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Conrad Pope Interview about Harry Potter scores


Bespin

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The secrets of Harry Potter musical Theme.

 

It's in french, but the Conrad Pope interview is in english. It may have been posted elsewhere, but personaly that's the first time I hear an interview of Mr. Pope.

 

 

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3 hours ago, Bespin said:

OK, reformulated. I never saw an interview of him before.

 

Pope spoke very briefly about Potter in this interview:

 

Quote

As an orchestrator, you’ve been part of the “Harry Potter” saga from its beginning. What was it like to see the series reach its conclusion, and what do you think your work brought to it?

As with any job, you’re only aware of generally what’s right in front of you and you seldom think about a film such as “Harry Potter” and its history. Indeed, I’ve often commented, “If Hollywood had its own language, its grammar would have no use for a past or a future tense. You would only need a present tense.” Having said that, I feel privileged to have worked on the Potter music– from John Williams’ first trailer, through the first film, to orchestrating for Bill Ross and making sure everything was “just right” on the second, to being part of one of the most remarkable Potter scores, #3, to helping my friend and colleague Alexandre Desplat put his own stamp on the music of the iconic Wizard in the final two installments.

In the decade since I first worked on Potter, I’ve seen many changes in my own life and career. For the first score, John was in London on 9/11 conducting Harry Potter 1. A decade later I was in London conducting “My Week With Marilyn.” When I first received the sketch “Leaving Hogwarts” from John Williams for Harry Potter 1, I sat at the piano and played through it as I normally do, and thought, “Aha–the real magic of Harry Potter is that it is a love story.” I was quite moved by the beauty of the music. When we came to re-record portions of the same cue for the final film of the series, I found the music no less beautiful or magical than it was in the first film. In the end, my contributions were simple ones: I paid close attention to John Williams’ sketches and his intentions. With Alexandre I tried to carry forth my experience with the original first three films into the sound world of Alexandre Desplat–achieving, I hope, some continuity.

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4 hours ago, Bespin said:

The secrets of Harry Potter musical Theme.

 

It's in french, but the Conrad Pope interview is in english. It may have been posted elsewhere, but personaly that's the first time I hear an interview of Mr. Pope.

 

 

 

I love how when Conrad says "I remember when John Neufeld and I were working on this" the subtitler obviously had no clue what he said so subtitled it "John [Williams]" ;)

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19 hours ago, The Psycho Pianist said:

 

I love how when Conrad says "I remember when John Neufeld and I were working on this" the subtitler obviously had no clue what he said so subtitled it "John [Williams]" ;)

Yeah I noticed that right away too. Obviously the person subtitling the video didn't catch the name and didn't have a clue who Neufeld is, which is not a big surprise. I remember one film music documentary where Korngold turned into Cromwell in the subtitles thanks to the subtitler not catching the name correctly. :P

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I was very shaken many years ago to learn that JW uses these people referred to as 'orchestrators' - as it gave me the immediate (false) impression that none of the orchestrative decisions were his, but rather some (almost) unsung hero buried in the film credits, and that John merely created a simple lead sheet with a melody and some harmony on it.

 

It took a while to be reassured again of John's sovereignty regarding the creative decisions, as I gradually learned what an orchestrator technically does (or more to the point, what they do when working with JW), and how their role is merely (as Pope once put it) "secretarial". In that sense, it's quite fascinating hearing anything from the likes of Pope, Neufeld, and Karam (whom I've heard of in name only), as so much of the finished creations, as per JW's original intentions depend on how well they survive the orchestrator's own interpretation.

 

In that old BBC documentary, we get a glimpse of Herbert Spencer, and his progress on the "Mynock Cave" cue. I really wish the documentary had spent a bit more time on that stage of the scoring; I felt it was really glossed over.

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The only thing I don't like is (especially in France, or maybe Europe in general) when they here an "orchestrator" worked on the music, they just say " oh John is really not a composer, he needed to have an orchestrator come and do most of the writing for him, Conrad Pope deserves most of the credit for the score.".

He's denied this many times, but still annoying.

