Did Williams actually use smaller orchestras than other leading composers in Hollywood?

[Sunshine Reger 3,612]

There is a pejorative stereotype that film composers use 10 horns in every score (echoing what was said about American music in the John Philip Sousa era)

 

When you look at the orchestras used in film scores:

In the 1920s Gottfried Huppertz had a Wagner/Strauss/Mahler-sized ensemble not unusual for European concert halls (and musician wages) of the day.

In the 1930s and 1940s you get Max Steiner scores with all sorts of instruments more than doubled now and then.

Korngold is a tricky case, because I have a sense he used larger ensembles in interbellum Europe (Das Wunder der Heliane) than he did in the US.

1950s-1960s The epic scores of Miklós Rózsa, Dimitri Tiomkin, Alex North, Elmer Bernstein also used oversized orchestras and choirs.

1940s-1975 throughout this period you have Bernard Herrmann with instrument section numbers almost unreplicable in concert settings (and challenging to even re-record) in almost every other score. I guess the cost of hiring 10 harpists or 10 woodwind players was not necessarily higher than of hiring 10 string players.

 

Williams usually utilized a more standard "Symphonie Fantastique" / Tchaikovsky / Bruckner "city orchestra", plus a piano and an additional trumpet and maybe an additional pair of horns, but at any rate smaller than the orchestras of his aforementioned predecessors. It was essentially Korngold's Warner Brothers Studio orchestral template.

To paraphrase Williams himself "Alex (North), do you really need 8 contrabass trombones?"

 

There are exceptions, such as 8 horns in Miracle of the Ark (a Cape Fear homage), or calling for an A clarinet in The Phantom Menace, but the overal trend remains very Live To Projection friendly.

 

And on the other side again you look at the subsequent wave of orchestral gigantism with 40+ stave scores of Zimmer (Prince of Egypt), JNH (Atlantis), Elfman (Spiderman 2), Elliot Goldenthal scores etc. in the 1990s and early 2000s. This more or less goes on till today, with instrumental numbers being virtually limitless in the digital era.

 

This might be slightly counter-intuitive given the prevalent opinions regarding Williams being the Mr. Orchestra, I know. He just seems like an efficient user of ensembles, extracting a lot of energy out of them thanks to his rhythmic prowess.

 

I know some of you will probably remember off the top of your head more specific data on the orchestration of Williams's (and others') scores. Please correct me if I am seeing the pattern wrong.

[Thor 8,701]

Wouldn't it depend on the project? STAR WARS uses a bigger ensemble than STANLEY & IRIS. I'm not sure it's possible to denote an "average" size for the ensembles he's used over the years.

[Jurassic Shark 13,741]

It's not the size that matters.

[karelm 3,126]

I think you miss the point.  He uses what the score needs.  In E.T., it's a very typical romantic sized symphony orchestra.  In the prequels and Harry Potter, those were large orchestras even by Star Wars standards.  I think JW is generally on the modest size.  His big budget action scores will be on the large size but War Horse, Saving Private Ryan, and Schindler's List are generally modest.  In War of the Worlds, I think his largest orchestra was including 12 horns, 3 timpanists, etc.  From his point of view, that's what each score needed.  Historically, the musicians were part of the studio orchestra and that allowed some impracticalities.  West Side Story (1962) used three pianists.  It didn't really need three musically, but conceptually this added some interesting effects on a cue or two.  Some scores use very rare instruments and a lot of them (four contrabass saxophones or the serpents in Alien).  These are generally examples where the creative concept required the rare instruments.  But there is also gratuitous.  I doubt Elliot Goldenthal's Final Fantasy really needed all 16 horns.  There are different types of gratuitous too.  One of the Pirates of the Caribbean films recorded strings in LA but brass in England with an English choir that was then replaced with the Vienna Boys choir.  

