What does an orchestrator do?

[@AynenMakino]

Oh, making shorts of exactly this kind of thing is a GREAT idea!

[@virtua_t4695]

I defo agree, specially when it comes to showing other people :-P

[@stewartmoore5158]

Agreed agreed agreed!

[@IamMiaga]

I watched to whole podcast episode already but it's still great to watch a highlight clip like this.

[@BadNessie]

"Austin Wintory's Definitive Videopedia of Composition and All Things Music" Keep them coming - this is awesome as a separate bonus!

[@hambaku7318]

Great stuff

[@Arylith]

You are an absolute wealth of knowledge! Shoutout Troy for being curious and asking these questions

[@wcjerky]

To my understanding, thanks to Wintory, an ochrestrator to an orchestra is what an engineer is to a manufacturing process.

[@awintory]

Hmm that's interesting. It's possible I don't fully appreciate the intricacies of the engineer / manufacturing side of that but I don't think it's entirely accurate. Who is the composer in your analogy then?

[@Quotenwagnerianer]

@@awintory I'd say probably the industrial designer.

[@wcjerky]

@@awintory To be more specific, I would use a process engineer equated to a orchestrator; someone who can fully optimize the output of the system. In manufacturing, a process engineer is one who is tasked to use statistics to minimize bottlenecks and maximize output, as well as process mapping i.e. scheduling when to make product A, B, or C so that there is minimal downtime. In other words, they make the most out of all the parts playing at different times. If I have interpreted your brief lecture on the topic, this is what the goal of the orchestrator is with a musical process. EDIT: regardless, I love these mini-videos, as they teach me things that I did not know.

[@debayanbmusic4991]

This is amazing! Had no idea what orchestrators do! Shorts like these could change my life!

[@Serarel]

Very interesting!

[@catastrophicjones]

Oh wow, I've always been curious what the difference was. That was so well explained, thank you!

[@sachbun]

You really are a mine of gold Austin, thanks for everything. And please keep up!

[@ouchmoma]

Yeah!! Cool thing to learn

[@lizkatrin]

Thanks for this video. To me an orchestrator has always been a kind of a translator for the orchestra... 😀

[@VenusAdonisYT]

Could absolutely listen to you talk music/orchestration all day, and this coming from someone who can barely read guitar tabs. Gonna check out the full episode!

[@stephengoodman9058]

Great stuff guys. I thought I knew what an orchestrator was, but had no idea they could have so much creative input. The question you've raised for me now is what's the difference between an orchestrator and an arranger?

[@james-michaelsellers3884]

Oh you had to ask. For my orchestra, I fill the roles of all four: composer, arranger, orchestrator, and copyist. That's the order I see them to go, but I think what each person does in the chain depends on who is in each position. For me, composing involves all of the creation of the music. Thematic material, potential linking material, countermelodies, and so on. This is all the sketching. To me, this is like saying I'm going from New York to Miami, and here is a list of stops along the way. Areanging my own works is where I put all the pieces in a defined order to create a full work from start to finish. Arranging someone else's work may involve reordering sections of music or changing elements like harmonic progression. In the terms of that New York to Miami journey, this would be deciding what route to take to hit all the cities. Orchestration then comes along and takes the work from the start to finish sketch of the work and scores it out for the intended instrumentation. Like stated in the video, John Williams was very specific about what instruments he wanted throughout his works, but sometimes an orchestrator might find himself with little to no indication. Doing my own works means I'm already in my own head and don't need to write that down, but orchestrating my arrangements of works of other composers usually leads me to at least state what instrument combination has melody. Copyists then take the rather rough score and clean it up. For me, that involves ensuring page turns are nice, markings are nice and clear, the music isn't cluttered, things like dynamic hairpins and dynamics themselves are aligned, and a lot of other things up to and including the number of lines of music on any given page. But each setup is different. Mine is very different being one person doing all four roles, so they tend to blend together (I compose and arrange at the same time, and I am generally orchestrating and doing all the copyist formatting at the same time). If they are separate people, there's more of a separation in time as well, and the roles are specifically defined for that group. Composers create the material. Arrangers put the material in an order from start to finish. Orchestratprs decide who plays what. Copyists make sure the score and parts are clean, free from error, and clear about what to play.

[@starflowersea6031]

@@james-michaelsellers3884 This is a fascinating and detailed writeup! Thank you; I learned a lot today!