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In JW's case the word "orchestrator" might not be the best one. For having studied some of his sketches, the (pretty much full) orchestration is there on this 16 stave sheet. But for some other composer, it's definitely an appropriate word. 

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Keeping this Potter-themed, in contrast to Williams, Nicholas Hooper was a composer who really needed assistance in orchestrating his music. He had to send off his MIDI files to a group of guys to do it all for him. So that speaks volumes of either Williams's absolute skill in music or Hooper's lack thereof (maybe both).

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I'm no student of music, so I can't really explain much of anything in detail, but I'm looking at an Indy 4 sketch and Williams has a lot of the orchestration mapped out: 6 horns, 2 tubas which play with those horns, 4 trombones, 1 tuba which plays with that trombone, a timpani, etc. Then Conrad Pope came and made it a bit more legible. So Williams provides Pope, or Eddie Karam, or whoever with a lot more than a less proficient composer might.

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4 minutes ago, Skelly said:

I'm no student of music, so I can't really explain much of anything in detail, but I'm looking at an Indy 4 sketch and Williams has a lot of the orchestration mapped out: 6 horns, 2 tubas which play with those horns, 4 trombones, 1 tuba which plays with that trombone, a timpani, etc. Then Conrad Pope came and made it a bit more legible. So Williams provides Pope, or Eddie Karam, or whoever with a lot more than a less proficient composer might.

 

3 tubas on Indy 4? I guess Williams may have inspired Zimmer on Inception after all...

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32 minutes ago, Skelly said:

I'm no student of music, so I can't really explain much of anything in detail, but I'm looking at an Indy 4 sketch and Williams has a lot of the orchestration mapped out: 6 horns, 2 tubas which play with those horns, 4 trombones, 1 tuba which plays with that trombone, a timpani, etc. Then Conrad Pope came and made it a bit more legible. So Williams provides Pope, or Eddie Karam, or whoever with a lot more than a less proficient composer might.

 

Interesting.  So the sketches are complete, basically condensed scores.  All the information is there.  The orchestrators are more like copyists.  

 

I'd like to see Zimmer pull that off!

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Williams definitely orchestrates his own music. No doubt that. The orchestrator saves him time. I guess since he had lots of time for TFA, he's even listed as orchestrator. 

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On 9/20/2016 at 8:03 AM, Stefancos said:

Johnny hums the themes into an old fashion take recorder and his orchestrators make something from it.

 

Are there any composers who actually do this? Just wondering.

 

---------

 

Speaking of orchestration, how does the process work when there is no credited orchestrator? @loert? @karelm

 

I understand that typically Williams sketches cues, the orchestrator expands them into long hand form, and then the music prep service copyists create individual parts for the musicians, right?

 

But, for instance, on The BFG Williams composed and JKMS did music prep, but nobody got an "orchestrations" credit. Does JW orchestrate everything entirely himself in this case (i.e. write out every single stave in proper, long-hand form) or does he just send his "condensed" sketches straight to JKMS who now with more advanced technology can take the place of Conrad Pope, etc.?

 

And in a situation like TFA where Williams gets co-credited for orchestrations, does that presumably mean he actually wrote out a bunch of cues in full form and the rest were just sketches he sent to Bill Ross to write out in full form? And then all the cues in full form were probably sent to JKMS?

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10 hours ago, Will said:

But, for instance, on The BFG Williams composed and JKMS did music prep, but nobody got an "orchestrations" credit. Does JW orchestrate everything entirely himself in this case (i.e. write out every single stave in proper, long-hand form) or does he just send his "condensed" sketches straight to JKMS who now with more advanced technology can take the place of Conrad Pope, etc.?

 

Yikes, I didn't know that! If we assume by that that there was no "orchestrator" then I guess that means Williams prepared everything in long hand himself. I don't know whether to believe that or not, though! At some point there needs to be a full score which the copyists work from, at least when it comes to orchestral scores.

