Proceedings of the 2 nd International Conference on Timbre (Timbre 2020), 3-4 September 2020, Thessaloniki (online), Greece 1 The Semantics of Orchestration: A Corpus Analysis Jason Noble 1† , Kit Soden 1 , and Zachary Wallmark 2 1 Schulich School of Music, McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada 2 School of Music and Dance, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, USA † Corresponding author: jason.noble@mail.mcgill.ca Introduction The burgeoning field of timbre semantics has revealed many insights into cognitive-linguistic and cross- modal bases for ways we experience and describe timbre (e.g., Saitis, 2019; Wallmark, 2019; Zacharakis & Pastiadis, 2016), but has usually focused on the semantics of individual timbres, especially the timbres of musical instruments. There remain many questions about the semantics of timbres and textures arising from orchestral combinations: for example, what leads orchestration pedagogue Samuel Adler (2002) to describe some orchestral textures as “flickering” while others are “noble,” “bombastic,” or “muddy”? Semantics of combinations of timbres and textures are germane to ecologically valid experiences of music, especially ensemble music. They also complement the much-discussed gray area between timbre and harmony (e.g., Hasegawa 2009; Harvey 2000) with another equally fascinating liminality: between timbre and texture. A rich source of information about the semantics of orchestral combinations comes from the many published orchestration treatises. Wallmark (2019) analyzed a corpus of eleven treatises and manuals, focusing on descriptions of individual instrumental timbres. He organized the resulting sample of descriptors into seven basic categories and analyzed the frequency with which particular terms and categories appeared in the corpus as indices of timbre conceptualization and cognition. Building upon this precedent, we analyze a corpus of six orchestration treatises published over the last century (Table 1) for semantic descriptions of orchestral combinations. Table 1: Orchestration treatises used in our corpus study. Author Title Publication year Adler, Samuel The Study of Orchestration 1982/2002 Blatter, Alfred Instrumentation and Orchestration 1997 Jacob, Gordon Orchestral Technique: A Manual for Students 1982 Read, Gardner Style and Orchestration 1979 Piston, Walter Orchestration 1955 Forsyth, Cecil Orchestration 1935 Method The authors and their research assistants thoroughly reviewed the treatises and catalogued all semantic descriptions of timbres and textures arising from combinations of instruments (i.e., two or more instruments sounding concurrently). Information captured for each entry included the descriptive terms used, the instruments involved, the numbers of instruments, and the number of instrument families. Where possible, each entry was catalogued according to the orchestral effects taxonomy developed by Goodchild, Soden, and McAdams (in prep), using categories such as blend, surface texture, stratification, and timbral contrasts. Information about register, dynamics, articulations and so forth was also captured, and will be analyzed in future stages of this research, along with the inclusion of descriptors mined from additional treatises. Here we present the first stage of analysis, based primarily on conventional corpus linguistic measures and preliminary qualitative descriptions of the contents of our corpus. A more detailed statistical analysis will be the subject of a future paper.