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One of the greatest if not vastly under appreciated services to come out of Film Music Magazine is its annual Salary and Rate Survey that’s been ongoing for over a decade. The most current version was released at the end of Second Quarter and it’s an eye opener, especially for those of us who’ve been in L.A. for a while.
Reading the survey will surely provoke cries of, “Oh wow!”
But whether the cry is one of excitement or despair depends largely on how long you’ve been in town, or if you’re just about to arrive.
To make sense of these figures, I compared the current 2011 guide to the one published in 2000. In doing this, one sees the shifts of musical value and in some cases, stagnation.
The good news is that creative fees and packages for films released theatrically has increased. But for TV movies, the trend is downward. I’ll give you one example.
2000 TV Movie Low Budget – $10,000 to $25,000 Medium Budget – $30,000 to $50,000 High Budget – $75,000+
2011 TV Movie Low Budget – $5,000 to $20,000 Medium Budget – $25,000 to $50,000 High Budget – $55,000+
Comparing 2000 to 2011 High Budgets shows a drop of approximately 27%.The very low end of Low Budgets is off by 50% while the high end is down 20%.
If there’s a bright spot for composers, it’s game scoring. In 2000, a Low Budget project averaged $15,000. For 2011, that figured has increased by %100, and more in some instances.
Scoring mixers, otherwise known as recording engineers, have seen stagflation in their rates. At the upper end for High Budget projects, the fees are the same today as more than a decade ago, $75 to $150 per hour, while Premium Scoring mixers are getting $2000 – $3000 for a nine hour day. Engineers doing demo recordings and Low Budget projects, over a decade, have only seen roughly a 15% increase which in cash is only $5.00 per hour more at the low end of the budget. This means that at the low end, to break $75,000 a year for fees, engineers on the low end, who are self-employed have to work 45 hours per week for 50 weeks. Out of this they must pay matching Social Security and provide their own medical insurance, and other costs.
There’s one conclusion the report doesn’t make which is that the wise creative artist will save and learn to invest to cover those rainy days when there is no work, or for some reason, they’re not able to work.
Now that we have Audiobro’s LASS, EastWest’s Hollywood Strings, the Vienna Symphonic Library, and the soon-to-be-released Miroslav Vitous String Ensembles, we’ve arrived at the place in music technology where the composer really must know string bowings and how to plan them.
Previously, we really didn’t have this option. At best, we had available a sustained (sometimes called a long) that let you do legato lines and pads (pop talk for sustained harmony), half-step/whole-step trill, tremolo, and some kind of short bowing like a staccato or marcato.
And lo! Much TV music and demos were written!
But now that’s changed. Look at this screenshot of the Vienna Instrument’s Pro Player.
It looks intimidating. Fortunately there are presets! But if you click the graphic you’ll see on the right a list of “articulations” for the brass. But the same principle applies to the strings. The little cells you see are where you can insert an individual bowing, thereby, laying the foundation for how you want to “bow” the piece. You can do this for Violins 1 through Basses.
As for piano skills, you actually don’t need them, because you can step time in all the parts and edit from there. But having excellent keyboard skills is certainly a help.
Now we come to Hollywood Strings. Check out the chart below and you’ll see the list of bowings commonly found in orchestration textbooks staring you in the face. Hello, now you really need to know them beyond homework assignments.
LASS, an acronym for L.A. Scoring Strings, is the only library organized and recorded to let you write divisi, or to create smaller ensembles as you need them all the way down to a string quintet. You don’t have the broad depth of bowing selections you have in Vienna and Hollywood Strings, but you have more than enough including excellent spiccatos, legatos, staccatos, marcatos, and portamentos galore to get the job done.
The new Miroslav Vitous String Ensembles hasn’t been released yet. I’ve been doing some pre-reviews on them. So there’s not too much I can say right now. But like Hollywood Strings and LASS, you have more than the old average number of bowings to choose from.
Learning these libraries is always a challenge as now you have to put a tech day or two into your schedule to understand how the players are working and then experiment to first learn each library and what it can before you go trying to blend them into your template.
But the change for the composer is that now you’re really doing the planning work that a concertmaster does before performing your work. It’s time consuming before the parts are passed out, and it’s time consuming for you as well doing the planning before sequencing.