[Marian Schedenig 9,387]

Two impressions I've long had about Williams seem to relate to this topic:

 

He seems to approach scoring a film firmly from the point of a "classical composer". That's why his music can mostly be performed directly in a concert hall: It is written for a "real" orchestra with "real" acoustics (which undoubtedly is the result of his classical training and his knowledge about how and why to orchestrate and arrange for all kinds of instruments). Sure, sometimes he'll use special effects (like the backwards bits in PoA), but only to achieve something that can't be done otherwise. When Williams writes a passage for a solo instrument with orchestra accompaniment, you can play that live. Most other remaining composers are so focused on specifically writing a film score that (it seems to me) they don't even consider that aspect: The whole thing is written to be recorded, and you can mix and amplify the soloist and the various instrument groups any way you like. The result is something that can rarely be played live without at least amplifying the solo instrument - either because the composer doesn't care about it or perhaps because many of today's composers don't have the skill and knowledge to write in such a way, at least not without significant extra effort. Whereas to Williams, I imagine, this sort of thing comes quite naturally. In this frame of reference, it seems logical to assume that his default ensemble is a standard orchestra (or some other kind of standard ensemble).

 

At the same time, Williams does frequently deviate from a standard orchestra by adding more or special instruments. Which is why the signature edition (to my knowledge) often contains changes to make his music more convenient to perform in a usual symphonic setup (which means that you hardly ever get to hear the actual, original film orchestration live). But at the core, it'll still be written for a standard ensemble (with augmentations), which also means that you can perform many of Williams's pieces in the same concert without boring the orchestra, because none of the players will have longer times where they don't play anything than they would have with other pieces from the standard repertoire.

[Sunshine Reger 3,612]

1 hour ago, karelm said:

I think you miss the point.  He uses what the score needs.  In E.T., it's a very typical romantic sized symphony orchestra.  In the prequels and Harry Potter, those were large orchestras even by Star Wars standards.  I think JW is generally on the modest size.  His big budget action scores will be on the large size but War Horse, Saving Private Ryan, and Schindler's List are generally modest.  In War of the Worlds, I think his largest orchestra was used including 12 horns, 3 timpanists, etc.  From his point of view, that's what each score needed.  Historically, the musicians were part of the studio orchestra and that allowed some impracticalities.  West Side Story (1962) used three pianists.  It didn't really need three musically, but conceptually this added some interesting effects on a cue or two.  Some scores use very rare instruments and a lot of them (four contrabass saxophones or the serpents in Alien).  These are generally examples where the creative concept required the rare instruments.  But there is also gratuitous.  I doubt Elliot Goldenthal's Final Fantasy really needed all 16 horns.  There are different types of gratuitous too.  One of the Pirates of the Caribbean films recorded strings in LA but brass in England with an English choir that was then replaced with the Vienna Boys choir.  

I think our posts agree rather than disagree.

 

Yes, it is a subjective choice what direction should the music push the audience's interpretation of the imagery and sounds in. I wanted to say that Williams's scoring, even in the prequel era, was somewhat lighter than say: the Silver Age scores of North and Herrmann - the very age after which Williams supposedly "rescued" orchestra presence in films. He also used less forces even im the 1990s/2000s than scores to then-contemporary popular blockbusters composed by others.

 

Williams's orchestras are usually more modest than the biggest ones on record on comparable projects even where the budget allowed for it and where say George Lucas probably wouldn't have minded, artistically or otherwise - assuming the director even would have noticed it - a cue with a chorale of exactly 9 trombones at a mp dynamic.

 

I agree that sometimes too much is too much. I am a fan of what one can do with a string quartet or a Beethoven orchestra, and looking at very dense scores sometimes makes me wonder whether one couldn't have achieved 90% of the effect with just half the forces.

 

I just found it interesting given JW's reputation for "big sound".

 

[Marian Schedenig 9,387]

1 minute ago, Sunshine Reger said:

I just found it interesting given JW's reputation for "big sound".

