For all of you composers, orchestrators, musicians, or anyone else interested, I've decided to start a thread devoted to the study of the art of creative orchestration used in film music. It need not be extremely advanced and I invite anyone to share thoughts or examples of effective, unique, or interesting orchestration techniques. Please feel free to provide examples for all to study if you wish. Discuss any of your favorite composer's orchestral traits and fingerprints. Keep in mind that the examples here should be for study purposes only.
I will start today’s lesson with a study of two cues from Bernard Herrmann’s amazing score to Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Mountain Top and Sunrise. If you would like to hear it while looking at the music, I would recommend listening to the original tracks on the Varese release – Track 7 (with lots of cuts to match picture), or the suite he conducted for Decca years later, with a big cut and change to the first piece, but the Sunrise is intact. Notice, in the Sunrise, how He builds on his simple thematic idea, under a bed of four harps playing arpeggios, introducing new colors starting in the low woodwinds reaching higher and higher adding brass, bells, and chimes as he slowly crescendos to the climax in bar 16. It perfectly captures the mysterious excitement shared by the film’s characters and the audience alike. Not since Richard Strauss’ Alpine Symphony has there been as glorious a sunrise.
The thing that makes this score and many other Herrmann scores so interesting is the fact that he does not use a conventional orchestra, opting to use evocative and moody instrumentation that provides an otherworldly quality for the locale and drama. Anyone who knows Herrmann’s work will be well aware of this and of his typical use of odd instrumentation to accompany films in his own unique way. I want to present this to inspire and get the creative juices going and get people to think of inventive ways to score films today.
Here is the instrumentation for these two cues, and many of the cues in the film.
Great thread Bill! SO many great examples of unorthodox orchestration so I'll throw my hat in. Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky is a case where the composer recorded brass at very close proximity to the mic's to achieve a grating distortion to underscore the abrasive evil nature of the German Teutonic knights. I think I read some interview with Herrmann who referenced the genius of this approach. I know Herrmann recognized at a very early time how composers did not have to be constrained to normal orchestral forces for film scores as the recorded medium could amplify a flute over 24 french horns if need be.
Another interesting case is Fumio Hayasaka's Seven Samurai. Orchestra budgets were not all that big for Japanese composers around the 1950s so guys like Hayasaka and Ifukube resorted to interesting combinations of instrumentation. Seven Samurai is light on strings and heavy on brass and winds. The main theme, a swaggering, bold line, is played in unison by trumpets and trombones at the octave while a solo clarinet plays around the line with a counter melody. Wish I had the score to pinpoint these things but the accompanying example allows one to hear the primary themes. Saxes and pizz basses play against one another with the saxes on the strong beat while pizz basses play on the 2nd and 4th beats of the measure. the recap features upper winds doubling the main line.
The Toshiro Mifune character theme, played on baritone sax and percussion in a rhumba is another classic. It underlines his buffoonish antics of the character and his clumbsy way about him. A descriptive and evocative portrait. It also shows the influence of jazz on Japanese composers in post-war Japan.
The "Love Theme" is more traditional in its arrangement played primarily on violins I and II at the octave with idiomatic Japanese melodic riffs.
OT- this and Nevsky are seriously in the top 10 greatest films of all time.
Okay here's another beaut. David Shire's Taking of Pelham 1,2,3. This is not only an interesting case for orchestration but a crossing of two seemingly disparate styles. Serialism meets jazz meets '70s funk.
Now, in the strictest sense, this theme does not adhere to the same rules that Schoenberg followed as he repeats some notes in the theme (that little ostinato in the trumpets) but it's still a unique score. You have got the trumpets and bones playing the main theme, while the bari's push out a low peddle in and around the electric bass. There's even a little pointallism where different parts of the group play smaller cells or lines. The repeating figure on Rhodes is kinda hypnotic too.
The recap features upper winds (altos and sopranos) playing in unison with the trps and bones giving the piece more weight and a sense of development. All in all one helluva memorable theme. In fact, there really wasn't anything like it before or after. Good one Mr. Shire!
I find it odd that the scores are out of order (ie, brass on top of the woodwinds). Is there any reason for that, or is it a quirk of Herrmann?
I also find it interesting that he notated the harp parts as opposed to writing "gliss" indications. I suppose because only wanted certain notes and for the runs to be metered.
Another interesting case is Fumio Hayasaka's Seven Samurai. Orchestra budgets were not all that big for Japanese composers around the 1950s so guys like Hayasaka and Ifukube resorted to interesting combinations of instrumentation. Seven Samurai is light on strings and heavy on brass and winds. The main theme, a swaggering, bold line, is played in unison by trumpets and trombones at the octave while a solo clarinet plays around the line with a counter melody. Wish I had the score to pinpoint these things but the accompanying example allows one to hear the primary themes. Saxes and pizz basses play against one another with the saxes on the strong beat while pizz basses play on the 2nd and 4th beats of the measure. the recap features upper winds doubling the main line.
Awesome call with Hayasaka and Ifukube especially. Ifukube is my favorite composer. One of my friends actually had the fortune of doing an exhaustive interview with him at his home in 1995 or 1996 and he spoke a lot of his choice of instruments and how the small size and time allotted for music affected his writing. This is also why he recycled a lot of music. Why, the orchestra during the recording of the first GODZILLA was something like 24 players (which for that time was actually probably fairly sizable). He relied heavily on brass and low end strings and bassoon. To give it an even meatier sound, he relied on his signature piano-as-percussion technique. I love those old scores!
I also find it interesting that he notated the harp parts as opposed to writing "gliss" indications. I suppose because only wanted certain notes and for the runs to be metered.