Now when you ask the question, “Hmmm, how do I want this phrase bowed?” you can go a long way to answer it since by your choices you can hear how the phrase changes its impact on the listener based on how you bowed the line.
It’s now no longer good enough to know the definition of a particular bowing. The new libraries require a depth of knowledge from the composer I don’t think the developers themselves really grasp. For example, just how loud can strings really play spiccato vs. staccato?
This isn’t a trick question.
In a fast passage that could be bowed either way, the dynamics make the decision. And now you have to really know that, because once you’ve turned in the recording demo of your work, even a car mechanic will be able to tell if you know your salt from your salt substitute.
In short, where does each bowing rank on a scale of loudness?
This requires an amazing level of ear training (aka focused listening) on your part to find out. One must listen with even greater focus, possibly to several recordings of the same work that has bowings similar to what you’re trying to accomplish. Finding different performances of the same work on YouTube can be helpful especially if the work is bowed differently. The second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony comes to mind. Felix Weingartner suggested one approach which Von Karajan promptly ignored. Then there’s Carlos Kleiber.
Three different approaches, three different expressions.
In a world where fast isn’t fast enough, for the composer, at least for me, it boils down to expression which some call art. And that’s more time consuming then just slapping something together from your template. It’s bringing up something from down deep. Something maybe you didn’t even know was there until you probed around and decided to let “it” out.
Not only is that more time consuming, it’s also more demanding.
The deal here is, “What am I trying to say?”
For my Writing For Strings Course, which I expanded this summer because of all this bowing newness, I created a short piece based on a Kurt Wallender detective story. Called The Dogs of Riga, it’s a simple little piece in Dorian running about 47 seconds. I created several different versions and as part of the final project, the student has to mark the bowings and then record it for the “imaginary” producer.
Confronted with my own brilliance, I had to answer the same question, “What am I trying to say?”
Each different bowing created a different “feel” or statement. Some approaches were clearly more emotional than others for capturing Kurt Wallender’s complex emotional involvement with his would-be lover, Baiba Leipa.
Right here is the difference between scoring a scene (called a cue) vs. scoring a programmatic piece like Berlioz’ Symphony Fantastique.
You can nuance the bowing for the scene. But in a programmatic work, it must stand on its own with each listener’s imagination entirely creating the scene. Below is YouTube clip of Bernstein conducting Reveries, the first movement of Symphony Fantastique. Listen to how the bowings reflect Berlioz’ breathing and sighs as he contemplates the actress Harriet Smithson with whom he’s fallen in love with from afar.
Before now, this would have been extraordinarily difficult to realize electronically. But today, there are a sufficient number of bowings available to bring out the depths within of what you want to say.
As you attempt this, you recognize quickly how much more about instrumentation you really do need to know, and that the only way to gain this knowledge is through focused listening, score study, and experimentation.
That’s the only way. Because what you’re striving for is the relentless pursuit of, as perfectly as possible, clearly communicating what’s within your heart.
I’ve been going through Benjamin Britten’s Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes. There are too many good lessons not to share.
I’m starting off with the combination of Violins and Flutes in ppp.
The Dynamic Equivalents guideline is that at p one department of strings absorbs one (1) flute. Is this true? Yes, and it holds true for the dynamic going down to ppp. you can hear it in the opening movement called Dawn.
The violins are in the very high position. The string combination is Violins 1 + Violins 2. They’re doubled with Flute 1 and Flute 2. So in orchestral math, it looks like this:
Violins 1 + Flute 1 + Violins 2 + Flute 2
Since this is a full string section with at least 12 violins per section, for the most part, you don’t always hear the flutes doubled with the violins as much as you sense them. Notice how the flutes “fill in” the violins in this upper register. In certain places the flutes do slightly predominate but without overpowering the violins.
Watch and listen to hear/sense the power of a single flute with one violin section at this dynamic level.
This is my first time in a week where I felt I could breathe a little. Since I’m finishing up Professional Orchestration 2B, I decided to compare what I’ve learned so far from Lange to Rimsky’s range chart where Rimsky breaks the registers into low, medium, high and very high, and then gives some adjectives to describe the colors.