 

10 hours ago, Will said:

And in a situation like TFA where Williams gets co-credited for orchestrations, does that presumably mean he actually wrote out a bunch of cues in full form and the rest were just sketches he sent to Bill Ross to write out in full form? And then all the cues in full form were probably sent to JKMS?

 

Yes, I presume so. Williams had a relatively large amount of time to write the music for TFA, and him orchestrating some of his own cues himself would be beneficial for the score because he ends up having greater control over the end result, and could even make some additional revisions and changes as he makes a "second pass" of the music.

 

Btw, if anybody ever has to deal with someone who says "Williams only writes tunes and the actual orchestral music is done by orchestrators" then you can always bring up these arguments:

  1. How come the orchestration sounds so similar across all of Williams' scores despite there being different orchestrators? (Pope, Neufeld, Spencer, Ross, Williams) If the actual orchestral sound was down to the orchestrators then Williams' scores would sound noticeably different depending on which orchestrator was involved.
  2. Who orchestrates Williams' concert pieces? Williams, of course. So is this not well orchestrated music? Or this? This doesn't prove that Williams does the "hard work" on film scores, but it at least proves that Williams isn't a bad orchestrator. :D
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4 hours ago, loert said:

 

Yikes, I didn't know that! If we assume by that that there was no "orchestrator" then I guess that means Williams prepared everything in long hand himself. I don't know whether to believe that or not, though! At some point there needs to be a full score which the copyists work from, at least when it comes to orchestral scores.

 

Actually, on many of his post 2010 scores, it seems that he has in fact been sending off his original condensed scores to JKMS directly. 

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11 hours ago, Stefancos said:

Elfman worked that way early in his career. Batman is actually mostly Shirley Walker. 

 

I don't think that's how he worked generally (could be wrong, I don't know that much about Elfman's process) but he did tell a story about having to do that on a plane for Batman.

 

Quote

It’s one of my funny stories, because instead of being in a car when the title music hit me, I was on a 747 flying back from London, and all I was thinking was, “I don’t have the ability to pick up a napkin and write music.” I’ve never taken music lessons. I can write, but I need a keyboard and some kind of reference to write. And I didn’t have a keyboard. Now I try to travel with a little equipment, and if it ever came up again, I could grab my little mini-computer and play these parts. But at that point, I had nothing—certainly not a laptop. All I had was this little Sony tape recorder, so I kept running into the bathroom and laying down track after track after track, hoping that they would later mean something. I was thinking melody, counter-melodies, rhythms, all this stuff separately, and I kept getting more ideas and running back.

 

I couldn’t do it at my seat, because I didn’t want to sing into my tape recorder with this guy sitting next to me. And it got to the point where I’d open the bathroom door and there’d be two flight attendants standing there saying, “Sir, are you all right?” And I’d go, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m fine.” I’d go back to my seat and be back in the bathroom 10 minutes later, and this time there are three flight attendants. And clearly they’re looking at me as some sort of hopped-up junkie who’s just shooting up every 10 or 15 minutes. I’m sure they didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t appear to be sick or throwing up or green around the gills. If anything, I was excited.

 

But also the bathrooms were incredibly noisy, so when I got home to my studio—as I had feared—the plane erased the entire piece of music from my mind. Because they played landing music, and I think it was something like “Yesterday” by the Beatles, and it was a total memory eraser. I came off the plane and all I could think of was “Yesterday,” and I’m like, “What happened to the Batman theme? [Sings.] ‘All my troubles seemed so far away…’ Fuck! I’m screwed!” And I turn on the tape recorder, and I have about 30 minutes of notes on there—and all I’m hearing is loud engine noise. I finally heard little bits of myself coming through it, and I could catch a little bit of a “bum bum-bum-bum bum” and I’d go, “There’s a bit of the rhythm, okay, I got that.” And finally it all came back to me and I was able to write it down. But I was really relieved, because it almost is the exact main title to Batman.

