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So there’s an interesting prehistory to all this. The us music industry began in the late 19th century… and this is before the record! music publishing and so
by bodhiandphysics 4y ago
So there’s an interesting prehistory to all this. The us music industry began in the late 19th century… and this is before the record! music publishing and songwriting was literally publishing… of the sheet music. The standard form of this was as a piano score, and that’s the form that songwriters generally had copywrite on. Now if you were to perform this you would obviously need an orchestration, and this was subject to copywrite as well, but orchestrations were generally not published.
An important thing to consider is that orchestration is a technical skill, and many great songwriters had limited formal training in music. So orchestration was almost always separate from songwriting. It still is on broadway; almost all great broadway composers outsourced orchestration (including composers like Richard Rogers, Gershwin, or Sondheim who were perfectly capable of writing it).
- brazzy 4y agotwitch Sorry, but since you used a phonetic misspelling twice, I suspect it's not a typo and you could benefit from being corrected. It's copyright. The right to make or distribute copies of a work. A copywriter is someone who writes texts for advertising or marketing.
- bodhiandphysics 4y agoyou're right... its a condition... i have terrible spelling
- SOLAR_FIELDS 4y agoAnother correction worth pointing out - it’s Richard Rodgers, not Rogers. I thought it was the latter, but it’s actually spelled Rodgers.
- themadturk 4y agoMany Hollywood composers outsource orchestration as well, often due to time constraints. John Williams is perfectly capable of orchestrating his work, but often doesn't. I understand he leaves very detailed notes for those who do, however.
- bodhiandphysics 4y agoIn John Williams' case it's particularly funny, since he got his start as an orchestrator! The notable exceptions to this rule on broadway are Kurt Weil and Leonard Bernstein.
- ciconia 4y agoAs far as I recall Bernstein composed Candide on the piano and let someone else orchestrate it.
- bodhiandphysics 4y agobernstein "touched up" the orchestrations, and of course orchestrated the overture, but you're right. Hershey Kay and Maurice Peress did the orchestrations. West Side Story was also not orchestrated by bernstein (except for the orchestral suite)
- dbalatero 4y agoYeah, he mentions his orchestrator in this documentary on Empire Strikes Back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NT4_ERNVx3Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NT4_ERNVx3Q Given the time constraints on getting the film scored it makes a ton of sense to have help in that department.
- michaelrmmiller 4y agoOrchestration also means something different these days for most film, TV and game composers compared to the traditional definition. Traditionally, orchestration would be taking a piano or short score and expanding it to be played by an orchestra. Nowadays, almost all media composers create full digital mock-ups of the music first with the entire orchestra and then some. Orchestration then is mostly a process of transcription, typesetting and adjustments for live ensemble so the recording and performance accurately conveys the intent. John Williams and Howard Shore are two of the old guard who write short scores with notes for the orchestrator about what to do. Nearly everyone else is writing for the full ensemble and orchestrating as they go. Then the orchestrators translate that to traditional music notation so it can be played.
- msla 4y ago> The us music industry began in the late 19th century Earlier than that, if you include minstrel shows as pop music, and they are. That's pre-Civil War.