How to Write for Orchestra | Q&A

hello my name is David Bruce today we're going to answer some of your questions about orchestration thanks to all of you on Twitter Instagram YouTube and on my patreon for submitting the questions a lot of the questions that came through were really about getting started your first steps writing for orchestra but let's start with this one question from Andrew from page fire if you had to write a song with orchestration and heavy metal example nightwish flesh god apocalypse Diablo swing orchestra etc how would you do it I think I would really focus on strings which can really come quite close to a heavy metal sound whether it's the low growl and grind of the Rite of Spring or the fast fireworks of some Vivaldi [Music] some of Shostakovich is music can get pretty heavy like say the second movement of his eighth string quartet in fact here's a translation of the piece on two electric guitars and drums and you can hear it works really well as metal without changing almost any of the notes so don't thing is to surprise that there are a lot of string groups that play metal most famously the cello quartet Apocalyptica so yes strings would be the way to go I think heavy strings so let's look now how to get started with orchestration and thanks to all of you who asked about this so there are a couple of famous orchestration books there's rimsky-korsakov's principles of orchestration which is pretty old-fashioned now but sets out some of the basics pretty well Berlioz also wrote a pretty hefty treatise on instrumentation which these days you can check out online then there's the Cambridge guide to orchestration by air Tugrul Seb se which I have to confess I've never read and then there's Samuel Adler's study of orchestration which is a pretty standard thing to study in universities and has a lot of examples which you can hear on the CD that comes with it so that's definitely worth a look but you'll notice that both of these books aren't particularly well thumbed and that's because the real lessons I've had all come from looking through scores and listening to scores and these days there are a lot of places you can find full scores online both of the old masters but also many contemporary composers some publishers like Busey and hawks and Faber's have nice online score browsing facilities which are a great place to check out how contemporary composers write and actually here on YouTube there's an increasingly large collection of score videos where you can hear the music and follow along with the score as the piece progresses which is really conveniently but rather than feeling you have to listen to hundreds and hundreds of scores just listen to one page of one score set it on a loop or just study it for an hour and then listen back to it and a great exercise to do is to find a score that you can also find a piano version of you can do this for many of the famous symphonies say Beethoven or Schubert's ninth or whatever and take the piano version and try to do your own orchestration of it spend an hour doing that and if you've got some notation software typing in and see how it sounds on the MIDI and then go back to the original and you'll find you have a really intimate understanding of the passage and the problems it has and that will be really interesting to see how Beethoven or Schubert solved the same problem that you've faced it starts to feel almost like you've got really into the mind of the composer or at least you're working alongside them facing the same challenges several people asked about the order you should write things should you write at the piano and then orchestrate or should you write straight into full score I think a lot of that depends on the kind of composer you are so if you're imagining a specific texture on a specific instrument then you're more likely to want to write straightaway for the instrument whereas if you're perhaps more traditional writing melodies and harmonies in a more traditional way then working at the piano first and then orchestrating it out will work just fine for me for the most part I think the colors of the ensemble are a key aspect of my compositions so I tend to write the main points of the orchestration down initially it's true that if you try and write everything straight to where you can get bogged down in the detail so I prefer not to spend hours on the orchestration detail at this stage I'll tend to write a sketch that has the key details but not everything Koral Matt asks why are certain instruments transposing ones is it just a historical hangover so yeah transposing instruments is one of those weird features of writing for Orchestra that can be quite puzzling why are things set up that way here's a page from Brett Pimentel showing some of the different transpositions so there are different types you might get a clarinet in b-flat where the pitch is written at C but actually sounds at b-flat that's one kind of transportation and then there's the other kind of the octave transposition so here on the piccolo it's written as what's known as c5 where are the sounding pitches c6 an octave higher so in the case of octave transposition it's simply to make those things simpler for the player to read without having a ton of ledger lines above or below the stave with the transpositions of some of those woodwind instruments like the clarinet and saxophone it has a lot to do with the fact that they're part of a family of instruments and it means that the player only has to learn one set of fingerings and they can play all of the range of