 

I think he's simply skilled and experienced enough to get all of that with a mostly standard setup. And he wants his music to be playable in concert, so he writes it in such a way to begin with (but without compromising the sound he wants for the film). Richard Strauss wrote a massive Wagnerian climax for Ariadne auf Naxos for an orchestra of less than 40 musicians, after all - which ChatGPT (which I used because I can never quickly find an exact number of players including strings) calls "quite large", but I don't think it quite understood the context.

[Tom 5,231]

4 hours ago, Jurassic Shark said:

It's not the size that matters.

I am disappointed in you.  The correct response is "Size matters not."  

[Jurassic Shark 13,741]

1 hour ago, Tom said:

I am disappointed in you.  The correct response is "Size matters not."  

 

It's not the grammar that matters.

[Marian Schedenig 9,387]

*Grammar not matters.

[Chen G. 4,779]

8 hours ago, Sunshine Reger said:

When you look at the orchestras used in film scores:

In the 1920s Gottfried Huppertz had a Wagner/Strauss/Mahler-sized ensemble not unusual for European concert halls (and musician wages) of the day.

In the 1930s and 1940s you get Max Steiner scores with all sorts of instruments more than doubled now and then.

Korngold is a tricky case, because I have a sense he used larger ensembles in interbellum Europe (Das Wunder der Heliane) than he did in the US.

1950s-1960s The epic scores of Miklós Rózsa, Dimitri Tiomkin, Alex North, Elmer Bernstein also used oversized orchestras and choirs.

1940s-1975 throughout this period you have Bernard Herrmann with instrument section numbers almost unreplicable in concert settings (and challenging to even re-record) in almost every other score. I guess the cost of hiring 10 harpists or 10 woodwind players was not necessarily higher than of hiring 10 string players.

 

Williams usually utilized a more standard "Symphonie Fantastique" / Tchaikovsky / Bruckner "city orchestra", plus a piano and an additional trumpet and maybe an additional pair of horns, but at any rate smaller than the orchestras of his aforementioned predecessors. It was essentially Korngold's Warner Brothers Studio orchestral template.

To paraphrase Williams himself "Alex (North), do you really need 8 contrabass trombones?"

 

There are exceptions, such as 8 horns in Miracle of the Ark (a Cape Fear homage), or calling for an A clarinet in The Phantom Menace, but the overal trend remains very Live To Projection friendly.

 

And on the other side again you look at the subsequent wave of orchestral gigantism with 40+ stave scores of Zimmer (Prince of Egypt), JNH (Atlantis), Elfman (Spiderman 2), Elliot Goldenthal scores etc. in the 1990s and early 2000s. This more or less goes on till today, with instrumental numbers being virtually limitless in the digital era.

 

I'm not sure how true all these generalisations are. From memory, few of the "epic" scores of the 1960s called for exceptionally large forces: notwithstanding speciality instruments outside the orchestral palettes (usually recorded discretly from the orchestra and playing not as part of the orchestral texture) the size of the forces tended to hover around 100-110 players: big, but nowhere near some sort of Gurre-Lieder extravegance.

 

Hermann often had absurd ensembles of specific instruments, but the overall size of the ensemble wasn't necessarily so monsterous. Same with Zimmer: it's fine and dandy to record 12 trombones and four tubas for Inception, but the other sections of the orchestra are much smaller, so on the whole its really not such a huge ensemble.

 

Williams in his big scores is hardly sparing in the orchestral forces. After Star Wars he pretty regularly used a 100-piece orchestra, and one of his favourite effects - as part of his "if it sounds good in the room it will certainly record well" - was to bolster the high winds (as many as six piccoli and five oboes) and add percussion and a second piano to evoke grinding gears. Elsewhere he would bolster brass (as many as twelve horns, three tubas, five trumpets) or other segments of the orchestra, as well as some fairly large choruses.

 

Of his contemporaries, I believe Horner woudl regularly use 120 players (in part by bolstering the viola section to achieve a darker string sound) and John Powell sometimes let loose with his forces, but on the whole its on a similar balpark to the big Williams' scores. Most of Howard Shore's Tolkien scores are recorded with a "measly" 92 people, although as with Williams he uses additional players for selected pieces. In the recording studio, the difference between five horns and eight is really not what it is in the Bayreuth Festival House, anyway.

