I don’t think you mean transposing or transcribing, but arranging. Transposing = key change; transcribing = writing down what you hear; arranging = taking a work for one instrument or group of instruments and rewriting it for another instrument or group (or the same). Arranging can be extremely faithful to the original, or wildly, creatively, different.
Do composers need to write the music for every instrument individually or is there some other trick?
While this has nothing to do with orchestral scores, per se, it might be of interest for the curious anyway.
Sometimes church choir music is scored so that there is a part written for a “C-intstrument”.
Last December, my handbell choir played at all three church services. We had a flute at once service, a clarinet at another, and a violin at the third.
The violinist played by far the most interesting part–because it was played by a violin teacher, with a whole lot more knowledge and experience than either of the others.
In casual contexts like this, in my experience, the composer or arranger of the sheet music may have written a part, but often the choir director can make up a part that does what she or he wants it to do.
Or sometimes the intstrumentalist can make up the part.
On which note, it was funny when the new choir director at my church wanted to reprise a song originally played with a saxophone solo. He hadn’t realized that the saxophonist had made up his own part (and was perfectly willing and able to make a up a new part this time) rather than having music provided for him.
Although, on the other hand, this kind of improvising may veer pretty far off of what the composer intended . . .
I’m pretty sure woodwinds have an upper maximum, although it’s higher than you’d expect. I know, for example, that there is physical limit to how high you can lip up that G twice above the staff. I’m pretty sure it’s around Bb.
Stupid joke, but I just heard Maynard Ferguson’s “Brass Attitude” again last night. No one plays high notes like the lip! Why would an orchestrator try to deliberately harm a performer??!!
I think there might be some internal politics at work, as in, he said, she didn’t, he wrote, she wrote, he tried to play, he didn’t.
I’m not sure what would set that limit. You can play different notes with the same fingering on a woodwind, right? Well, just do the same thing you do to get a higher note, except do more of it. On a brass instrument, this would be tightening one’s lips more, but I’m not sure of the wood equivalent.
Not really. You can on the flute, but it’s not really a woodwind. On a clarinet at least, the difference registers required altered fingerings. I can only think of one exception: you can play the C above the staff or G above that with the same fingering, although it’s difficult, and the latter sounds much more shrill and out of tune, and as thus is never included on any charts.
I sat around trying to go higher and higher on my clarinet, and the highest note I could hit was the Bb, no matter how hard I shoved the clarinet up my mouth and tightened the embouchure, I couldn’t get it to go any higher.
Here’s a website that shows all the fingerings of a clarinet. You’ll note that each note is at least slightly different, even if you include the alternate fingerings.
Increasingly these days, film and television composers are expected to do everything from scratch by themselves. Things like proper orchestration and actual musicians playing real instruments are getting rarer.
Transcription has both meanings. The term “arrangement” is used more in the popular music world; “transcription” is used more in the classical world.
True, however that doesn’t remove the need for orchestration - instead of writing the parts individually the composer would now have to create every instrument part from whatever orchestral library he’s using. You still need to know which instruments sound good together.
Ah, OK, that would set a limit, then, since there’s only a finite number of fingerings. I’m only really familiar with the brasses, where lip tension is arguably even more important than fingerings (considering that some brasses don’t even have fingerings at all).
It does make orchestration A LOT easier, though. Most of the decent orchestral sample libraries already have each instrument mapped such that you can’t go out it’s range, so knowing the ranges of the instruments isn’t really needed. Plus, you can use trial and error to find the instruments that go well together a lot easier with a sample library than hiring an entire orchestra. 
I’ve been a composer and orchestrator for small scale multi-media, commercial, web, and film projects. Almost all of them required me to do everything myself with my computer and sample libraries. I’d love to hear some of my pieces done by a live orchestra - that would be amazing… I probably would even get a little emotional…
Interesting. I’d like to hear more – to get started, I knew a few film/soundstage guys who used to pretty much do everything in Sibelius (it’s a software program with ability to include sample libraries, IIRC, or probably VSTis, or pretty much anything else, other than those included with the suite).
Do people in the field use things as specialized as other musicians who only play one or two instruments do? Like, Ivory plug-in for piano, or Scarbee’s vintage keys samples (Rhodes, Wurlitzer EP), and so forth (lots of people use modeled VSTi Hammond, but I haven’t done that for ages, long since B4 was in its grave, since the hardware is so good now)? Or is it pretty well standardized, as in, “that’s good enough” to get a rough orchestration happening?
The Sibelius-type apps (ones that are like word processors for musical notation) are basically the same as most other audio apps that run sample libraries - they’re all just MIDI sequencers. The Sibelius front-end is just a familiar (to some musicians) interface (staffs, notes, etc.) for them to enter MIDI data. They’re great for composers who know how to read an write sheet music.
I, on the other hand, am not so well trained in that arena, so I’d rather “program” the MIDI notes or just record myself performing them on a MIDI controller - unusally a “piano”-looking keyboard that controls the notes, volume, and articulations of the particular instrument I’m trying to emulate. There’s some VERY good orchestral sample libraries out there that, when used correctly, are able to fool most people into believing they’re listening to a full orchestra.
Basically, my method is to tinker on a nice piano sound until I come across a melody or theme that’s to my liking. Once I get those MIDI notes down, I can load any instruments I want to play them. After I have a main melody I like, then I start playing around with counter-melodies and harmonies using other instruments and pretty much build it as I go, creating the structure of the piece as well as paying attention to the articulations I want the instruments to perform.
