# Recommend brilliant film music orchestrators for study



## TeroV (Jan 14, 2014)

Which names comes to your mind as brilliant orchestrators in orchestral film/game music? I would like to gather some contemporary genre-specific orchestration ideas, to discover brilliantly orchestrated stuff and to learn from it by listening and perhaps studying a score. John Williams comes to my mind but please suggest other 'film music Ravels' and some particularly brilliantly orchestrated scores with a rich and vivid orchestral texture.

I have a background in classical music with two years of university lessons in classical orchestration and I own the Adler and Rimski-Korsakov books.

Unfortunately public libraries only have classical scores and the film music scores are atrociously expensive (probably for a good reason). Do you study other composers' scores occasionally and where do you obtain them?


----------



## ghostnote (Jan 14, 2014)

John Powell - How to train your Dragon

brilliant score


----------



## Richard Wilkinson (Jan 14, 2014)

John Williams concert score are available, and Marco Beltrami has some score excerpts on his website. And the Dragon score by Powell is brilliant.


----------



## mark812 (Jan 14, 2014)

Anything from John Williams or Jerry Goldsmith.

If you want something more recent, then definitely Cloud Atlas score by Tykwer, Heil & Klimek.


----------



## Gabriel2013 (Jan 14, 2014)

TeroV @ Tue Jan 14 said:


> Unfortunately public libraries only have classical scores and the film music scores are atrociously expensive (probably for a good reason). Do you study other composers' scores occasionally and where do you obtain them?


You can start off studying concert composers that have influence film composers.
Just a few examples of scores easy to get:

John Williams:
.Holst - The Planets
.Stravinsky - The Rite Of Spring
.Howard Hanson - Symphony no. 2

James Horner:
.Rachmaninoff - Symphony no. 1
.Benjamin Britten - Synfonia Da Requiem
.Prokofiev - Romeu E Julieta / Ivan The Terrible


----------



## WhitePhaser (Jan 14, 2014)

Good resource to study film composers.

http://www.filmmusicnotes.com/


----------



## Jaap (Jan 14, 2014)

Michael Chrostek @ Tue Jan 14 said:


> John Powell - How to train your Dragon
> 
> brilliant score



I second this to be honest. I found it one of the most refreshing and brilliant orchestral scores of the last few years.


----------



## KEnK (Jan 14, 2014)

filmmusicnotes.com -looks like a pretty good site.

Never heard of it before -will definitely check it out when I have time

Michael Giacchino has lots of free scores of his work on his website

and - my fav

Here's a yt page of Bernard Herrmann's scores.
Mostly tv shows, but you can read the scores and hear the music.
Amazing to me to see what he did.

http://www.youtube.com/user/FilmScoreRundowns

k


----------



## ed buller (Jan 14, 2014)

KEnK @ Tue Jan 14 said:


> Michael Giacchino has lots of free scores of his work on his website
> 
> k



where ?

e


----------



## KEnK (Jan 14, 2014)

Sorry-

My mistake.
It was Marco Beltrami and they appear to no longer be available.
(I checked)
For a long time he had about 30 scores on his website in pdf form.

Pieces from

Hellboy
310 to Yuma
Live Free or die Hard
Blade II
Mimic 
Flight of the Phoenix
Underworld II
and a few others

Don't know why he'd have them there for so long and then pull them.


----------



## ed buller (Jan 14, 2014)

shame

e


----------



## TeroV (Jan 14, 2014)

Thanks everyone for the suggestions! I will have a closer look at Powell's and Goldsmith's work. And obviously John Williams.



wilx @ 14.1.2014 said:


> John Williams concert score are available, and Marco Beltrami has some score excerpts on his website. And the Dragon score by Powell is brilliant.



John Williams' full orchestral scores are indeed available as sheet music and quite expensive but I guess I should bite the bullet and purchase a few favorites. The problem is, where are all other film scores to be had? I looked for a couple and I found either nothing or just some concert band arrangements.