[Naïve Old Fart 10,795]

Is THE MISSOURI BREAKS his "smallest" score? He only used six musicians.

[Loert 2,786]

In addition to what's been said, I think it's also true that Williams' use of musicians in his film music is very economical, irrespective of how many there are. Occasionally when listening to something by Strauss or Korngold, one gets the sense that there's too much stuff going on at once and the music suffers from bluriness. With Williams, though, every musical line seems to have a clear function. I actually think this is a pragmatic thing that Williams has developed over the years of recording studio orchestras, where he not only writes music that works best for the film, but also works best for the occasion when he has to get on that podium and conduct the array of musicians who have probably had very little time to study the music in front of them.

[Sunshine Reger 3,612]

3 hours ago, Loert said:

In addition to what's been said, I think it's also true that Williams' use of musicians in his film music is very economical, irrespective of how many there are. Occasionally when listening to something by Strauss or Korngold, one gets the sense that there's too much stuff going on at once and the music suffers from bluriness. With Williams, though, every musical line seems to have a clear function.

Yeah, Strauss, Mahler, Reger, and their contemporaries had the tendency to write at times rather counterproductive counterpoint that muddied the music both in the moment and over time.

 

Steiner disparaged Korngold's orchestrations as constantly "Christmas-tree-like" for this very reason.

[karelm 3,126]

Lots of great points made in this thread.  I think it's important to draw a distinction between what is purposefully needed and what is gratuitous.  If you used a soprano and strings to say what you needed to say with a soprano and piano, then it was too much.  With Williams, you see what is most succinctly needed even where large forces are used.  Conrad Pope once mentioned for Gigolo Joe's seduction scene where the song "I only have eyes for you" was played, that is actually a JW arrangement and Johnny was very specific on the instrumentation.  As Conrad put it, Johnny was an encyclopedia on musical styles and very specific for this cue on the film giving feedback that it needed to be 3 first violins, 3 second, 2 viola, etc.  That is not how an accomplished orchestrator would have scored this music but was what was needed for a 1920's style.  If it needed to sound 1950's style, it would have had a different instrumentation.  Do you think any of the audience would have noticed or cared for such specifics?  As Conrad put it, the composer schooled the orchestrator on what was appropriate for a specific scene.  That is very unusual.  I guarantee you, no film maker would have noticed or cared as long as it sounded good enough.  But if you hire Williams, you expect perfection.  
 

 

[TownerFan 5,420]

On 27/10/2024 at 10:33 AM, Sunshine Reger said:

There is a pejorative stereotype that film composers use 10 horns in every score (echoing what was said about American music in the John Philip Sousa era)

 

When you look at the orchestras used in film scores:

In the 1920s Gottfried Huppertz had a Wagner/Strauss/Mahler-sized ensemble not unusual for European concert halls (and musician wages) of the day.

In the 1930s and 1940s you get Max Steiner scores with all sorts of instruments more than doubled now and then.

Korngold is a tricky case, because I have a sense he used larger ensembles in interbellum Europe (Das Wunder der Heliane) than he did in the US.

1950s-1960s The epic scores of Miklós Rózsa, Dimitri Tiomkin, Alex North, Elmer Bernstein also used oversized orchestras and choirs.

1940s-1975 throughout this period you have Bernard Herrmann with instrument section numbers almost unreplicable in concert settings (and challenging to even re-record) in almost every other score. I guess the cost of hiring 10 harpists or 10 woodwind players was not necessarily higher than of hiring 10 string players.

 

Williams usually utilized a more standard "Symphonie Fantastique" / Tchaikovsky / Bruckner "city orchestra", plus a piano and an additional trumpet and maybe an additional pair of horns, but at any rate smaller than the orchestras of his aforementioned predecessors. It was essentially Korngold's Warner Brothers Studio orchestral template.

To paraphrase Williams himself "Alex (North), do you really need 8 contrabass trombones?"

