The Study of Orchestration (Hardcover) by Samuel Adler: W. W. Norton & Company; Fourth edition (June 1, 2016)
One reason I was willing to pay for this extremely expensive book was that the ad promised that "The Fourth Edition invites students to experience the instruments through online audio and video recordings and now offers more coverage of writing for band." note: NO INDICATION THAT YOU WOULD HAVE TO PAY FOR ACCESS!
When the book came, it had a card in it with the web site URL, a password, and instructions for setting up your access -- with NO INDICATION THAT YOU WOULD HAVE TO PAY FOR ACCESS!
I went through the process in question, with NO INDICATION THAT YOU WOULD HAVE TO PAY FOR ACCESS!
Then after a year, I found my access blocked, and a message that if I wanted to keep access you better give us some money, bub.
They can of course charge for their web site access if they want to. But to advertise that the extremely high price of this book includes web access with NO INDICATION THAT YOU WOULD HAVE TO PAY FOR ACCESS! and then to include instructions for access in the book with NO INDICATION THAT YOU WOULD HAVE TO PAY FOR ACCESS! and then to have you go through the registration process with NO INDICATION THAT YOU WOULD HAVE TO PAY FOR ACCESS! and then to spring it on you later that to keep access you have to give them still more money than the unconscionably high price they have already charged -- in other words, TO SELL YOU A TRIAL SUBSCRIPTION WHILE ALLOWING YOU TO ASSUME IT IS A PERMANENT SUBSCRIPTION --is very clearly unethical. This publisher ought to be ashamed of itself.
Comments
I was lucky that I bought an earlier edition of the book that came with a CD that contains all the audio excerpts, without any silly time-limited, subscription-only access control.
A real pity that the publisher resorted to such low-brow tactics to milk the cash cow dry. The content itself is excellent study and reference material for learning orchestration, though.
I agree Teoh. I too purchaed it many moons ago and it's pretty much worn out now with a broken spine. It is good but there are decent alternatives too. I notice Jon that you are heavily into choral music so putting two and two together, you may be interested in THIS BOOK , a classic really. In fact the site has the Adler too, along with virtually every other music theory text available. Most are rentable, but the Forsyth being an older text is free.