The software I use is Propellerhead’s Reason along with the GPO Orchestral Library. Works for me…
Orchestral libraries are (hopefully) made to sound good together, so mixing a whole bunch of different specialised plug-ins probably isn’t the way to go. Packages like the Vienna Symphonic Library are so vast that it can be quite difficult to even master the one, you wouldn’t want to complicate your workflow by adding many more into the mix. Additionally, there aren’t that many non-keyboard stand-alone instruments out there - I’ve never seen an oboe or cello plug-in, for example. If you’re going for a specific sound of a Hammond or a synthesizer, though, then I don’t see a reason not to use a more specialised tool.
There are actually several things going on here. There’s the range of the instrument, which has been already discussed and you may already understand.
The common “double horn” is what you’re asking about - the French horn gets an increased range by essentially being two instruments in one. The F side is pitched lower and has a lower theoretical range, while the Bb side is pitched higher, making it easier to play higher notes. The music makes no indication to the player. The player makes the choice of which notes to play with the trigger*, and they just use the different fingerings for those notes.
For example, with the horn in F the written note D is played with the first valve fingered. With the Bb trigger, that exact same note D is played with the first two valves fingered. The lip tightness is roughly equivalent to the note you’d play with the first two valves down in F, which would be an A just below that D.
It’s less confusing than it sounds for a player to learn; consider that woodwinds do something similar for every note they play. Brass players (especially horn players) actually do a lot more adjusting with the lip, since the harmonics don’t always line up. Hitting the “wrong” fingerings isn’t so much of a problem, especially on the high notes. In relation to the rest of the brass instruments (which tend to use the same fingerings for the same written notes), it’s the F side that’s “correct”.
Most modern music is written for Horn in F. Indeed, not all players use a double horn anyway and their horns are simply in F. The slightly complicating factor — it used to be the case that instead of being transposed, all horn music was written in the key of the piece. Horn players would actually use a different main slide (known as a “crook”) for each piece. For these historical reason, any quality horn player will be expected to know how to transpose from any key for classical music. Crooks are still occasionally used by concert band players - a lot of band music is written for horn (or an equivalent instrument) in Eb, so having an Eb crook is not unknown.
*The “trigger” is the term for the valve, operated by the thumb, that switches between the F and Bb side.
So if I get this right, all I have to do is find the right orchestrator, and tell him “I’ve got a tune in my head that goes like this: duh-duh-duh-duh, duh-duh-duh-duh, la-la-la-la la-la-la-la la-la-la-la etc.” and then I’m done composing? It’s easier than I thought!
Fascinating. Yes, I did know it was not really a “slide thingie,” but a little button or “trigger,” but I had no idea it was essentially up to the horn player to sight-transpose (from the already-transposed horn key chart). I know enough horn and wind players to know that sight-transposing is a pretty common skill, but it’s rare enough in jazz that it’s still somewhat remarkable (for me). Hell, I can’t do it on keys except for something pretty rudimentary and in slight modulations, and yet I’m supposed to be able to do it all the time (because of those lazy-a** chick singers).
Interesting above, BigShooter – yes, I thought a few minutes after posting that using a more general term might be better, but I had the impression that Sibelius had become more or less the “ProToolz” of the orchestrating/arranging world. Commonly used, but still just another front end for well-developed technology. Do you actually step-input via MIDI (keys, in your case, but it could easily be a MIDIfied guitar, I guess, or whatever) or use that little block-interface all sequencers (that I’ve seen) have for modifying input data?
Yep, you got it.
I am totally tapping my toes to this. Whoa, now I’m dancing around the house, singing it.
Though the “duh-duh-duh-duh, duh-duh-duh-duh” part is reminiscent of The Police, and the “la-la-la-la la-la-la-la la-la-la-la” part is pure Delphonics.
Also sneers from classical composers. Years and years ago, I read an anecdote about Igor Stravinsky (sorry, can’t remember where). He lived in the Los Angeles area from some point in the 40s until his death in (I think) 1971. He was a pretty big star in the music world, especially for a classical composer, and sometime around 1960, he was approached by a film producer to write the score for a new film. When asked his price, he named some (then) outlandish sum, like $1,000,000. The producers gasped, and said something like “Maestro Stravinsky, that will eat up our whole budget! After all, after we pay you, we’ll have to pay the orchestrator too!” According to the account I read, Stravinsky was horribly insulted, and walked out of the meeting. I can kind of see why – Stravinsky was (and is) acknowledged as one of the great masters of orchestration, and the producers ignorantly implied that he wasn’t up to orchestrating his own music. I suppose they weren’t really that ignorant – in their world, the composer and the orchestrator were always two different people.
I actually perform most of my parts one at a time on my MIDI keyboard and record the MIDI notes into my sequencer. Then I’ll go back and use the block interface to clean things up, fix minor timing issues, and make the articulations sound as realistic as possible by messing with velocity, volume, etc.
Here’s a piece I did a while ago for a movie treatment that never came to be. Not a ton of orchestration, but it’ll give you an idea how realistic a good library can sound when you give some attention to certain detail in the MIDI editing:
And here’s another I did for a film graduate’s project at the local state college. He wanted something like the theme to “Game of Thrones” on HBO, so I basically ripped off the drum rhythms and structure of that show’s theme and put my own melodies over the top. A lousy ripoff, I know, but it had to be done quick and the student wasn’t being picky. Still, it’s a good example of what can be achieved fairly easily once you have the knowledge…