 

There are exceptions, such as 8 horns in Miracle of the Ark (a Cape Fear homage), or calling for an A clarinet in The Phantom Menace, but the overal trend remains very Live To Projection friendly.

 

And on the other side again you look at the subsequent wave of orchestral gigantism with 40+ stave scores of Zimmer (Prince of Egypt), JNH (Atlantis), Elfman (Spiderman 2), Elliot Goldenthal scores etc. in the 1990s and early 2000s. This more or less goes on till today, with instrumental numbers being virtually limitless in the digital era.

 

This might be slightly counter-intuitive given the prevalent opinions regarding Williams being the Mr. Orchestra, I know. He just seems like an efficient user of ensembles, extracting a lot of energy out of them thanks to his rhythmic prowess.

 

I know some of you will probably remember off the top of your head more specific data on the orchestration of Williams's (and others') scores. Please correct me if I am seeing the pattern wrong.

 

There are some really interesting points raised here, but sometimes too convolutedly expressed (sorry).

 

From Star Wars onward, Williams has always been the poster child for the "big orchestra sound" in Hollywood (and he even got a lot of slack for it by film criticism intellighentsia), so there is this cliché that a lot of his music is scored for a 100 musicians playing marches and fanfares all the time. While it's definitely true that JW went for a big symphonic sound in several of the blockbuster films of the late 1970s/early 1980s era, one has to really look for the nuances of his orchestrational modus operandi. The fact he composes directly on 8-line score where orchestration is already part of the nature of the piece says a lot in how he is very careful in managing the forces at his disposal. One of his go-to studio musicians once told me that JW music is actually more like chamber music, but orchestrated for a very large ensemble, which I find a very interesting take on the subject. I think a lot of JW's "big sound" moments are mostly direct consequence of the grandeur he saw on screen and finding a way to musically enhance those scenes with very powerful symphonic statements.

 

One has also to go back and put all of this in historical context. The so called "Golden Age" era of Hollywood film scores, i.e. 1930s to late 1950s, had orchestras much smaller than one can imagine. Despite being certainly written with the Strauss/Mahler model as a reference, the standard number of players for Korngold and Steiner was around 40-45 musicians, with a lot of them doubling on various instruments. High fidelity stll didn't exist and many scoring stages weren't big enough to sit a hundred musicians plus equipments, etc. A lot of composers used these limitations as creative allies to orchestrate their music and never get in the way of dialogue, etc., which has always been the primary concern. Bernard Herrmann was notorious for being particulary eccentric for his instrumental requirements and called attention of other composers, who often chimed in on the stage to see what the hell he was doing--there is a funny anecdote - probably apocryphal but it gives you the idea - of André Previn going to the session for The Day The Earth Stood Still, seeing all the electric instruments used (like theremin, electric guitars, electric violin etc.), going away for a while and then coming back on the stage with an electric blanket to see if that could be of use! But Herrmann really was the exception to the rule. Miklos Rozsa was perhaps the first to go for orchestras bigger than the standard for his huge historical epics and again that soon became a sort of cliché of the genre, up to the point where Alex North took it to the extreme in the early 1960s for Spartacus and Cleopatra, which both had a wide array of unconventional instruments like baritone oboes, contrabass tubas, a zillion percussions, etc. From the mid-1960s to the mid 1970s it was pretty much free reign and of course the title song mania caught everyone so more of a pop sound of the era hence you had smaller ensembles being the norm, but some films still required for the big symphonic sound. Composers like Goldsmith also started to fool around with synthesizers and put them as part of their standard orchestra. Star Wars turned everything on its head and made big orchestras fashionable again and Williams was certainly savvy (and enormously talented) in making the most out of this new situation, which he serendipitously helped to create. From then on, it seems he always stayed close to what seems to be his preferred set-up for most of his films (75-to-85-piece orchestra), of course varying and changing the lineup according to the requirements of the film. For example, many seem to believe he uses an augmented brass section for most of his movies, but he rarely went beyond the 6 horns, 4 trumpets, 4 trombones (1 doubling on bass) and 1-2 tuba set up (he used 8 horns only on a few instances, for example, while other composers and their orchestrators instead use this as the standard).  It's just slightly bigger than the conventional set up (which is 4-3-3-1) and mostly used to give players more flexibilty in splitting up complex parts. As for other sections, JW always stayed pretty much within the conventions of the standard symphonic set up--I think Born On the 4th of July has an augmented string section for sure; scores like Munich, Schindler's List, Stepmom, The Fabelmans have greatly reduced brass and percussion sections; JFK has a lot of pre-recorded electronic stems and cues with three pianos.

