October 2021 - Wrap Up

Even though it has only been a few weeks since I came back from vacation, it seems like ages ago. The downside of being self employed is that whenever you go on vacation, on your return all the things you ignored for that time will pile up. So I was quite busy with catching up on all the things that were asking for my attention while I was gone.

However, I had a spectacular highlight shortly after my return which was to see John Williams conduct the Berlin Philharmonic which was - once again - an incredible experience. Having been fortunate enough to see him in Vienna before Covid and now in Berlin was just insane. The great thing is that he left a really fit and well spirited impression during the Berlin concerts. He was chatty and smiled alot and seemed to thoroughly enjoy the concert, mentioning several times that this was "the best orchestra in the world" - so I think he really meant it.

Now having seen both concerts, I had a great reference of comparing these two world class orchestras. In all fairness, it should probably be noted that the Vienna concert was "squeezed" into their schedule on short notice and the rehearsal time there was very short. So there were a few near catastrophic issues in Vienna that during the concert really made me hold my breath hoping it wouldn't fall apart completely. Some of those made it to the album and Blu-Ray. In Berlin, there were minor quirks here and there (more on this later) but the concert was way better rehearsed so it felt more solid in its performance. It is hard to describe it exactly but Vienna felt more like you're driving a sports car way too fast on way too tight roads and just hope it wouldn't crash while Berlin felt like cruising comfortably and controlled on the highway with all the pros and cons that came with it. Vienna had some peak moments that were just overwhelmingly exciting and some moments that were really problematic, while Berlin felt controlled and solid all the time. Personally for me, I'd say Berlin was the considerably better performance while Vienna was more emotional. The crammed stage in Vienna, the smaller venue which transported more of the energy into the audience and the feeling (at the time) that this would be a first and last concert of seeing him live made it a stronger impact on me. Objectively speaking, Berlin was the better concert.

There were two downsides to the Berlin concert for me. Firstly, the Orchestra has the strange policy that their star soloists from the Woodwind and Brass section don't play in debut concerts. And unfortunately, in spite of Williams being 89 and this probably being one of their most iconic concert events in years, they applied this policy also on this concert (which totaly beats me). Consequentially there were some minor insecurities in some exposed spots (e.g. the solo Horn in Jurassic Park) that likely wouldn't have happened if there were all the prominent soloists on these positions. This is a minor issue but having heard this orchestra in many concerts with similarly tricky music (like just a few weeks earlier I saw Firebird with them), I felt that there was an overproporional amount of quirks. Usually, when they play in their "parade line-up", there usually is barely ever an audible flaw in the performance. As a little side note it was interesting to see that the trumpet players played with pump valve trumpets. Usually they play with German rotary valve trumpets which have a rounder, more sonorous tone and among (older) German trumpet players pump valve trumpets are considered "second rate trumpets" but of course they are essential to the Hollywood sound and it was great to see that the presitgous Berlin Phil decided to go for authenticity rather than tradition.

The second issue I had was more the programme itself. While of course I would have wished to hear more pieces that are not on the list of his "Greatest Hits", which however was not to be expected, I found that the concert was in its entirety "too loud". Every piece was a fanfare or ended with a big tutti climax. Brass, Percussion, banging, fortissimo! While these are all great pieces, at one point it started to become a wash of high energy orchestral textures. Only the Elegy for Cello was a real contrast to that (which was spectacular) but I would have wished for a few pieces in between that would be more on the calm side.

All this complaining of course doesn't diminish the impact this concert had. I was emotionally drained afterwards and it took me a few days to get back to reality from this.

And while I was still emotionally impacted by this concert, which put in front of me the reason why I wanted to become a composer, I was hired for a project from LA that showed me the state of the industry today. This was one of the most extreme projects I have worked on regarding what "creativity" means in the industry these days:

I was hired to co write a trailer for a relatively big game project. It was mostly samples with a few soloists on top. Yeah okay, trailer.. not my personal cup of tea but why not. I didn't have direct contact with the game company but it went through another composer. 

So here's what happened: I got a temp track that they edited the trailer to.  It was a drone heavy track with some ethnic elements where there were some players improvising figures and melodies on their instrument. My job was to: rebuild the tempo track, the exact chord progression and the accents on the same instrument that were supposed to sound as identical as the temp. (I went through probably 10 libraries of the same instrument hunting for one that sounded as close as possible as the live recorded one from the temp). The creative work was to add some textures to the sound (and by textures I don't mean orchestrated textures but synth/acoustic morphing things that some libraries provide with the single push of a key). Also, what was different was that the improvised melodies by the soloists that we got were different than the temp. I spent about 15% of my time doing something musical with this track and the rest to get the sound as close as possible to the temp.

Now of course this was a trailer campaign (which lives by different rules than "normal" scoring) and not every project is like that but it is an example that shows how narrow the musical paths have become in some parts of the industry. 

The proximity of these two events - on the one hand the exhiliarating pieces that Hollywood has created in form of John Williams' work and on the other hand the restrictive job that I was doing for a Hollywood project really created some sort of frustration. Not really about myself but about the industry in general. This of course is nothing new and nothing that happened suddenly but experiencing it personally in such harsh contrast hits differently.

Wow, I didn't want to drag the mood down that much, sorry for that. On the positive side, I was meeting up with some of the patrons from here before the concert and it was a fun and spirited conversation. We were laughing a lot and had some nice talks.

Also, the recordings from the First Orchestra Discovery Session are almost finished so I will be sharing those soon, and also do a bit of PR work for this Patreon with those on Social Media and relevant Forums to hope to bring some more people to this Patreon so we can record a larger line up next time. We're still hovering around 100 Patrons currently and have been for a few months. Of course with all the educational content that is being released recently it becomes increasingly tricker to compete but I hope that I can create some extra value here that still makes it attractive.

Thank YOU for being part of this! Just as a reminder, we also have a Discord server where we have conversations about music and other things from here. You only need to connect your Patreon with your Discord account and will be automatically added.

It would be great to see more people there!

Robin