Here is a truly practical guide to scoring for the orchestra--a book that will be an invaluable aid to all persons interested in learning orchestration: students, arrangers, composers, teachers of instrumental music. As an easy-to-follow self-teacher, it will be particularly rewarding to musicians who wish to improve and enrich their knowledge of the subject. Orchestration presumes no previous knowledge of scoring. Its scope ranges from a historical-background survey of every instrument in the orchestra to a detailed and outlined plan for scoring. A unique feature of the Wagner method is the reference chart of keyboard idioms and patterns, which permits moving directly and easily from the piano to the orchestra and demonstrates the scoring of identical examples for strings, wood winds, brass, and full orchestra. The reference chart catalogs and classifies keyboard idioms and patterns as they are found in music which the student must use as source material. It further serves as a guide for isolating and reducing the orchestrator's problems to definite and specific details which, when learned, can be applied without difficulty to all similar problems. Wood-wind instruments are considered according to their family classifications rather than their printed order on the score page. There is a novel treatment of percussion instruments according to their common vibrating characteristics, with numerous examples. The study of composers and their styles of orchestration is a guide for further exploration among similar lines, to develop the perception and understanding of the evolutionary aspects of music. Detailed and exhaustive, this study of orchestration by a world-famous authority offers a practicable solution to all the diverse problems of orchestration.