The Composer-Orchestrator Relationship

As soon as you get the chance to work with a real orchestra for a larger project, it becomes increasingly tricky to do all the work yourself. Outsourcing is key in such situations and most composers like to outsource the orchestration part.

There is a common confusion about what is orchestration and what is arrangement, so let's maybe clear this up first. These definitions vary regionally. 

The European definition looks something like this:

Orchestration means that you take existing material that is defined exactly in length and structure and write that for a fixed set of orchestral musicians. You don't change the order and progression of musical elements but stick exactly to the structure of the original idea.

Arrangement means that you take influence on the progression of the music, e.g. by inserting intros/outros, bridges etc. So you change the sequence of the musical elements.

While the American definition is:

Arranging is the art of preparing and adapting an already written composition for presentation in other than its original form. An arrangement shall include reharmonization, paraphrasing and/or development of a composition so that it fully represents the melodic, harmonic and rhythmic structure and requires no changes or additions.

Orchestrating is the labor of scoring the various voices and/or instruments of an arrangement without changing or adding to the melodies, counter-melodies, harmonies and rhythms.

So it differs in the fact that adding side lines etc. can still be seen as Orchestration in Europe.

While the terminology seems rather insignificant, it becomes relevant when it gets to money as arrangers usually get a share of the royalties.

So this might be a small detail in a contract negotiation that might have a big influence.

The composer-orchestrator relationship is one of the most common working relationships in the film scoring world and pretty much all composers since the beginning of cinema have relied on the assistance of orchestrators.

However, the job of an orchestrator has changed quite a bit in the recent decades. Up to the late 90s it was common for an orchestrator to receive handwritten condensed sketches by composers, sometimes just a melody line, sometimes very detailed reductions. His/her job was to transfer these sketches to a full score and hand that down to the copyist who then would have a team in place to transfer this to individual handwritten parts for the players. In some rather rare cases (e.g. John Williams) this procedure is still the same, however the majority of orchestration jobs nowadays needs a different skill set.

With the requirement that has become standard nowadays to present elaborate demos of the music, most composers write their music in DAWs creating mock-ups and doing edits in there, usually completely detached from any sort of notation. These sessions then get handed down to the orchestrators who extract the relevant data from them to create score sheets for the live musicians.

This step can become quite laborous. A standard way would be to export a "cleaned up" MIDI file from those Sessions and load that MIDI file into a notation software while keeping the session open for cross reference. The clean-up process is usually needed to make the import into a notation software easier and to avoid any laborous clean up in those programmes (as it usually takes more time there).

I will get into detail about the technical aspects of orchestration in another post about that will cover these details.

So the job nowadays is to transfer rather complete DAW Sessions to notation. Only in very rare cases this is done outside of a notation software. Most orchestrators rely on either Finale (more common in the USA) or Sibelius (more common in Europe) with Dorico currently gaining momentum in both markets.

There is a very common confusion about what fees to expect when hiring an orchestrator. Union Rates usually apply on a "per bar" basis. 

For reference, here are the rates of the AFM:

https://members.afm.org/uploads/image/MP_chart_no_bar(3).pdf 

and the MU (UK) rates:

https://www.musiciansunion.org.uk/Files/Rates/Songwriting/Arranging-Music-Preparation-Orchestration-Fees 

You see that calculating a "final number" actually takes some work. Outside of unions and in continental Europe a "per Minute" rate or "per hour" rate is common. Both approaches are not really fair as busy action scoring with writing lots of notes gets paid similarly to "whole note pad" scoring, with however the per-bar-rate being a bit more fair.

Outside of the big (English speaking) markets for orchestration work, rates can drop tremendously with companies and orchestrators undercutting each other.

In Germany (where I live), it is not uncommon to see a rate of 100-150 Euros per minute of music for orchestration which is a fraction of the Union Rates from above. Full service companies from Eastern Europe charge even less. With the skill set of orchestration often being reduced to "How quickly can you transfer Midi to Score Sheet and follow the notation conventions", there hardly remains a plausible reason to hire Union orchestrators which can also be seen happening at the American market where many score productions outsource their work (partially) to cheaper countries.

Also, the argument of "I need my orchestrator in or near my studio for easiest communication" remains only slightly valid in the age of Internet.

However, as soon as you need musical input on the orchestration (like actually adding more musical material), it might definitely be a good idea to have someone who you know and trust to understand your musical intention to orchestrate your work.

One more difference that is evolving compared to past times is that the point changes where the Copyist takes over. Often, it is expected from the orchestrator to provide PDFs of Score and Parts that only need to be printed and sorted. However, also this is very depending on Union/Non-Union jobs.