 

Finally, one has to acknowledge that while Williams had access to big budgets that allowed him to contract whatever he felt was necessary, he never went for useless follies like reconfiguring recording stages, flying in musicians from all over the world to have them play two notes, having the largest sections ever of trombones and cellos, crashing pianos out of the window or whatever nonsense makes for good PR. He has always been very methodical and savvy in how to use the resources he was given because he always puts the performance of the music at the core center.

[Bayesian 1,448]

10 hours ago, TownerFan said:

Finally, one has to acknowledge that while Williams had access to big budgets that allowed him to contract whatever he felt was necessary, he never went for useless follies like reconfiguring recording stages, flying in musicians from all over the world to have them play two notes, having the largest sections ever of trombones and cellos, crashing pianos out of the window or whatever nonsense makes for good PR. He has always been very methodical and savvy in how to use the resources he was given because he always puts the performance of the music at the core center.

For some reason, this has become the biggest thing to stick in my craw about film scoring lately. (Or at least it used to be—I blessedly haven’t heard much of this kind of stunt being done since that jackass Balfe thought it’d be a good idea to humblebrag how he got nearly 600 musicians to play his shitty music for the last M:I movie.) 

 

I’ve heard it said that baking is the hardest kind of cooking because the chemistry involved in getting things to rise properly or set evenly is a lot less forgiving than the chemistry found in cooking in a pot or a pan. Ingredients matter, but proportions and amounts even more so. JW is a master pastry chef in this regard—encyclopedic about what instruments (ingredients) can do and infallibly accurate about what needs to be added or removed to balance the product before it goes into the oven.

[artguy360 1,941]

On some podcast I listened to a while back, Conrad Pope talked about how JW knows how to a 80 or 90 piece orchestra sound incredibly large while other composers bringing in more players than that just create more volume.

[Pat_S 73]

On 28/10/2024 at 12:07 PM, karelm said:

Lots of great points made in this thread.  I think it's important to draw a distinction between what is purposefully needed and what is gratuitous.  If you used a soprano and strings to say what you needed to say with a soprano and piano, then it was too much.  With Williams, you see what is most succinctly needed even where large forces are used.  Conrad Pope once mentioned for Gigolo Joe's seduction scene where the song "I only have eyes for you" was played, that is actually a JW arrangement and Johnny was very specific on the instrumentation.  As Conrad put it, Johnny was an encyclopedia on musical styles and very specific for this cue on the film giving feedback that it needed to be 3 first violins, 3 second, 2 viola, etc.  That is not how an accomplished orchestrator would have scored this music but was what was needed for a 1920's style.  If it needed to sound 1950's style, it would have had a different instrumentation.  Do you think any of the audience would have noticed or cared for such specifics?  As Conrad put it, the composer schooled the orchestrator on what was appropriate for a specific scene.  That is very unusual.  I guarantee you, no film maker would have noticed or cared as long as it sounded good enough.  But if you hire Williams, you expect perfection.  

Do you remember where CP discussed this? Sounds fascinating. 

[TownerFan 5,420]

12 hours ago, Bayesian said:

For some reason, this has become the biggest thing to stick in my craw about film scoring lately. (Or at least it used to be—I blessedly haven’t heard much of this kind of stunt being done since that jackass Balfe thought it’d be a good idea to humblebrag how he got nearly 600 musicians to play his shitty music for the last M:I movie.) 

