War is hell. But sometimes Hollywood would prefer if it sounded a little more upbeat than that.
Such is the challenge faced by composers and orchestrators when drafting the scores for conceptually similar films: What's the audible difference between various alien races carrying out warfare on Xandar, a la Guardians of The Galaxy, and alien races aiming to eliminate human life on Earth, such as in The Day The Earth Stood Still?
"It's the way you write, it's the the types of instruments that you use—you decide on your palette—and all of that comes down to one of the hardest things in film, which is tone," says Timothy Williams, the orchestrator for both of the aforementioned film scores. "That's the thing that I usually spend the most time discussing with directors."
Orchestrators, the often unsung heroes of cinema scores, ultimately handle the responsibility for that tone. Williams—a composer himself—was charged with taking the Tyler Bates' composition for Guardians and setting that to an orchestra. A modern composer typically writes a score and then creates a demo using brass pads and string pads to create a rough draft for the orchestrator, who then works as a pre-production producer—determining volumes and instrumental emphasis to best suit the assigned tone.
"(Composers) have a particular sound for a film...if it's a very suspenseful film that needs to creep around, it's going to be very different orchestration than a superhero film where there's a lot of heroic moments and some comedy," he explains. "With the Guardians it's a very fun film, so I didn't have as many low woodwinds this time, I weighted the violins and we had more trumpets than usual. The register moved up to accommodate the tone of the film."
Working as an orchestrator makes Williams subject to the whims of the composer, who is himself subject to the whims of the film's director. Guardians of The Galaxy was somewhat unusual in that director James Gunn requested parts of the score be provided before shooting even began, as an audio cue. It's a method employed often enough by auteurs such as Martin Scorcese, but results in more work for composer and orchestrator alike when the director requests tweaks. Bates reported in an interview that his staff worked more than 100 hours a week for four months when developing the Guardians score. Although many of the changes could be carried out via editing software, Williams conducted for three separate sessions to record and rerecord audio.
The underappreciated nature of the orchestrator comes to light when one considers the number of hours the position puts in, and that only the composer's name appears on the album cover for the score. And in the case of Guardians, only Bates was asked to appear as an extra in the film. Williams has worked both sides of the process and he doesn't feel any bitterness toward his composer compatriots, particularly Bates, for whom he's orchestrated many projects, including 300 and Watchmen (Bates, for his part, told Music Times that Williams is a "distinct talent," which makes him "a great partner in crime").
"It's the bit like the difference between a Wall Street trader and an accountant. When you're in composing mode you're throwing money at the market, whereas when you're an orchestrator, you're an accountant going 'what the hell have you been doing here?'" he says. "I guess that's the fun of being an orchestrator. It's less stressful and more fun. When you're a composer, you're there on the front lines, you have to impress the director...There are times when I'm really thankful to be an orchestrator and then that creative bug takes over and I'm really glad I get to write."
And write he does.
Although he has orchestrated plenty of battle with Bates—as well as the score for the Tom Hanks-produced Beyond All Boundaries film that shows at the National World War II Museum—Williams approaches god of war status himself (the 2013 variant of the video game series was another project by the Bates/Williams team).
Among the titles that Williams has composed solo for during 2014 are World War II drama Walking With The Enemy and Air Force action film Red Sky, which display the diverse range of tones that a director might seek out. Walking tells the tale of a Hungarian Jew hiding amongst the occupying Nazi forces to find the whereabouts of his family. That subject matter called for a more somber tone obviously and the producers opted for a "period" sound that reflected the film's 1940's setting. Red Sky might have been a bit more in line with Williams' tastes, allowing him to incorporate electronic elements for the film's 21st century dogfights. Contemporary sounds are among the factors that Williams, schooled as a classical pianist, appreciates about scoring for film.
"My initial compositions, everything I wrote, initially sounded like bad knockoffs of Rachmaninoff and Debussy," he says with a chuckle. "The thing that really drew me to film was how much innovation there is in terms of sound palette...in film music you have that opportunity to do some experimentation and to find new ways of writing music."
A desire for innovation is a handy trait in a field such as film composition. After all, "war is always the same," as Lyndon Johnson once stated in his State of The Union.
But the soundtrack needs to be different.
