John Williams Orchestrated E.T. himself

[Jesse James 5]

I recently noticed that John Williams apparently Orchestrated E.T. himself. So what normally Spencer or someone else would do Williams did himself on that Movie.

I never heard anything about it but i have the Handwritten Score and it is pretty clear to me that it is Williams handwriting. 

Can anybody confirm this? Or does anybody know on wich other Scores Williams did the Orchestrator Job himself. I once heard that on Jane Eyre he did it himself. 

 

Never heard anyone talk about this but these things interest me very much. 

[karelm 2,914]

It was Herb Spencer.

 

With that said, JW's sketches are extremely detailed and as Conrad Pope says, an orchestrator for JW's film is a glorified editor.  He's specific about the instrumentation, rhythms, voicings, ornaments, doublings, solos, etc., all in the sketch.

[Jay 37,369]

19 minutes ago, karelm said:

as Conrad Pope says, an orchestrator for JW's film is a glorified editor.

 

Copyist

[Falstaft 2,132]

3 hours ago, Jesse James said:

I never heard anything about it but i have the Handwritten Score and it is pretty clear to me that it is Williams handwriting. 

Can anybody confirm this? Or does anybody know on wich other Scores Williams did the Orchestrator Job himself. I once heard that on Jane Eyre he did it himself. 

 

This is true for every* single JW score -- his sketches are for all intents and purposes complete. Which is not to minimize the importance of the orchestrator in any way, just to say that their role is, in JW's words and their own,  "stenographic."

 

It is indeed unusual for a film composer to do this, but JW's not your regular film composer!

 

*Caveat: There are instances of timesaver cues from scores like HP:COS, Indy 5, and some bits of the Sequels where the orchestrator's task is also one of adaptation of pre-existing JW music. We on this JWfan board like to worry disproportionately about these! 

[Jesse James 5]

Ok i looked at the whole thing again and it is indeed Spencer atleast for the most part. The first Cue has a different Handwriting though. Could be Courage or Morley or someone else but the Handwriting looked remarkebly similar to Williams Sketch when i compared them. Looking at the Numbers for example, they are written in exactly the same way. So thats how i came to that conclusion. 

 

I know btw how Williams Sketches work and that they include basically everything. I have a lot of the Scanned Sketches. 

[King Mark 3,631]

I think it's been established the orchestrator doesn't really matter much in Williams case.

 

I think the Superman re-recording album was made from his hand written sketches alone so they're pretty much complete already

[JWScores 27]

5 hours ago, Jesse James said:

Ok i looked at the whole thing again and it is indeed Spencer atleast for the most part. The first Cue has a different Handwriting though. Could be Courage or Morley or someone else but the Handwriting looked remarkebly similar to Williams Sketch when i compared them.

 

Williams occasionally did the orchestrations himself, when time and other circumstances allowed him to do it. The revised version of the first cue from E.T. is one such example: it was indeed orchestrated by Wiliams (in the revised part of the cue), so you are right about this. The rest of the score was mostly orchestrated (in the sense mentioned above by others, i.e., orchestrator = glorified copyist) by Spencer, and one cue was orchestrated by Morley. 

 

[Jilal 569]

6 hours ago, Jesse James said:

The first Cue has a different Handwriting though.

 

That's definitely Williams's handwriting.

[mrbellamy 6,287]

Was Lincoln the first one where JoAnn Kane Music Service effectively became his "orchestrators" and he just sent the sketches over to them to do that work of extrapolating the parts and full score? I feel like everything since then besides Star Wars and Indy hasn't had a credited orchestrator.

 

I also have wondered, what's the significance of John Williams being a credited orchestrator on those four sequel scores with William Ross, if the process was pretty much the same as always?