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PREVIEW, POV BOX: ORCHESTRATOR
FULL INTERVIEW: ROBERT ELHAI
In terms of work on film score, the second most important person after the composer is the orchestrator, also known as the arranger. The words arranger and orchestrator seem to imply different duties, the orchestrator writing out the composer’s sketches for a full orchestra and the arranger re-interpreting passages of a composer’s music. In actual practice, the two activities are closely related and are often done by the same person. For this reason, people nowadays, like Robert Elhai in this interview, use the term orchestrator and arranger interchangeably. Elhai is an award-winning composer and orchestrator, although the latter has taken up the bulk of his duties in Hollywood. He has orchestrated over 150 film scores, including the first Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003, composer Klaus Badelt) and Thor: The Dark World (2013, a score composed by Brian Tyler) and. He spoke to me in the late 2010s from his home in Minnesota.
The Interview
JH: How would you describe what do you do, Robert?
RE: I like to use metaphors when I’m describing what I do, non-musical metaphors. One of them I like to use is that if you think of the composer as an architect, he pictures the building in his mind. He sees it as a whole. He has the big picture. And he knows that, in addition to whatever creative vision he has, there are a certain number of nuts and bolts that have to be figured out.
JH: Nice.
RE: For example, if the composer wants to see a specific kind of roofline, then that means that the roofbeams have to be attached in a certain way. If he wants something that’s cantilevered out from the second story over the backyard, he knows that there are certain techniques that are needed in order to achieve a cantilever. In my metaphor, there are some architects that are expert draftsmen, that know absolutely everything about the construction business.
JH: Right.
RE: They know exactly what they need to do to realize their vision. Then there are other architects who don’t know anything about the construction business. They have no clue how to realize their vision.
JH: A composer who has no clue about realizing his vision?
RE: You’re right, that’s pretty unusual, because, when you study architecture, you learn a fair amount about the nuts and bolts, and you learn how to draft. But the idea is that the composer is somebody who is the creative person, who creates music, who envisions it, who imagines it, who has a very strong sense about what it needs to sound like. And then, composers have a greater or lesser ability to actually realize that vision, to draw the plans. So, sometimes I think of an arranger or orchestrator as a draftsman who takes the architect’s vision and figures out exactly how to realize it.
JH: That’s a great metaphor.
RE: It’s important for people to realize that, nowadays things are different from, say, thirty years ago. It used to be that, if you wanted to be a composer, you pretty much had to learn how to write music. There was no other way to do it. Now, there’s so much music that’s being made without anybody knowing anything how to write music—
JH: Music notation, in other words.
RE: Yeah, music notation, as well as the ins and outs of music theory, all the basic building blocks of classical music. For the most part, that’s fine to not have that knowledge, except when you’re confronted with large projects that have a budget to hire an orchestra. Then, there needs to be somebody who can translate what the composer writes into notes on a page to put in front of a player. That’s what I think of what an orchestrator does.
JH: And yet, some composers were just as skilled in arranging or orchestrating their music as they were in creating it. Apparently, Miklós Rózsa fully orchestrated his scores so that all that his orchestrator Eugene Zadór needed to do was to copy out note for note what Rózsa had already written out. You seem to suggest that this kind of composer is becoming a rare breed, though.
RE: Absolutely. Although I wouldn’t say that notation is a dying art nowadays. Plenty of people know how to notate enough to keep the art of notation alive. But even if they know how to write things down by hand, more and more people are relying on computer to do it. One of the things that guides me in using notation software is that, when I print it out, it has to look right. And that’s based on looking at thousands of scores over the years, thousands of notational principles that have been inducted into me. But that’s true about Miklós Rózsa and virtually every composer back in the forties, fifties and even into the sixties. They were perfectly capable of writing out their own scores, if they had the time. But they didn’t!
JH: Walk me through what you do. Even before you and the composer start your work, some earlier version of the film has usually been given temp music, right?
RE: That is correct. In the same way that editors will mock-up special effects that give you a pretty good idea of the final version, that’s pretty much what a temp score does.
JH: You use the term mock-up, which is a little confusing. Just to clarify, the temp score is different from the mock-up score, right?
RE: Right. Most of the time, temp scores are not composed. They’re completely cut together from existing music.
JH: So, the composer might come along, listen to the temp score, and compose completely different music.
RE: Right. It kind of has to do with the idea of whether you consider a film a primarily creative expression or primarily a manufactured product.
JH: I see.
RE: The thing about composers is that they’re trained to be creative. But the fact is that a lot of film companies don’t want anybody to be creative. They just want people to fill in the colors, to provide whatever the director is conceiving in terms of the emotional mood of the film, which is what much of the music contributes to. Of course, a lot of music editors speak the language of the director. And the director doesn’t have to speak musically to a music editor, even though most music editors are musicians. The other thing is, that it doesn’t cost anything to get a bunch of music and play it under scenes and see what sounds good. The great thing about temp music is that it gives the composer a really good idea as to what the director is after musically.
JH: At what point do you come in once the composer has started working, and then when do you phase out of the picture, so to speak?
RE: I come in once the composer has written the score, has played it for the director and the director has approved it. That’s when things go to the orchestrator. Because orchestration costs money, and nobody wants to go to the orchestra prematurely, the orchestrator has to come pretty late to the process. And, in fact, one of the problems is that, music often does not get approved until very late, like days before the session.
JH: I gather you have a reputation for writing up an entire orchestral score in an hour or something like that.
RE: Not completely accurate, but I have gotten good at is turning things around really, really quickly!
JH: Because you have to, presumably?
RE: I have to, because otherwise there’s nothing for the orchestra to play the next day!
JH: The only other thing would be calls for more cues or last-minute changes, right?