[@stephengoodman9058]

@@james-michaelsellers3884 Wow, thanks for that James, really appreciate you taking the time. This has been quite enlightening for me, I'd assumed the composer did all of this ( I guess some do as Austin suggested and you've proven). I mainly listen to the 'the great' classical composers who I assume would have taken this up to the orchestration stage. What you've described sounds like the studio approach to art with a number of individuals progressing the piece through to completion. Good people on this channel 👍 Steve.

[@awintory]

Great answer James!

[@kujasan]

well obviously they strate orches. terrible jokes aside, there is some etymologic showerthought in this. as in, the orchestra is the semicircular square, and the orchestrator attempts to accomplish the euclidean task of squaring the circle. not through math, but art.

[@Quotenwagnerianer]

It might be worth noting that the necessity to have an orchestrator is only due to the limited time budget of a film production. If a film composer had an indefinate amount of time to finish their music, they would all do it themselves. In the history of 19th century orchestral music I can only think of one example where a composer supposedly worked with an orchestrator at first, because he was insecure about his own skills coming from the piano and not having scored for orchestra before: Franz Liszt. He was supposedly helped with the scoring of his first few orchestral works by Joachim Raff, composer in his own right. I say supposedly because I know both composer's styles, and the orchestral scoring, even in the early works of Liszt, sounds nothing like what Raff is doing in his own works. So either Raff was very good at masking his own style in orchestration, or Liszt revised the orchestration before publishing the scores and eradicated all traces of Raff's hand.

[@awintory]

I think having another set of eyes on the music, including finding ways to optimize the orchestration (improving voice leading, phrasing, etc) and finding typos etc etc all make orchestrators worthwhile even outside of time constraints. It allows the composer to focus on details of their choosing, from big to small. It took me a long time to become comfortable with working with one, doing every last little detail myself for many years. But I later came to find it liberating and invigorating

[@Quotenwagnerianer]

@@awintory To my understanding finding typos was the job of the copyist in the 19th Century. They would then refer the passages back to the composer for corrections. What I find fascinating is that there was a time when conductors would continue to tinker with the scores for their own performances. Mahler is said to have told conductors that they could change his orchestrations if they thought it would improve or clarify certain passages. Stokowski and Ormandy were known for this, and you can find many of these moments in their recordings of works. Just the other day I heard a 1952 recording of Brahms' 1st Symphony with Ormandy, and he added a few timpani beats here and there. Not bad ideas in their own right, but not what Brahms wrote and a little irritating when you know a work well.

[@Quotenwagnerianer]

@@privacee1845 Tchaikovsky is perhaps the most perfect orchestrator there ever was. His ear for texture blending was just out of this world.

[@davetbassbos]

@@Quotenwagnerianer I'm new to the orchestral world from a rock and jazz background, but alowing an experienced conductor to make orchestration changes makes a lot of sense, because they might know what the different options would sound like to audience, is that the idea? And if conductors used to be attached to the same orchestra they might be familiar with quirks of the acoustics and the players (can classic musicians have quirks? I don't know) Cheers!

[@Quotenwagnerianer]

@@davetbassbos That's right. Taking into account the hall you are playing in or the size of the orchestra it was common for conductors to do this. This however, has changed. Lets take Beethoven as an example: Up until the 70's and even 80's, conductors changed the size of his orchestra by adding further wind and brass instruments to make up for the greater number of strings in modern orchestras. When people are performing his works know they go the opposite direction and reduce the string section down to early 19th Century size. That of course is just a matter of size, the actual division of the voices is not changed, and no new notes are being added or subtracted. And players can have quirks, or rather be particular good at their instruments. This however is not reflected in conductors giving them more or less to do, than the composer demanded. But composers may have taken their strengths into account. John Williams did this in his classic Star Wars scores. He came to know the capabilities of the LSO so well that he adapted his scoring and challenged them. Something which they greatly appreciated.

[@iceomistar4302]

Do you have an orchestrator you collaborate with regularly? hiring one is expensive, I know many composers who prefer to orchestrate their own work to save money.

[@awintory]

I always work with Susie Seiter. Check out this video for a glimpse of our process: kzbin.info/www/bejne/gKu5nZyCgpaWsK8

[@diogo1444]

Two things: now I know what an orchestrator is and don't forget to shave guys. :)

[@someoneelse7287]

That outro song sounds familiar. What is it called?

[@awintory]

It's Dallas Crane's (my assistant who helps with these videos) riff on Thomas Newman's AMERICAN BEAUTY