In many places, Lange and Rimsky (both of whom were largely self taught and also geniuses in their own right) agree where the color breaks are, but in many places, Lange is more precise. Lange’s precision comes from covering the saxes when others don’t, brass and their mutes, and the individual strings of each stringed instrument.
It’s like Lange has put a microscope on the sound produced.
Caroline has loaned me a set of her good colored pencils that she uses in her drawings. I’ve colored in the range chart using Lange’s system. So now I have by range and octaves colorized where all the woodwinds blend and can be combined as colors.
Composers are always looking for ways to more effective communicate with producers in a language we both can understand. Playing with the Spectratone chart really gives the impression that if you take the time to work out the ranges and see what sounds where, you can play some chords and stuff and say, “Well, if you’re looking for green, these are green colors and sounds.”
It’s a big chart with the whole orchestra, including muted brass and the saxes, on the same page. So it’s for any style of music I want to write in.
It’s organized by something like nine colors. The colors span the range of the instrument and indicate intensity. So the higher the musician plays up the harmonic overtone series, the more intense the sound and where the intensity changes there’s a new color.
That alone is a great help. But Lange has gone an additional step. Not all the instruments have all the colors. According to the little booklet that comes with it, these colors also symbolize blendability with other instruments. So where you have the range of Purple, for example, you can group all the instruments together to create combinations and doublings. On the other hand. you can write purple for one group then take a contrasting color like yellow and write something with those instruments.
In the process of getting out our 50th Anniversary Edition of Joseph Wagner’s Professional Orchestration: A Practical Handbook, I ran into Lance Bowling of Cambria Music who had been one of Dr. Wagner’s students. Lance is a fountainhead of information. We’ve already spent several hours on the phone. While we were talking about Dr. Wagner, I asked him about this thing on his web site called The Spectratone Chart. It looked to me like the kind of thing Caroline and I would use to pick out paint for the living room. Lance couldn’t really describe it to me over the phone, so he sent me a copy.
It arrived today.
When I opened it up and saw what it was, I nearly choked. Here on a single page is much of the information graphically illustrated that I’ve been trying to translate from classical French from Charles Koechlin’s Treatise on Orchestration.
Mottl assigned the melody to the Violas + Cellos. Both can be in unison in the same register for this passage. Mottll then creates a second counter line using basic counterpoint to create a two-note against one-note rhythmic line. The line’s pitches are entirely those of Chabrier’s theme. It’s assigned to two harps in unison and then to the First and Second Violins where the line is divided as they play pizzicato.
On the seventh bar where the new counter theme goes out of the range of the violins, the two harps continue the theme.
So now we have a new color to exploit: unison violas and cellos with pizzicato violins and harps doubling on the counter theme.
Being the investigative researcher he is, Max Tofone, who newly engraved Professional Orchestration: A Practical Handbook, discovered that the Austrian composer/conductor Felix Mottl, who was an expert in conducting Wagner, had orchestrated Chabrier’s Bourree Fanstasque and found the complete score online. I then followed up and found a complete recording of Mottl’s orchestration on iTunes.
Here’s Mottl’s solution for the opening bars for strings within the full orchestra. What do you see?
Today I started scoring the Bourree Fantasque excerpt for strings for the 50th Anniversary re-release of Professional Orchestration: A Practical Handbook by Joseph Wagner. Here’s a screen shot of it:
For the first six and a half bars, the melody falls into the range allowing for Vlns 1 + Vlns 2 + Violas + Cellos. This is a big sound used effectively by Holst in The Planets and Bizet in his L’Arlesienne Suites (see Professional Orchestration 2A for both examples under the String Unisons section). However, at bars 7-8, the unison can only continue with Violas + Cellos since the low F is not playable by the violins.
For fun, I tested Vlns 1 + Vlns 2 + Violas + Cellos on these opening bars using the EastWest QLSO Platinum with the new PLAY player. I used a spiccato “round robin” program to handle the repeated notes.
What a glorious sound!
But the “trouble” begins on bars 6-7 where the violins must drop out. Even with a sampled library playing the lines, you go from power to drop off to full ensemble. And it’s noticeable. The ear is immediately drawn to it.
Is the drop out intentional? Or is the orchestrator a complete boob?
