What does "orchestration" mean?

The arrangement of music for performance by an orchestra.

Orchestration

Common synonyms include: absolute music, adaptation, air varie, aleatory, aleatory music, arrangement.

noun

noun ·4 syllables ·Uncommon ·Advanced level

Noun

1
The arrangement of music for performance by an orchestra. uncountable
2
the act of arranging a piece of music for an orchestra and assigning parts to the different musical instruments wordnet
3
A composition that has been orchestrated. countable
4
an arrangement of events that attempts to achieve a maximum effect wordnet
5
The control of diverse elements. broadly, uncountable
"It’s “The Most Dangerous Game” by way of The Running Man and Battle Royale, with touches of Survivor and the mass-scale orchestration of The Truman Show."

Show 2 more definitions

6
an arrangement of a piece of music for performance by an orchestra or band wordnet
7
The automated arrangement, coordination, and management of computer systems, middleware, and services. broadly, uncountable
"Microservices applications can be formed with thousand of containers. We need a proper container orchestration framework to handle all of these containers. Let's discuss Kubernetes, which is the most popular container orchestration system, in the next section."

"This piece is a virtuosic display of the composer's mastery of counterpoint and orchestration."

From French orchestration. Equivalent to orchestrate + -ion.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.