INTERVIEW WITH THE ORCHESTRATOR

Composer Robert Elhai talks about the world of film orchestration

by Alexandra Broat

Very few composers simply move from commission to commission and still pay the rent. Most are driven by the passion to create – often balancing odd jobs in the process. For composer Robert Elhai, finding a "day job" didn’t require leaving music at all – it simply meant taking his composing skills and using them to orchestrate film scores.

Elhai, a Minnesota resident and member of the Forum, works as an ochestrator on film scores by Michael Kamen (Mr. Holland’s Opus, Robin Hood Prince of Thieves) and Elliot Goldenthal (Batman Forever, Interview with the Vampire), among others. He recently worked on Kamen’s music for X-Men, and brought his talents to Broadway’s Lion King, where he earned a Tony nomination for best orchestration. He is currently composing a family musical.

What exactly does an orchestrator do?

What [I do] is akin to a draftsman working with an architect. The composer who I am working for will conceive a composition, and I help to carry it out. An architect will conceive a building but won’t usually sit there and figure out exactly where each joist has to go. A composer will write music and say, "It’s happy until this phrase and then when she looks at him, it gets scary." There is a lot of music that [captures the mood], and then it’s up to me to figure out how to best accomplish that with an orchestra.

How does this work benefit you as a composer?

I think of film scoring as my own personal grant. You work really intensely for a few weeks – 18 hours a day, 7 days a week. You make a big pile of money, and then you have a couple of months off. You live on your big pile of money, and you write every day. ... Orchestration enables you to write whatever you want and not have to worry about a day job. And when you’re working as an orchestrator, you [stay] in the middle of an amazing frenzy of music making.

How did you get started?

My background is as an academic composer, which is probably how most of the composers in the Forum are trained. I have a master’s degree and a doctorate. I’ve always been fascinated by orchestration. .... I started when I was very young. I was just out of school when I went to New York and I hooked up with Elliot [Goldenthal] as his assistant. [It was] an entry-level music position, which is a pretty common thing for composers to try to get. I was very fortunate that Elliot had such a meteoric rise in his career.

All the other [film] work I’ve gotten since then has pretty much been a result of people knowing me because of my work with Elliot. A lot of people want to go to L.A. and get jobs as copyists and hope that they’re in the right place at the right time when someone needs an orchestrator. I think it’s a much better idea to try to get to know a composer and be a composer’s assistant, because you have a much more organic relationship.

Do people ever misunderstand what you do?

They totally don’t understand it. Musicians and composers know what it means to orchestrate versus compose. Most [other] people think that I am some kind of composer. A lot of times I talk about being an "arranger" because most people aren’t even familiar with the concept of orchestration.

When working with a composer, what is your goal as an orchestrator?

Ideally, the orchestrator connects with the composer to be an extension of the composer. It should be as if the composer were orchestrating for himself or herself.

What skills do you rely on in your work?

The thing that has helped me most, purely as an orchestrator, is knowledge of instruments. Not just book knowledge, but actually learning how to play them. ... The other skill that’s very important to have is facility. Basically, an orchestrator is a support person. The idea for support people is to accomplish what they need to do as fast and easily as possible so that the composer – the creative person – has enough latitude to be able to concentrate on creating. ... You certainly need to know the nuts and bolts of orchestration – the basic things like the ranges of the instruments. You need to be fast with notation. ... I also think it’s a good thing to have a legible hand in a commercial situation. Unless you’re doing music that is really straightforward, it’s almost never quicker to do it on a computer.