Watching the new John Williams documentary has me newly in awe of his talent—although that’s not really accurate because I always feel that way.
Much is made about him being a “dinosaur” in that he composes with a pencil, piano and paper—and that’s it. He explains in the documentary how it takes him longer to write out all the notes compared to somebody on a computer workstation.
I love so much music that is composed digitally, with modern recording techniques—from composers who don’t read music or have a particularly complicated vocabulary.
But there has definitely been a ton that has been lost from the switch to new-school methods, particularly when writing symphonically. I won’t name names but this is even from composers whose music in the 1980s and ’90s used to be so much more memorable.
But it’s about more than the composers: schedules, temp tracks, audience expectations, sound mixes, and the multiple layers of approvals.
A thought experiment for today. Say you are producing a mega-blockbuster and the composer came in with this demo for a pivotal action scene:
Would you really have the imagination to know it would ultimately sound like this?
I’ll bet not!
The last part of your article is really fascinating to me. the folks who are so musically knowledgeable to look at notes on a page and know what it sounds like (like those moments when Salieri is looking at Mozart’s manuscripts in ‘Amadeus’), always blows my mind.