RE: Well, yeah. Once the score is recorded, my part of the filmmaking process is done. Sometimes I sit it on the mixing sessions, you know, but it’s not something I need to do. It depends on how much I’m integrated into the music team. Because of the time pressures that have been introduced in recent years, there’s rarely time for composer, once the score has been submitted, to take a look at it before the recording session. They just have to rely on the orchestrator getting it right. In recent practice, the major creative decisions are made using the mock-up score. Putting it on paper is really sort of a formality,
JH: I see.
RE: It used to be that a composer like Brian Tyler would look at scores once I was finished orchestrating them, and we go through them and he would make some suggestions. But the time has just gotten so compressed now, that there’s barely any leeway to do anything except get the score to the music copyist and have it copied.
JH: In conclusion, Robert, what are some of the changes that you’ve seen over your decades in the industry from the point of view of the orchestrator?
RE: Good question. I would say there are two huge changes that I’ve experienced. One is the idea of composers having sufficiently realistic sounding synthesizer samples in the mock-up score. So that when they are composing the mock-up, they can compose basically a near finished orchestral sound. When they can present the mock-up to the director, it will pretty much sound like what the orchestra is going to sound like.
JH: That’s a big change.
RE: Exactly. And when the score is mocked up and the director approves it, then the music is finished. The idea of going to the session and hearing it for the first time doesn’t really happen anymore.
JH: That’s progress, in a way.
RE: I think so. In the past, composers were sort of chained to music notation, because it was the only way that they could communicate with their ideas. And now that composers are free from notation, I think that in some ways that’s actually a good thing. I think it’s led to a new kind of composer who can write by ear, not have to worry about notating it. I think that there is a certain freedom there, and that’s a good thing.
JH: That’s true of music students, from my end of things as a music teacher. The average music major nowadays knows less music notation than her counterpart ten, twenty years ago.
RE: There are probably still some places where you’re forced to write out music notation by hand, like you used to have to learn cursive in elementary school!
JH: Now, that’s progress!
Further Readings
Robert Elhai, “Robert Elhai” in Christian DesJardins, Inside Film Music: Composers Speak (Los Angeles: Silman-James, 2006), 321-324
See Ian Sapiro, Scoring the Score: The Role of the Orchestrator in the Contemporary Film Industry (New York: Routledge, 2017)
BONUS: MARK ISHAM ON ORCHESTRATORS
The work between a composer and an orchestrator often takes the form of a lifelong relationship—in Elhai’s case, his relationship with composer Brian Tyler. Let’s listen to what Hollywood composer Mark Isham has to say about his orchestrator Brad Dexter. How does the composer feel about his or her relationship to the orchestrator? As Isham explains in the following interview, the most important aspects of a composer and orchestrator’s relationship are trust and mutual respect. The composer must be able to trust that the orchestrator will complete his or her ideas in the best possible way. And to make this happen, as Isham emphasizes, the orchestrator must enjoy the composer’s music!
JH: In reflecting on the relationship of a composer and his or her orchestrator, of a Miklós Rózsa and a Eugene Zadór, can you talk a little bit about the orchestrator from your point of view as a composer? Is there an orchestrator that you have favored? If so, why?
MI: Certainly. I have worked for years with Brad Dexter, my orchestrator. He and I have a very similar background. We are both jazz players and jazz writers. He started it with a background in classical music and film music. And so, there’s very little knowledge that we both don’t share about music and different genres. All I need to do is reference things in shorthand, and Brad will know exactly what I mean. I can say, you know, when the orchestra does this in The Death of Klinghoffer (a 1991 opera by John Adams), I’m thinking of something like that, or when Gil Evans and Miles Davis did that thing with the French horns.
JH: And Brad will know exactly what you’re talking about?
MI: Exactly. It’s a musical shorthand that we have between us. I love that common knowledge and reality that we share. And it doesn’t hurt that he actually really likes my writing!
JH: I would think that would be crucial…
MI: It is. You know, it’s important to have someone that really appreciates what I’m trying to do and why I do it, as opposed to someone thinking, “Well that’s fine, Mark made that choice, but I wouldn’t do that.” That kind of relationship doesn’t necessarily work the best.
JH: Yes, that would affect a working relationship very much.
MI: Right. Brad and I respect each other a tremendous amount. I think that Brad is a terrific orchestrator. I love his ideas, and he brings me a lot of things that I wouldn’t have thought of as well. But the ideas he brings are always in the universe where I live, they’re things I like as well. And usually on a project, we’ll have a sit down and I’ll show him the first demo. I’ll show him film, and I’ll say, “This is what I’m thinking.” We go back and forth, and he asks questions.
JH: What happens after that?
MI: Usually, it goes pretty smoothly. We first make demos of everything. This is very important for the student to know in this day and age, that there’s a demo for everything. And that’s the way you communicate with the producers and director, that’s how they assess your composition. Nowadays, your ability to make a good demo or mock-up score, to handle sample orchestra sounds well, is of paramount importance.
JH: That’s certainly the impression I’ve gotten from my other interviewees.
MI: For someone like Brad, because he already knows this, he can imagine what the score will sound like from a demo. But a lot of directors or executives do not have that knowledge, and they have to be shown exactly what it’s going to sound like. I can turn to Brad and say, “Look, the synthesizer samples just won’t do at this point, I want them to do something like this,” and I'll describe it. And he’ll get it: “Oh, I know what you mean.” We’ll put a tremolo here and some trills there, I’ll have them scrape the bow against the bridge here, and so on. Some things just can’t be reproduced on a demo. But once we get on the stage, and record it, you want the director and producers to say, “That really is beautiful!” And you want somebody that’s going to really understand that process and work with you on it.