I find it odd that the scores are out of order (ie, brass on top of the woodwinds). Is there any reason for that, or is it a quirk of Herrmann?
I also find it interesting that he notated the harp parts as opposed to writing "gliss" indications. I suppose because only wanted certain notes and for the runs to be metered.
Actually it does make sense musically and visually as you notice the buildup starts in the lower winds and goes up and ends with the horns and trumpets. The contour of the music is evident this way and would aid the conductor to visually see where things were going for a big climax.
It also made me realize if Steiner had written a similar passage, the harps would have moved up starting on different note inversions on every beat making it impossible to write all those repeat signs. He was very cruel to his orchestrators and copyists in that way.
That Prokofiev clip was just excellent Dave. It's amazing how many composers, myself included, Have tried to recapture (or copy) the power of that piece "Battle on the Ice" and not even come close. When we were scoring TRINITY AND BEYOND, That piece was a huge influence on me, especially for the "Hiroshima and Nagasaki Requiem" sequence.
Most Excellent!!!!
It got me thinking of Holst's exciting and intense opening to Mars, The Bringer of War from The Planets. There's something very similar in the way they both slowly build to a climax, although Prokofiev goes much wilder.
This thread is one of the best in a long while, thanks Bill! Herrmann's unorthodox, but amazingly colorful orchestrations are what initially drew me to film music. I'll never forget as a kid watching Journey to the Center of the Earth and Mysterious Island and being captivated by the spectacular sounds that evoked what for me became known as "The Jules Verne Sound". My interest in orchestral music sprang from there and eventually moved into classical music and then back again to film music. It's all Benny's fault!
Herrmann's use of low winds, especially his clarinet "choirs" supported by bass and contrabass clarinet, is like his signature for me. This sound evoked such darkeness and at times dread. You can almost hear the ebony color of the clarinet echoed in the sound.
For me at least, he sounded nothing like any other film composer of his day. I've never really considered him a "Golden Age" composer per se, but place him in a category all his own and a great deal of that has to do with his orchestrations being so wildly different from the rest of the pack as well as being such an integral part of his compositional style.
I'll follow up with some more orchestrational examples later, I just wanted to get in my two cents about Herrmann. And I know I've mentioned this before, but do you guys have any plans to record Herrmann's Journey to the Center of the Earth at some point? After your fantastic recording of Mysterious Island I think it would be a great companion piece and would benefit (because of the magnificent orchestrations) from a state of the art, loving recording!
Actually it does make sense musically and visually as you notice the buildup starts in the lower winds and goes up and ends with the horns and trumpets. The contour of the music is evident this way and would aid the conductor to visually see where things were going for a big climax.
Those sheets are amazing to look at: they're almost works of art in themselves! The whole 'rising' structures of dawn light and mountains are right there in the architecture of the staves! Glisses just wouldn't have looked so good either! This sort of gets right to the essence of image to music back to image again. I wonder were these Herrmann's own hand-notes or a copyist?
I think a lot of Herrmann's impact is in the orchestration. A piece like the opening to 'Three Worlds of Gulliver' would be nice enough pastiche if distilled down for a three-stave thing for a couple of pianos, but nothing out of the ordinary ... but you only get the 'bizarre' juxtapositions in the full orchestra allocations. Herrmann seems in lots of pieces to have enjoyed juxtaposing black and white, extremes, and to hell with the middle. That's where your low bassoons etc. come into their own.
The Decca suites and all those Tribute and Varese re-recordings prove that the music works on its own though, without artificial bolstering from amplified instruments or overlays. That's something I wonder about: in the early days, were there some composers/conductors in mainstream concert work who might have thought the use of amplified clarinets to swamp trumpets as 'cheating', since it might not be replicable in real conventional concert settings? Most of Herrmann's work seems to be actually playable straight in concert, as far as I see in my limited way.
Herrmann, like Korngold, was a champion of the 'orchestrating down' and 'up' to almost operatically underline and compliment dialogue, as opposed to merely dialling down. That, and the fact that his music is so often played in concert straight suggests that he didn't use the 'amplifying' technique to accentuate as often as made out. It could be argued that, apart from in 'solo with accompaniment' sonata passages, the better the composer the less need to do this. I'm not arguing it, but some might say that.
And he was a master of orchestration. Who else could write 10 minutes of music and get 30 minutes of actual music time for his efforts?
Ah, but look how definite and detailed his whole presentation is. Nice bold handwriting and easy to read. He could have saved time if he'd just scribbled .....
Jerry Goldsmith experimented both compositionally and orchestrationally almost as his mantra during his career and there are no shortage of orchestrational unorthodoxies to be found in his work.
The one that always sticks out in my mind is the sound that Goldsmith created to depict the creature in Alien. Goldsmith used a combination of conch, didjeridou and serpent (nod to Herrmann?) along with echoplex to create an unbelievably unnerving sound, both eerie and iconic for the creature. The scratching of the didjeridou, the muted otherworldly sound of the echoplexed conch and the animal like utterances of the serpent combine almost poetically to represent the essence of the alien presence. This sound is primal, frightening and pretty much impossible to readily identify instrumentally on hearing it which helped to aurally establish the unknown and utterly foreign nature of the beast in the film. I don't' think you'll find this instrumental combination in too many scores of music of any kind!
Here orchestration was as much sound design as as it was musical expression helping give voice to the creature. This may be straying off subject a bit by going for extremes in orchestration, but it does show the power of orchestration to create elements as important as lighting, sound, costume, etc. in a film.
And he was a master of orchestration. Who else could write 10 minutes of music and get 30 minutes of actual music time for his efforts?
I read once that one said of Herrmann, that he could "get more out of two chords than most composers could out of ten" (NOT an exact quote, but it was something like that)
