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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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. [...]