.png){kind=icon}
TAKE 7, POV BOX: MUSIC COPYIST
FULL INTERVIEW: ERIC STONEROOK
In the post-production stage of film music, we have reviewed the roles of several key workers, from the composer to lesser known figures like the orchestral contractor. Following the contracting of the orchestra to record the finished score, the individual parts for each orchestra player have yet to be produced. This is an intricate task that involves taking the full score prepared by the orchestrator and splitting it up into “mini scores” for each player. The role of the music copyist, often overlooked in film, is crucial. Here to tell us about this category of work is Eric Stonerook, who has been copying film music for over four decades in Hollywood. Stonerook began his career with Warner in the seventies, and became a freelance copyist following the shutting down of Warner’s music department. Needless to say, the list of films to Eric Stonerook’s credits are very long! It includes such hits as Men in Black (1997) and The Fate of the Furious (2017). I spoke to Eric from his home in the Los Angeles area.
JH: Thank you for agreeing to this interview! Let’s start with a basic question about your vocation as a music copyist. How did you get into this line of work?
ES: I graduated with a degree in Music Composition from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1976 with the intent of becoming a film composer, not a music copyist! I figured at the time my best way to get into the business and make the necessary connections was through music preparation. In the late 1970s I was hired as a proof-reader for the Warner Bros. music copying office. I was a proof-reader for about four or five years and then became a copyist. I worked with most of the great composers of the time, John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, Henry Mancini, James Horner, Lalo Schifrin, Danny Elfman.
JH: How exactly did you get your start at Warner?
ER: I graduated with a degree in Music Composition from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1976 with the intent of becoming a film composer. I figured at the time my best way to get into the business and make the necessary connections was through music preparation. I was hired as a proof-reader for the Warner Bros. music copying office. I was a proof-reader for about four to five years and then became a copyist.
One of the first movies I remember doing was with Lalo Schifrin. This would have been probably 1978. I can recall being in the Warner Bros copying office by myself. Everyone else was at lunch. Lalo Schifrin walked in, introduced himself to me and handed me a pile of scores for his upcoming movie Boulevard Nights (1979). Schifrin said that this was almost all of the music with the exception of “a couple last cues to come.” The dates for his recording session were just under two months away. At that time the full scores we received from the composer or the orchestrator were all hand written, in pencil on pre-printed score paper of the composer’s choice.
The music copyist in those days worked on paper with pre-printed staves. I used a calligraphy fountain pen and small plastic triangle for straight lines to copy the part, note for note, one note at a time as it was indicated on the score, transposing it if required. If any of us made a mistake we had electric erasers that could erase the ink—but would also erase the pre printed staff lines as well—and we would correct the mistake. For more extensive mistakes we had adhesive strips with blank staff lines pre-printed on them called “goof tape” that we could literally paste over a complete line of mistakes and re copy it correctly. The proof-reader would be the one most often making those types of corrections. At that time at the Warner Bros. copying office, we usually had six to eight copyists and one proof-reader. The copyists would usually split music cues up so we could complete the longer cues faster.
By the early 1990s, I was still at Warner, and copy machines had developed to the point where some copyists were starting to use computers to create the parts. Laser printers were able to print the part on any size paper up to 11 x 17 in size. I was the first to use a computer at Warner Bros. Let me tell you, it was a long, slow and sometimes painful process! I was met with opposition from some of the other copyists who didn’t want to give up their ink and pens. At the same time, they started worrying that I was going to take all of their work away and do it all myself!
JH: Over the course of a job, with whom do you as a music copyist communicate the most? The composer? The film director?
ES: Over the course of a project, as supervising copyist, my only real communication is with the orchestrator. Since there is usually more than one orchestrator on a given project, one orchestrator is usually designated “supervising orchestrator.” That orchestrator is in direct communication with the composer, the other orchestrators and the main copyist, the supervising copyist.
JH: Anyone else beyond the orchestrator?
ES: I do also communicate with the orchestra manager or contractor as to what instruments are going to be required. Does the flute player need to bring their piccolo or alto flute? Questions like that. Otherwise, as the supervising copyist my only other real responsibility is to prepare all of the billing and invoices for all copyists and orchestrators, and to communicate with whatever payroll company is handling the payroll for a given project.
JH: Most people are not aware, even if they think about film music, that a music copyist is involved in the process. The term “music engraving” is sometimes used in connection with music copying. How relevant nowadays is engraving to what you do?
ES: I believe the term “music engraving” applies to publication quality printed sheet music, but the expression “music preparation” is a more contemporary term that applies to producing printed sheet music. To explain what I do, you should know that in film score recordings, the instrumentalists are basically sight-reading on the spot. Film scores are broken into smaller segments called cues, anywhere from a few seconds in length to ten minutes or more. The orchestrator produces a full score from the composer’s sketch, and the copyist produces the parts.
JH: I gather that many composers nowadays don’t sketch as much as record some kind of synthesized mock-up.
ES: That’s right. When I first became involved in this business almost forty years ago, composers would write out an abbreviated, condensed version of their score called a sketch. Nowadays, the composer’s “sketch” more often than not consists of an audio recording of the composer playing the score on synthesizers using samples of the various instruments or sections. Nowadays, it’s the orchestrator doing the note entries, and so on—they’re doing the bulk of the work. The orchestrator has to transcribe this to a computer-generated musically notated printout. It is the copyist’s job, then, to produce the sheet music for the individual instrumentalists in the orchestra from the orchestrators full score. For instance, when the orchestra is seated, the flute player only needs the sheet music for the flute on their stand, the oboe player only needs the sheet music for the oboe on their stand, and so on.
JH: What program do you use? Sibelius? Finale?
ES: I love Finale, and I hate Sibelius—period!
JH: Why do you feel so strongly about that?