different instruments so for example the clarinet you might get a b-flat or an a clarinet you get piccolo clarinets in e-flat and E or a bass clarinet in b-flat and what you think of as C is the same on all of those different instruments and that saves you having to learn an entire new set of fingerings for each one so most of the transpositions are to make things easier for the player when you're composing and trying to write for these instruments it definitely makes things harder and more confusing if you look at most of the 19th century schools you'll find them written transposed as the player would read it so if you want to work out what notes are in a call in terms of orchestration you'll have to transpose the clarinet part down a tone the horn part down a fifth to work out what the notes are actually being played which obviously makes it quite a bit more challenging in the past 50 years or so composers have tended to head towards what's called a score in C so all the instruments are written at sounding pitch with the exception of those operative transposing instruments but even today there's no consistency in approach so I've always preferred the score in C but my publisher Bill Holland prefers the transposed score so he tends to ask me to transpose them the other aspect behind woodwind notation is that the easiest scales the ones with no sharps or flats are usually the easiest and most intuitive to play just by lifting go off to play the next note so flutes oboes saxophones and the upper register of the clarinet will all play a C scale with the simplest fingering so you can see that this makes sense when you're learning initially that the easiest scales have the simplest most intuitive fingering when it comes to brass instruments it's not quite so clear why things ended up being the way they are and it's even more confusing so the typical orchestral trumpet in the US will be in C whereas in Britain and believe Russia and maybe few other places it will be a transposing b-flat instrument although in both cases the trumpet player will be familiar with transposing it up or down a tone so you don't have to worry too much about it for the trombone what feels like the home key with the slide closed is a b-flat that the trombones not a transposing instrument so the easiest scale on the trombone is the b-flat and that's for historical reasons that aren't entirely clear and don't even get me started on the euphonium which has different systems and different places some in the treble clef some in the bass clef some doesn't seem to be a standardized way of doing it I've seen various confusing and conflicting theories about how it all ended up like this certain traditions seem to have taken hold for example in the military and not always for a fully logical reason but then once they've taken hold is just easier to continue than to change so for composers it can be a little confusing when you're in a rehearsal and you're trying to check if someone's playing the right pitch it's particularly hard to remember which direction things move in the way I remember it is to think of the instruments name so let's say clarinet in b-flat and then you just say to yourself the phrase see a C play a b-flat so when the player plays what they think of as a see the sounding pitch will be b-flat major second lower the one slight extra confusion to add in is that we also need to know the direction for the most part the one you'll play is the one just next door to it but for the alto saxophone for example which is in e-flat CIC play an E flat but it's not the e-flat above now it's the e-flat a major sixth below that it plays so quite a bit lower than it looks on the page the French Jean can also get a bit confusing it's a horn in F so CSE play an F but which one the one above or the one below what's the one below some twenty one asks wires Ravel a great Orchestrator and how did he orchestrate so well so Ravel's often pull off as one of the best orchestrators because everything has this precision and clarity there's never anything superfluous there's certainly a lot to learn from him and I'd like to do a video about his orchestration but do bear in mind that the wow factor is only one part of the equation to me the best orchestration is the one that achieves the goal of the piece the best so there are plenty of composers who manage to get what they need out of the orchestra to get the kind of piece that they wanted to make so maybe Sibelius or Beethoven or even Brahms who has traditionally been viewed as a not particularly great Orchestrator but to meet all three of these do things that bring out the emotional power and beauty of a piece of music that's being played by an orchestra so what more can you really ask from your castration suppose it's just worth remembering that being impressed by the technical brilliance of something it's not the same as feeling a deep emotional engagement with it gusta la raya 7 asks what do you think of Andrew Norman's sustain about its orchestration so if you don't know him Andrew Norman is definitely a composer worth checking out over the past few years his profiles really skyrocketed and these days you can find him commissioned by leading orchestras like the Berlin Phil and the LA Phil he usually writes these fairly zany pieces that feel a bit cartoon-like with ideas barging each other out of the way all over the place [Music] I talked a bit about his peace spiral which I thought was very effective on my video on spirals in terms of orchestration I'm generally very excited to browse an Andrew Norman score