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Writer's pictureLukas Kendall

Old School


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!

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Nov 03

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.

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