ES: I started on Finale when it first came out. So, I’ve been with Finale for as long as I’ve been doing this with computers. Nowadays, a young orchestrator coming into this business will learn Sibelius, because it’s much easier to learn from a score standpoint. But for the copyist, Sibelius is difficult to handle, to extract the parts. Especially hard is trying to get the title for every part—the texts in Sibelius are ridiculous!
JH: I see. You have to produce all these different parts, each with the same title.
ES: Right. The orchestrator is looking at one single score. They put the title on the score where they want it, they put the composer’s name and the orchestrator’s name, and the cue number, the name of the movie, the name of the instrument for that part, and all of that.
JH: So, a younger copyist training nowadays will learn Sibelius?
ES: The younger orchestrator will. There are no younger orchestrators!
JH: What do you mean?
ES: Let me put it this way: nobody sets out to become a music copyist. They start out wanting to get involved in film music, and later find that the knowledge they have will allow them to copy. Still today, the best computer copyists are copyists that have been around and that started with a fountain pen. Anyone can open Sibelius and say, “Oh, look, there’s an ‘extract parts’ button!” You hit the button, and there you go, there are your parts. They’re legible. But they’re not usable until you go through every one, tweak it, move things around, line things up.
JH: Let’s get back to the synth mock-up scores, the score in digital format that more recent composers provide, rather than the old sketches. How does this affect your work as a copyist?
ES: First and foremost, the digital mock-ups affect the orchestrator. The composer I work with most these days is Brian Tyler. He has a team of orchestrators, one of which—thank God—is Robert Elhai.
JH: How did you first meet Robert Elhai?
ES: I met Elhai doing a movie with composer Elliot Goldenthal, thirty years ago or something like that. Ever since then, he has tried to include me as the copyist. More often than not, it is the orchestrators that will suggest the copyist, rather than the composer. The composer is much too busy to think about copying. They know it needs to be done, but they’re more concerned with getting their scores out. So Elhai and I have worked together on just about everything I’ve done, regardless of the composer. Elhai actually started as a copyist, probably thirty, forty years ago.
JH: You referred to yourself as a supervising copyist that oversees several other music copyists. Tell me a bit more about that.
ES: Some copyists will work alone, night and day for a week. I can’t do that anymore! For the major copyists working on Hollywood films, you have got to have a team. There’s no way that one person can do all that is required. When I do a major film, I have myself and two other copyists doing the extracting or the copying.
JH: Anyone else beyond that?
ES: Well, I will also have anywhere from one to three proof-readers proofreading everything we do, every note of every part against the score. Then, I will have two to three people and two to three laser writers doing all of the printing, because the printing and the binding is more time consuming than extracting the part.
JH: Just to be clear, the parts are paper copies, not digital ones?
ES: Yes, paper copies. They are bound in what are called “accordion tapes,” meaning they can be folded up like an accordion and then opened out on the music stand. The whole purpose of that is to try to avoid or accommodate page turns. Every time a player reaches over to turn a page, he’s going to make a sound that might get picked up by a microphone. It sounds very minute and ridiculous, but the copyist is really concerned with page turns and making the part playable and quiet.
JH: That’s impressive. How would say that have things changed from your music copying days for composers like Henry Mancini or John Williams in the late 1970s?
ES: You could—and can still—almost copy from John Williams’s sketches. They were so precise, and so clear.
JH: How does that compare to a recent composer like, say, Brian Tyler?
ES: Well, Brian is one that basically sits and works and composes at a synthesizer using samples of woodwinds, strings—all the instruments. He will play every track of the cue using the sample, and then his orchestrators get a digital audio recording. So, in the case of Brian, the orchestrators are the ones writing things out. So, nowadays, it’s much more work for the orchestrators.
JH: Let’s get back to your personal history. You started out as a copyist at Warner. How many other copyists were working at Warner’s at this time, in the late 1970s?
ES: At that time, when we were basically all working with fountain pens, it took eight, nine, ten copyists to do everything. We were literally copying each note. Along with the eight to ten copyists, we’d usually have only one or two proofreaders.
JH: That’s a lot of music copyists.
ES: Warner’s was basically a family run operation. I was hired by Dan Franklin at Warner’s. He was the supervising copyist of the Warner Brothers copying department. He was the one that hired me as a proof-reader. Dan was grooming his son Joel to take over his position as supervising copyist when he retired; and then his daughter Barbara also worked there as a copyist.
JH: When Warner shut down their music copying operation in the mid 1990s, you went into business on your own?
ES: Yes, I left shortly before they shut that part of it down. This was around the time of transition with computers, in the 1990s. When I first started at Warner in the late 1970s, once a composer was finished writing the music for any Warner Brothers movie, he would turn his music to the Warner Brothers copying department. As time went by, though, and independent copyists like Joann Kane developed more control, freelance copyists would be hired. In the 1990s, Joann Kane was one of the first to use computers in music copying to speed up the process.
JH: I am actually surprised that the copying arm of Warner’s music department stayed open as long as it did. I assumed that most everything in music post-production would have been outsourced by the 1960s or seventies.
ES: Well, don’t forget that the copying office is also the music library. They need to have everything on record. Back then, after we were finished with a movie, the studio would pick up all the music, break it all down and put it on the shelf in the studio library. If that music needed to be referred to years later for whatever reason, they had to have it available. Hence the reason for maintaining the music library for a big studio like Warner. Also, Warner has paid for that music, and it belongs to them. They literally have to keep it if it’s every going to be used later on down the road.
JH: That’s fascinating. Thank you very much, Eric, for taking the time to explain music copying to me.
ES: You’re welcome. I’m glad to know that you are including music copying in your textbook. When people find out I work in film music, they always ask me, “what exactly do you do?” And as you know, it’s difficult to explain.