François-Auguste Gevaert (1828-1908) was Director of the Brussels Royal Conservatory, a Prix de Rome winner, and successful composer of light opera. His 1885 New Treatise on Instrumentation, together with his follow-on volume on orchestration, was hailed as "by far the finest book on the subject ever written" and garnered the admiration of contemporaries such as Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Richard Strauss. The present volume is the first English-language translation of the work in over a century.