Gabriel2013 @ 14.1.2014 said:


> You can start off studying concert composers that have influence film composers.



Good hint. I agree that Prokofiev and especially Stravinsky are good recommendations for the study of orchestration. One favorite piece of mine with great orchestration that I also recommend is Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra.

The filmmusicnotes site is well worth a look. It seems to analyse mainly the melodic material and its development though. What I'm most interested in studying at this stage is how that material is set to orchestra and, more specifically, which orchestrational elements constitute a great 'film music' or 'music for media' orchestral sound as opposed to classical music sound. In the end, I hope to grasp something fundamental beyond the normal clichés (i.e. 6 horns unisono in a heroic theme, pizzicatos + celesta for mystic atmosphere etc. etc.).

There is also something to be said about orchestrators that the composers work with. I understand that for example John Powell has the final orchestration of his pieces done by someone else. So the final polish comes from a different source and in the end it is quite difficult to say whose brilliance actually shines through in a particularly well-crafted orchestration. What is your opinion? Are we talking about the right persons when praising a brilliant orchestration of a film score? Were the most famous film music classics orchestrated by the composers themselves or by orchestrators?


----------



## Gabriel2013 (Jan 14, 2014)

TeroV @ Tue Jan 14 said:


> ...... Were the most famous film music classics orchestrated by the composers themselves or by orchestrators?



It depends on: How many weeks (or months - very rare this days) do they have to score a Film.

Some composers orchestrate very well but just don´t have the time to finished because of deadlines.
If you want to know who they are (orchestrators) just go to IMDB and check the Music Department on a specific film.


----------



## jasonkellnermusic (Jan 27, 2014)

Listen to the Frozen soundtrack by Christoph Beck Its very "Disney".

Other then that the "Comedy" film score that I think Chris Beck first thought of is genius. Listen to the Hangover, Oldschool, Dodgeball: True underdog story, and there are many others. The composers responsible for these works are Chris Beck and Theodore Shapiro. 

Also, Hans Zimmer is the king of slow building tension!


----------



## bdr (Jan 27, 2014)

In terms of orchestration per se, Nick Dodd is awesome, as are Bill Ross and Conrad Pope.


----------



## bimberl (Jan 27, 2014)

TeroV @ Tue Jan 14 said:


> There is also something to be said about orchestrators that the composers work with. I understand that for example John Powell has the final orchestration of his pieces done by someone else. So the final polish comes from a different source and in the end it is quite difficult to say whose brilliance actually shines through in a particularly well-crafted orchestration. What is your opinion? Are we talking about the right persons when praising a brilliant orchestration of a film score? Were the most famous film music classics orchestrated by the composers themselves or by orchestrators?



It totally depends on the composer and the situation. Some composers do very complete mockups in which much of the orchestration is indicated; some composers indicate bare bones. Obviously the amount of time the composer has to write influences how much detail he's able to provide. I make sequences with a lot of detail, and sometimes it's unnecessary for my orchestrator to add much of anything beyond dynamics and phrasing. Far more often I find that my orchestrators add some smart doublings or ornamentation that improves the music. Bottom line is that it's a team effort. Powell and his orchestrators both deserve credit for the "HTTYD" score.

By the way, John Ashton Thomas is John Powell's lead orchestrator and he is superb. 

TS


----------



## The Darris (Jan 27, 2014)

Composers who do their own orchestrations:
Howard Shore, John Williams, and James Newton Howard (there are more but I can't remember off the top of my head.)

Famous Orchestrators:

Danny Troob(Aladdin, Pocahontas, Tangled)
Edward Powell who pretty much just worked for Elmer Bernstein
Jeff Atmajian who worked for James Newton Howard on a few films
Conrad Pope is a big one. He worked on The Hobbit, Harry Potter, Quite a few Star Wars movies. His credits are amazing.

Anyway, those are some off the top of my head.


----------

