Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Historically, orchestration has been mainly taught in a quite intuitive and non-verbalized way, and treatises on orchestration have been mostly limited to providing information about instruments. However, in recent decades, research has led to a better verbalization of some fundamental principles of orchestration. Under the name “functional orchestration,” Marc-André Dalbavie (composer and professor of orchestration at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris) and a few of his former students have developed some general and explicitly verbalized principles of orchestration. This field has been greatly enhanced over the past five years by exchanges with psychoacousticians and musicians within the ACTOR research partnership (Analysis, Creation and Teaching of Orchestration), with the input of concepts based on acoustics, psychoacoustics, logic, and the analysis of historical practice. I briefly present some of the key concepts of functional orchestration and a few related examples from the literature.</jats:p>