Robin Hoffmann
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Orchestrating With a Vertical Focus
🕑 Added 2021-06-17 08:29:23 +0000 UTCOne of the things that can often be seen in music by learning composers/orchestrators is the limited scope of the execution of ideas throughout the orchestral colours. This might sound really cryptic but let me explain what I mean by that:
Very often, the execution of a musical idea remains in a relatively confined space. There is for instance "a trombone chord "or a "piccolo run" or a "violin melody". The musical idea is often executed without leaving the confined space of a single instrument group and if it actually is extended to another instrument group, we often see a straight forward copy-paste. E.g. "I don't know what to do with the bassoons, let me copy the cello line as is to them". While this approach might work in some cases, it is not the greatest solution for all cases and solely relying on such orchestration strategies takes away quite a bit of colour possibilities from your arsenal.
One of the things that I see missing the most in such cases are harmonized musical ideas in heterogenous colours. What exactly are those?
Let's take a very famous example of such a strategy for reference:
https://youtu.be/GTXBLyp7_Dw?t=97
This is a prime example of a melody that is being harmonized in heterogenous colours. This is a transposing score so keep that in mind when analyzing the harmony. But if we look at the first chord we have an Em with the following couplings:
E.H. + Clar 1 -> concert B
Clar 2 + Bsn1 -> concert G
Clar 3 + Bsn 2 -> concert E
Imagine how flat this idea would sound if it wasn't harmonized but also how different it would sound if it was executed in just one instrument or instrument family.
But these sort of harmonized couplings don't always need to be in the prominent foreground material but can also play a secondary role.
A few bars later we have this situation:
https://youtu.be/GTXBLyp7_Dw?t=149
Now the theme is transfered into the trumpets alone (still harmonized) but observe the woodwind flourishes in this section. These are all harmonized melodic fragments that are being distributed in almost the entire woodwind section. Compare how they almost are inaudible in the recording but still add to the harmonic richness of that passage. The switch between linear doublings of single musical lines and harmonized musical ideas is an extremely effective way of creating textural colour.
Of course this entire approach is more laborous than simply writing a triad and copypasting and possibly octave transposing that somewhere else but it really is worth the effort for more colourful orchestration. Of course, harmonizing something like this means to check whether all instruments are in playable range, ideally in a register that works with the registers of the other instruments that are involved in that figure so there are way more factors to this than just having a single line and a lot of voicing strategy and experience is needed for this.
However, there are two more main reasons that I see why this approach is often neglected by learning composers.
The first is the inaccurate analysis of musical devices based on listening to them alone. You tend to hear the highest line most prominently and for instance in a harmonized woodwind setting, the piccolo might stand out and you translate that device into your own writing by just writing a high solo piccolo line while in your role model, that line was doubled in octaves below or even harmonized.
The second is (again) the common work approach in a DAW. It is considerably easier to write something in one track rather than splitting out a chord to several tracks where you also need to keep a vertical overview over who is in which register so this makes it considerably trickier to split out a voicing to a heterogneous group of instruments and it is way simpler to just treat every instrument or section as its own entity.
And this doesn't just happen with beginning composers but also with pros. For the research of this article, I was just skimming a bit through John Powell's score for How to Train Your Dragon, knowing that Powell is a DAW composer. There are moments in the score where he does some heterogenous chord couplings but they are extremely rare. The score represents quite strongly his work principle. Chords very often remain in identical instrumental groups (=DAW tracks) or are being copypasted to another group as is, there are very few instances where he takes the effort of doing something like this as in the score examples above.
I can only recommend developing a strong sensitivity for these things, also in your own writing and also go the extra mile in grouping heterogenous instrument families into a voicing to create more colour. It takes more time and effort to do this but it is worth the colour that you gain by that.
In the same way as discussed above, the grouping of several brass instrument families into for instance accompanying brass chords can be executed, or the same with strings. Thinking something as a "brass chord" rather than "trombone chord plus trumpet chord" changes the way how you work with the instruments in the vertical space.
This whole approach of thinking about the orchestra not as a group of individual colours but as an ensemble can be further extended. It is essential to develop an understanding of the orchestra that goes beyond trial and error of mixing colours. Coupling different instruments into the same task of the music (e.g. "foreground melody" or "middleground harmony" etc.) and balancing this out or even just deciding whether that mixes well takes experience and time and unfortunately the most often used tools for writing music don't encourage exploring these things while in order to create lively and colourful orchestration it is essential to master these things.
For further study, I would recommend reading through scores and paying attention to which instruments are coupled into the same task and how they are coupled. Also, analyzing how often the music moves from harmonized ideas to single note ideas and what effect that creates is a great point of attack for broadening your horizon in this regard.