as he has such a great way of integrating all the weird noises instruments can make in ways that make complete sense so they're always a reminder to me that you can stretch what you think an instrument or a player is capable of to quite an extreme degree sustain is a slightly new direction for him in the most part it contains these quite slow moving harmonies which remind me a little bit of Thomas Abbas's recent slow music I guess these kind of texts just have their origins in works of the 60s and 70s by people like Ligety and anarchists but they come across here really beautiful and emotional unfortunately Andrea scores are published through shot and aren't currently available online in fact the studies score for his piece play which won the Grammy Award costs one hundred and fifty dollars so that's pretty steep dr. spit valve asks how can someone use low brass more effectively it seems like a lot of developing composers use the low brass section for loud raucous and commanding and very rarely anything else bass trombone and tuba are especially typecast I have to admit I do fall into this typecasting approach a little bit I'm not necessarily the best person to write low bass melodies generally perhaps because my music tends to be quite upbeat and positive so it tends to be difficult to make that kind of atmosphere using the low instruments as the main line unless you've maybe going for some kind of comedy effect so I do I'm afraid love a good loud low brass sound one of my favorites for example is the noise you get from the low staccato grom though this sort of raw energy which i think is a really unique kind of sound I also love low sustained notes on the French horn which can actually go incredibly deep like two and a half octaves below middle C if you want a good comparison between deep horn notes with deep tuba notes here's a passage from George Benjamin's sudden time [Music] so he uses four deep horns and then contrasts them with one tuber it's a really interesting difference in tone there's something more menacing about the French horns they have this really growly tone and yet the tuber itself is so self-confident in this note that that makes it stronger in this context almost more terrifying [Music] Chuba generally has a fantastic ability to cut through an orchestral texture it can be an impressive solo sound so who writes well for bass instruments generally well I've spoken to string bass players who often mention Marlar as one of their favorites his bass lines will often have a real part the motives in Mali get thrown around the orchestra and the basses often get their turn so that's always very satisfying to the players Ian McAndrew asks how do you feel about groups REO castrating your music my feeling is that if they don't have the resources to perform a piece as I or the composer intended it's better not to have it performed at all or do you think it's more important to get your piece performed even if it's not how are you intended so I had an interesting case of this a while back in regard to my piece gumboots which is originally for clarinet and string quartet [Music] came across a performance which was actually broadcast on Dutch TV and the performance has no clarinet the clarinet part had been transferred to the violin and some of the inner string parts had been omitted and it also added a groovy percussion part now I'm not 100% clear on the legality of such things I believe it's the case that when you want to cover an existing piece you can get a license but I'm not sure if this one would count as a cover if you know more about this do let me know in the comments it certainly feels wrong for it to be advertised as David Bruce's gumboots as if that's the thing I'd written surely it should at least say David Bruce's gumboots arranged by X I guess again it comes down to the kind of composer you are if you rely on color the way I do in a lot of my music it feels slightly abusive for someone to go and change that color completely Bruno Pontecorvo asks in one of your videos you said that violins playing together have a different sound than a single violin does the same concept apply to other instruments this is actually a really fun topic in the original video I said that just putting two solo violins together can be quite dangerous because it can be quite hard for them to play exactly in tune and there's something about the tone color of two violins and it sounds quite painful if it's not precisely in tune but as soon as you get three or more then the sound starts to blend and you get the sound of the orchestral strings with other instruments this isn't really an issue in the same way most instruments will just sound slightly louder slightly richer version of a single instrument when you play two of them one quite fun exception is the clarinet it's quite a subtle effect but quite noticeable when you have two clarinets playing together particularly higher in the register there's a kind of phasing effect which happens which can sound quite crude or vulgar which i think is the effect that several composers who have used it have gone after so here's a passage in Marla's fourth symphony for example you can also hear it quite a lot in one of my favorite pieces Yana checks highly eccentric nursery rhyme pieces with cobbler and again I think it's designed to give you this kind of foki slightly out of tune resonant [Music] George Antipas asks do you believe that electronic instruments will be used as part of the orchestra more in the future so when I was a student our professor talked about a piece