 

I’ve heard it said that baking is the hardest kind of cooking because the chemistry involved in getting things to rise properly or set evenly is a lot less forgiving than the chemistry found in cooking in a pot or a pan. Ingredients matter, but proportions and amounts even more so. JW is a master pastry chef in this regard—encyclopedic about what instruments (ingredients) can do and infallibly accurate about what needs to be added or removed to balance the product before it goes into the oven.

 

 

It's quite typical Hollywood hyperbole to spin beyond reason whatever they feel makes good PR for the film. It goes way back before the days of social media and composers bragging online about their feats. Back in 1985 there was a short music documentary on Silvestri's Back To The Future saying that they used "the biggest orchestra in the history of Universal Pictures". It was certainly a big ensemble, with triple woodwinds, eight French horns and all the rest, but I highly doubt it was bigger than North's Spartacus. It helped to give the film a feeling of grandeur, so that probably was useful for publicity to avoid making it look like Sixteen Candles or The Breakfast Club.

 

Back to JW, it's definitely true that he's able to get the most out of what he has at his disposal and he knows that he doesn't need a 110-piece orchestra all the time. He's just a master of orchestration and knows better than probably anyone else alive how to make an orchestra sounds fantastic in any circumstance.

 

On 27/10/2024 at 6:53 PM, Chen G. said:

Williams in his big scores is hardly sparing in the orchestral forces. After Star Wars he pretty regularly used a 100-piece orchestra, and one of his favourite effects - as part of his "if it sounds good in the room it will certainly record well" - was to bolster the high winds (as many as six piccoli and five oboes) and add percussion and a second piano to evoke grinding gears. Elsewhere he would bolster brass (as many as twelve horns, three tubas, five trumpets) or other segments of the orchestra, as well as some fairly large choruses.

 

Size of the orchestra of course varies depending on the project, and even within the single film itself it may vary depending on the cue. I am fairly certain that JW rarely went beyond the 95-piece orchestra even for big films. That is already a massive ensemble that includes around 60 string players, triple woodwinds, 6 horns, 2 keyboard players and at least 5 or 6 percussionists. With such numbers, when the music gets big, you can definitely go blow up the roof in terms of volume and power. Whenever he went over that number, it was to achieve a particularly monstruous sound for a specific moment in the film--the "Snow Battle" cue in TESB as you said has notoriously extra woodwinds, three pianos and a whole battery of percussions to produce that brutal, mechanical sound for the huge Imperial walkers; in War of the Worlds, Williams went pretty crazy with low register instruments, as some of the key sequences call for twelve horns, six trombones, two tubas and two timpanists (he even avoided violins and got a section of 24 violas). But these are truly the exceptions to his usual preference, which is to stay within the parameters of the standard symphony orchestra with some additional players, with which you can already do pretty much everything already. Again, it's all about the purpose of the scene and how to best achieve the desired result. Luckily he doesn't have to please too many deaf producers wanting to have "the biggest orchestra ever" for their film, so he really gets what he wants all the time.

 

 

On 27/10/2024 at 6:53 PM, Chen G. said:

Of his contemporaries, I believe Horner woudl regularly use 120 players (in part by bolstering the viola section to achieve a darker string sound) and John Powell sometimes let loose with his forces, but on the whole its on a similar balpark to the big Williams' scores. Most of Howard Shore's Tolkien scores are recorded with a "measly" 92 people, although as with Williams he uses additional players for selected pieces. In the recording studio, the difference between five horns and eight is really not what it is in the Bayreuth Festival House, anyway.

