"Play" version E/W told me that QLSO Platinum "Play" will not work on my QUAD G5 2.5 Ghz, 8 GB with a raid of 6 Raptors!! Apparently "Play" is a CPU exterminator

hmm...  strange

"...can make you sound a lot better than you really are..." PaulR

The secret of most major film composers now working, though using live orchestras for "class."  Smear those beautiful London Symphony strings over those block chords and Presto!  You've got yourself the score to the latest blockbuster!

That may be, but this James Newton Howard is a main offender in my book.  I am not saying he is a bad composer - maybe he does great concert music when not doing film scores - but this  approach I truly believe that he and Hans Zimmer and several others are now using is DESTROYING THE ART OF FILM MUSIC.

Sorry, but the flames are necessary because this is a wretched development in what used to be a great art form and is being ruined by pop music.  The origins of film music are in severely classical NON-POP composers like Korngold (a truly great post romantic concert composer with several masterpieces in the concert repertoire)  Max Steiner,  Franz Waxman, Miklos Rosza, Georges Auric, and the greatest of all Bernard Herrmann and many others who were not Johnny-Come-Latelies to the orchestra but lived and breathed it as their only existence.  They were not guitar players or piano tinklers who get an orchestrator to show them how to write film music.  And don't talk to me about being prejudiced against pianists - Rachmaninoff was one of the greatest, but mastered the art of orchestration on his own to write one of the greatest works ever composed for orchestra that film composers today rip off right and left. 

All right, I'll stop now and go get another cup of coffee.

That's interesting vibrato, though I don't agree completely.  That kind of film is still being made, but is not very common.  Examples are the first Batman, which had a complex, contrapuntal, excellently orchestrated Herrmann-style score (though not orchestrated by Elfman), and Lord of the Rings which is a perfect example of a Max Steiner-Korngold style score that Shore did the orchestration for himself. 

However, it is now possible to do music with none of that excellence or complexity.  A "composer" (usng the term very loosely) can noodle with his synthesizer and give the results to an orchestrator on a sufficiently high budgeted film.  This is then converted into a score like Last of the Mohicans, which is not a film score at all.  It is one short little ditty that a chimp could have composed, played over and over again with a few extra chords.  These things are not film scores, and the people who do them are not composers.  They are sound effects technicians, because that "music" is not music at all.  It is simply a sound that is being used to affect the scene.  So it is partly because of these changes you mention that more than one kind of "score" is possible today.

Anyway though the way the orchestration is done is highly variable based upon the people and the film involved, so you are not confused. There is no one way it is done.  It is true that Herrmann did his own orchestrations entirely, and I remember Dave Connor stated previously here how he saw the detailed sketches Goldsmith did that were so involved that the orchestrator had very little to do. 

That is an interesting post Tanuj - I agree about the Korngold F# Symphony.  Have you heard his so-called "Sinfonietta" ?  (If that is a "little symphony" I shudder at the thought of what he thought a big one was - maybe something like Gurrelieder?) Actually his first symphony, which was written when he was 14.  That fact alone makes him a prodigy the equal of, or superior to, Mozart. Because of the extreme harmonic and contrapuntal complexity with utter mastery of form, development and orchestration.  But it also has an Adagio that is as beautiful as Bruckner's adagios.  And of course his opera Die Tote Stadt which is one of the few modern operas that can compete with the great classics of Verdi and shows Korngold's wonderful late Romantic morbid streak.  It also has an incredible orchestration that film composers would love to emulate.  It is interesting how Korngold viewed his film scores as "operas without words."   

Actually Korngold shows the same thing you are saying about character - how could "training" account for his writing that symphony when he was 14?  Music is just there, in your brain.  The training may help you get it out, but it has to be there to begin with.

sorry about the outburst - that video set me off.

Well now that I have recovered from that youtube -  yes we have hacked this thread, but it was answered fairly well.  Actually there should be a separate thread on Korngold. 

That is a good point about Korngold using short motifs.  In fact, his Sinfonietta is entirely based on four notes!  Every movement.  Vaughn Williams did that in his f minor symphony, but it is not too common.   The new master of short motifs brilliantly developed in a symphonic style is definitely John Williams who was very influenced by Korngold.

Yes, that is true, because of the studio system at the time, nobody orchestrated their own scores. It was actually against the union rules.  However, Korngold imposed his own approach to orchestration upon his scores to an unusual degree, as did Jerry Goldsmith much later.  If you listen to his symphonies and especially his opera,  you will hear exactly the same orchestral sound.  As well as very unusual effects that nobody was doing at the time.  You are right about Herrmann as he was extremely unusual in demanding to do the orchestration himself. As is well known he later went on to do the most original and varied orchestrations in film history.