which had added a particular electronic effect to the orchestra the teacher said he thought this was a bit of an extravagance he said you've got all the sounds of the orchestra why did you have to go to the extra indulgence of adding this effect and I have to say I completely disagree with this attitude it's an attitude which confirms the orchestra as the museum piece I really don't think it should be most of the instruments in the orchestra have remained unchanged now for 100 years or more and I think that's a real shame you're not I love going into music shops those ones where you have huge collections of instruments they're like a candy store to me but an orchestra is even better because you not only have the instruments we have for the professional musicians who can actually play them but I do think that the potential for the orchestra to be even more exciting than it currently is is really huge if it was able to adapt and become much less set you know if it became something where you could end up with say five accordions or a row of saxophones or any number of other variations the composer and conductor Pierre Beulah's spent much of his life trying to push for what we think of as the orchestra to become a much more flexible institution that could adapt to the needs of each piece as he pointed out in Bach's day the model was much less fixed even say the Brandenburg Concertos they're all written for different ensembles the orchestra as we know it today gradually took shape over the 19th century and eventually became pretty much fixed and even though there have been some moves two changes remain stubbornly stuck in its current form Boulos himself tried quite a lot he set up institutions like AirCam and the ensemble under calm temperament which amongst other things did pioneer the use of electronics with live instruments but even towards the end of his career Beulah's was lamenting that things hadn't managed to change as much as he'd hoped in 30 or 40 years we haven't gone very far he said one of the most radical places today in this regard is the LA Philharmonic who recently had a hundredth anniversary season with 50 new Commission's and they really seemed to be attempting to steer the orchestra into a place where new music has at the heart of what they do and currently seem to be bringing the audience along with them and inevitably if you start doing more new pieces you'll start to change the makeup of the things like electronics will become more possible now clearly it would be massively exciting if something like la became the norm in the orchestral world but at the moment le is pretty unique because it's extremely well-funded that 100th season apparently had a budget of 125 million dollars so it's not currently something every orchestra can do in terms of electronics the composer Mason Bates is worth mentioning as a rather clever way of adding electronics quite simply into an orchestral setting so Mason's written a lot of pieces for Orchestra that include a part of himself that he usually plays on laptop which apart from anything else is a great way to make yourself part of the gig and Mason's currently one of the most performed classical composers in the US so something's working there for me personally although I'm very interested in electronic sounds my way of expressing myself really seems to be tied in with the physicality of playing instruments so it's never been something I felt comfortable mixing in with my acoustic writing mixing live electronics or even amplified sounds in with an acoustic orchestral sound is something that's really difficult to get right too often it just comes across as the equivalent of mixing watercolors and oil paints or something Richard Friedman asks choice of orchestration may be a limiting factor for getting a piece performed do you really need an alto Haeckel phone here should that Symphony be better scored for a string quartet if you expect to get it performed ever think of those things when you're composing yes the smaller the group and the more common the group the more likely you are to be able to get performances finding that balance between something that you're passionate about that may end up being difficult to perform versus something more standard that's more easy to put on is something you have to just be aware of I've turned it to zigzag between the two extremes so I do like having pieces that are potentially playable as part of the repertoire of existing standard lineups but then part of why I write music is to find certain sounds and ideas that I've got in my head many of which might involve more unusual combinations [Music] so yeah writing for extra can be very exciting I can only imagine how much more exciting it would be if it became that more flexible institution that blue let's dreamed up I'm happy to say that in a few weeks time we'll have another go at the five composers one theme project which this time will involve the full orchestra and several of the composers we'll be writing for Orchestra for the first time so they're sure to be a lot to learn there so stay tuned for that thanks so much to my patrons on patreon for supporting the channel follow me on Instagram and Twitter and if you enjoyed the video do please like subscribe and share with your friends thanks so much for watching I'll see you next [Music] [Applause]

Channel: David Bruce Composer

Views: 80,651

Keywords: orchestration, orchestra, composition, how to write for orchestra

Id: M7JhBi3b2DU

Length: 20min 38sec (1238 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 27 2019