestration is itself a compositional decision, not a neutral act of arranging notes already chosen.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
Argues that orchestration follows learnable principles of instrumental balance and doubling, illustrated entirely through worked examples drawn from the author's own scores.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Miller Puckette
Argues that electronic composition is best taught through the signal-processing building blocks themselves rather than through any one software instrument, using patchable synthesis and processing as the common language.
link checked 17 Sept 2026