Device Lexicon: Part 1 - Sustaining Violin Chords (feat. Jurassic Park)

This is the start of a new series where I want to dive into musical devices that we keep seeing (and hearing) in film scores and that define a certain sound or a certain genre. This can be little orchestration decisions or composition approaches that I picked up over the years and should be seen as a little set of vocabularies that you can apply in certain conditions.

Today, I want to start with a device that John Williams uses quite often and which goes a bit against orchestrational intuition but works really well in the right context.

It can be heard in the Jurassic Park Main Theme from 1:27 onwards.

In the score sheet, that passage looks like this (strings only):

The melody is being played by the high woodwinds, horns and violas while the violins sustain in long and high chords with the second violins being split into two voices so the violins form triads in close position.

From an orchestrational standpoint, it is a relatively uncommon decision to demote high violins to pure "chord fillers" for several reasons:

• The higher you go the less chordal impression you get from a chord, so it would be more logical to place harmonic material lower into the register
• High violins in mid to high dynamics have a tendency to become acoustically quite dominant over woodwinds so in order to make sure that there is a chance for the theme that needs to cut through these violins, you need to put quite a lot of forces on it as Williams does here with a lot of woodwinds, horns and violas.
• High violins almost always get to play lines that have at least a melodic component
• You would normally try to avoid to divisi violins in high registers and high dynamics as they tend to lose substance considerably when being split

So the decision for this device is quite uncommon and yet it works very well. These chords add almost like an etheral sparkle of high harmonics to the orchestral sound, they do very much open up the frequency range and hang almost like a bright synth pad over the orchestra. It's also quite interesting that the highest line keeps hanging on that sounding Bb without any melodic movement so it almost acts like a high pedal point. Due to the fact that the register that they are playing in is also filled with notes from the theme (played by the woodwinds), the "thinness" effect by divisiing doesn't apply that much as basically only the higher harmonics really shine through the texture. He also goes for leaving the first violins unsplit so the highest note remains quite substantial. In other contexts he sometimes splits the firsts into octaves basically enclosing the 2 notes from the second violins and by that creating reinforcing harmonics. There are also instances where he adds the violas into this sustainy chord texture as well.

I think one of the reasons for this texture is the entire approach of that theme which in the score sheet is marked as "religioso" and obviously is supposed to score that first moment when they see the dinosaurs as an almost religious experience, almost like a procession so we could also understand these high violins as if he's imitiating church organ chords where high pipes are added to the sound to reinforce the octaves (and sometimes other intervals) from the lower octaves. So in any case, the decision to go for this device makes a lot of sense in this case. It is a nice way to create textural differences and break out the violins from their common roles.

With sample productions, this gets a bit more tricky as violin chords often tend to become very thick and inpenetrable due to the multiple layering of large string sections into a chord but with a bit of careful balancing and distribution a satisfying effect can be achieved there as well.