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On ‎21‎.‎9‎.‎2016 at 5:05 AM, Skelly said:

I'm no student of music, so I can't really explain much of anything in detail, but I'm looking at an Indy 4 sketch and Williams has a lot of the orchestration mapped out: 6 horns, 2 tubas which play with those horns, 4 trombones, 1 tuba which plays with that trombone, a timpani, etc. Then Conrad Pope came and made it a bit more legible. So Williams provides Pope, or Eddie Karam, or whoever with a lot more than a less proficient composer might.

 

"6 horns, 2 tubas play with horns" might be Wagner tubas

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1 hour ago, hornist said:

 

"6 horns, 2 tubas play with horns" might be Wagner tubas

 

I would add that the sketches are so complete, that it is even unnecessarily detailed in the sketches.  For example, he could just write "+ harp gliss" and the orchestrator would know from the harmony what to put in but JW will write the notes of the harp gliss in the sketch.  He will be very picky about divisi and such and all his instrumentation and notes are very clear and deliberately indicated.  It is just a glimpse into his process...he is all about the details.

 

By the way, I think "6 horns, 2 tubas play with horns" means tubas are "col horns" so this is probably a low ominous passage where the 2 tubas are playing along "with horns" in unison.  I don't think JW has ever used a wagner tuba nor cimbasso. 

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36 minutes ago, karelm said:

By the way, I think "6 horns, 2 tubas play with horns" means tubas are "col horns" so this is probably a low ominous passage where the 2 tubas are playing along "with horns" in unison.

 

Correct. The 2 tubas play the same notes as the horns for the first 5 measures (but then it looks like they start to do their own thing in the 6th and beyond).

 

This is 2M8C "Indie Versus the Russian", by the way.

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7 hours ago, TheWhiteRider said:

 

Actually, on many of his post 2010 scores, it seems that he has in fact been sending off his original condensed scores to JKMS directly. 

 

Yes, one reason I was wondering is because of this Conrad Pope Facebook exchange.

 

@loert and @karelm might also be interested. I'm a little confused with what Pope is trying to say but the main point seems to be that sketches can now go directly to JKMS to "orchestrate" because of more advanced technology (?).

 

This discussion took place shortly before TFA's release.

 

CP1.png

There was no orchestrator credited on The Book Thief or Lincoln, according to both IMDB and Filmtracks (and none for the BFG as I already stated), for the record, although War Horse, Tintin, and KOTCS all utilized orchestrators. 

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5 minutes ago, Will said:

 

Yes, one reason I was wondering is because of this Conrad Pope Facebook exchange.

 

@loert and @karelm might also be interested. I'm a little confused with what Pope is trying to say but the main point seems to be that sketches can now go directly to JKMS to "orchestrate" because of more advanced technology (?).

 

CP1.png

There is no confusion.  He is saying no orchestration is needed with JW sketches.  That is what we've all been saying.  Conrad believes this more than anyone else.

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There's also this, if anyone cares. This basically says stuff we already know but whatever.

 

CP2.png

@Skelly @karelm

 

Oh, OK, I guess it's not really that confusing. 

 

But isn't he saying that Finale makes it possible for sketches to go right to JKMS without the "middle-man" of the orchestrator (e.g. Pope), something that he says was not possible before (i.e. in the time of the prequels and earlier)? 

 

I guess that would explain why so many recent JW scores have had no credited orchestrators -- it's not that he's fully writing out every single cue himself in proper long hand form (although he may well do that for some), it's that JKMS can do that now instead of a separate orchestrator, am I right?

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5 minutes ago, Skelly said:

I suppose a skilled composer who uses Finale could do that - but Williams is notorious for being a pen-and-paper man, so someone has to transcribe it all.

 

Yes, of course. 

 

I'm saying that with the prequel comment Pope seems to be saying that JKMS can do everything now (rather than a separate orchestrator such as himself being involved). So JW can just send his sketches straight to them. 

 

@TheWhiteRider seems to think that's the case. And it would line up nicely with the fact that Williams hasn't been employing orchestrators on some of his last few scores.

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There is no mystery here.  JW is an a list composer and uses A list team.  They are not amateurs at what the do.  They know how to take JW's sketches and translate it to a full score and exactly what he wants.  He is very clear in his intentions.

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