The decision to restrict his examples to public domain sources limits the value of the book, which would benefit enormously from more modern music. For legal reasons his examples end at about 1920, and most of his selections are from the 1800s. While there is certainly great orchestral music in this period, a more contemporary handling of the orchestra would have been revealed with scores from composers of the later 20th century. An especially woeful lack is the complete absence of scores by film composers, arguably the contemporary masters of the orchestral art, and a group of musicians to whom Mr. Alexander claims a special kinship.
The value added by Mr. Alexander to this book is that he has organized the collection of scores by a typology based on various devices of musical doubling, such as "violins in octaves", "cellos & basses in octaves", etc. Some of his doublings are musical commonplaces, while others are very rare. Nowhere does he offer any suggesting as to why this is so, or why we as composers should prefer one to another.
The occasional comments that he does offer are of slight value, and are never more than a few sentences in length. For example,
Chapter 11 - Violas-Cellos
This is a very rich dark sound. Note carefully the registration and which instruments double the Violas and Cellos and at what dynamic levels. Though used mostly for melody, this combination can also be a background line. The higher the cellos, the more intense the sound.
Another cheapening factor is that, aside from the first sentence, "This is a very rich dark sound.", this comment is repeated more or less verbatim in many other chapters throughout the book.
That first sentence though does give us a glimpse of the insight Mr. Alexander might be able to offer if his writing was more generous. It is a qualitative judgement of this particular doubling, Violas and Cellos in octaves. But such insight is rare in this book. Most of his comments are entirely descriptive and banal, such as "Here you have Violins 1 on the lead with Violins 2 on the harmony a third below." (p.535), a fact which can be seen plainly by anyone who can read the score. In this book it is a rare sentence that expresses WHY a composer might choose one combination over another.
Chapter 20 - Violins 1 + Violins 2 + Violas - Cellos
Not used very frequently. I found two examples.
In short, Mr. Alexander's book offers very little insight into orchestration or music. As a collection of score excerpts it has some small value in that it might save you the trouble of looking up examples on imslp.org, but the convenience in my opinion does not justify the high price Mr. Alexander asks. The typology of doublings he presents might actually be valuable, but Mr. Alexander does nothing to explain it. His comments, though very sparse, are occasionally of interest, but the valuable bits are few and far between and scattered amongst literally thousands of pages of score excerpts.
Avoid this book. You'll do much better with one of the classics like Forsyth's or Rimsky-Korsakov's Orchestration, both available in inexpensive editions from Dover.
And if you're seriously interested in the magic of orchestral film scoring, get On the Track: A Guide to Contemporary Film Scoring by Fred Karlin, a book which is invaluable both for its musical insight and as a unique collection of film score excerpts from contemporary film orchestral masters such as John Williams, Elmer Bernstein and Jerry Goldsmith.