 

James Horner was notorious for being particularly demanding and very specific when it came to what he wanted in terms of instrumentalists, etc., much to the chagrin of the contractors. He made the Harlem Boys Choir fly to LA to do sessions for Glory, much against the will of the producers; He always insisted to always have specific ethnic players with whom he would do full improv; he often made hand-picked LA players flew to London whenever he recorded there, and viceversa; he asked to build a specific wood floor at Todd-AO to record extra percussion on Mighty Joe Young... Horner really knew how to use his privilege as an artiste composer. In terms of size, some of his scores are definitely up there with the biggest Williams orchestras. One thing I was told by a studio musician is that he often liked to have three pianos/keyboard players and have them seated behind the woodwind section, which is a quite unusual setup, to have that glowing filigree effect. However, he also used limited resources much to his advantage in chamber-like dramas such as The Spitfire Grill, To Gillian, The Man Without A Face, House of Sand and Fog, often removing brass altogether (save for the French horn solo, which he dearly loved), adding synth layers, solo voice, etc. One quite astonishing anecdote about Titanic was shared recently by Simon Franglen, who said that despite being a very expensive production, the music budget was very small, so all the synth choir work was done to avoid contracting a real chorus (Horner wanted the Harlem Boys Choir again). Cameron originally wanted an Enya-like electronic score, but then Horner dissuaded him and paid for orchestra sessions himself in order to bolster up the big sinking scenes.

[Jay 40,305]

On 27/10/2024 at 11:00 AM, Marian Schedenig said:

Two impressions I've long had about Williams seem to relate to this topic:

 

He seems to approach scoring a film firmly from the point of a "classical composer". That's why his music can mostly be performed directly in a concert hall: It is written for a "real" orchestra with "real" acoustics (which undoubtedly is the result of his classical training and his knowledge about how and why to orchestrate and arrange for all kinds of instruments). Sure, sometimes he'll use special effects (like the backwards bits in PoA), but only to achieve something that can't be done otherwise. When Williams writes a passage for a solo instrument with orchestra accompaniment, you can play that live. Most other remaining composers are so focused on specifically writing a film score that (it seems to me) they don't even consider that aspect: The whole thing is written to be recorded, and you can mix and amplify the soloist and the various instrument groups any way you like. The result is something that can rarely be played live without at least amplifying the solo instrument - either because the composer doesn't care about it or perhaps because many of today's composers don't have the skill and knowledge to write in such a way, at least not without significant extra effort. Whereas to Williams, I imagine, this sort of thing comes quite naturally. In this frame of reference, it seems logical to assume that his default ensemble is a standard orchestra (or some other kind of standard ensemble).

 

At the same time, Williams does frequently deviate from a standard orchestra by adding more or special instruments. Which is why the signature edition (to my knowledge) often contains changes to make his music more convenient to perform in a usual symphonic setup (which means that you hardly ever get to hear the actual, original film orchestration live). But at the core, it'll still be written for a standard ensemble (with augmentations), which also means that you can perform many of Williams's pieces in the same concert without boring the orchestra, because none of the players will have longer times where they don't play anything than they would have with other pieces from the standard repertoire.

 

Cool post, I enjoyed reading it!

[Richard P 4,375]

On 29/10/2024 at 9:27 AM, TownerFan said:

However, he also used limited resources much to his advantage in chamber-like dramas such as The Spitfire Grill, To Gillian, The Man Without A Face, House of Sand and Fog, often removing brass altogether (save for the French horn solo, which he dearly loved), adding synth layers, solo voice, etc. One quite astonishing anecdote about Titanic was shared recently by Simon Franglen, who said that despite being a very expensive production, the music budget was very small, so all the synth choir work was done to avoid contracting a real chorus (Horner wanted the Harlem Boys Choir again). Cameron originally wanted an Enya-like electronic score, but then Horner dissuaded him and paid for orchestra sessions himself in order to bolster up the big sinking scenes.

 

I've found Horner historically really good at incorporating synths into his work, to the extent that the synths work as a standalone, emotional part of the music. House of Sand and Fog (and Life Before Her Eyes) is a great example of him being limited (or limiting himself) to just chamber instruments and synths, and I find those scores so much more interesting than when a typical character study drama film has a 20 minute finale where the orchestra just meanders on. The finales of Legends of the Fall and A Beautiful Mind bore me to death because Horner is focusing purely on the orchestra for 20 minutes.