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Hello there, beautiful people.
I am new here, a fresh lumpling, or whatever (just trying to be hip).
This is a post regarding the fact that Elfman is not an educated nor an autodidact (i don’t know if that is the accepted english term for it, but i mean self-taught) arranger or orchestrator. He does not even conduct, as far as i can tell.
But being in the industry and being the band nerd (groopie) he claims to be, and having had the privilege of basking in the glory for many a project that is Shirley Walker, a true composer who wrote, arranged, orchestrated and conducted her own scores, all by herself. Now this is not ordinairy in the generic hollowood realm of musical composition. No one hardly does this anymore. Anyway, Elfman never conducted shit, Shirley Walker did, and Steve Bartek (whom i shall talk more about in a few moments, for he is truly the nucleus of Elfman’s genious).
Elfman may play the piano, and sing, and write whimsical lyrics, and yes, he has a sweet and extraordinairy sense of melody that i love. i have loved Elfman scince i was a little kid. I was 4 or 5 when i first watched batman, even though my cognitive skills might not have been much, my sense and love of music was in full abundance.
I loved the music and i had to fight not to hum and sing along…
some years later, when i was 8, my life changed. A nightmare before christmas and edward scissorhands was absorbed by my retina and i was in a stasis of dream and imagination unlike anything i had experienced before.
The visuals and story-telling was a great factor, to be shure, but the music…it was the music that truly captivated me.
So i talked about Elfman to everyone. I discovered Mussorgsky and Beethoven and an assortment of other classical composers much earlier, because my grandmother, who i grew up with was a lover of the classicals and i just loved grand music that could penetrate my very being, and mussorgsky and beethoven did so, amongst others.
But as my young ears had allready been exposed to so many auditive complexities, i felt i had a sense of being right in stating that Elfman is just a good as the classical composers. but he composes for a differen medium and a completely different world. It’s gorgeous and different and eerie. I loved it.
But after many years of listening to all kinds of music and studying it myself, even dreaming of being a composer for film or radio or theater i have picked up a lot of “veiled” information and “truths” that changed the way i viewed the industry.
The industry of film and television music.
In a world where the greats have all passed away, well almost, Zbigniew Preisner and Kilar are still alive (whom i greatly inspire you to listen to if you like Elfman) but Bernard Herman and Jerry goldsmith and Gottfried Huppertz and many others, who composed and orchestrated and probably even conducted their work themselves, a skill wich is shamefully rare today.
there are in fact few hollywood composers today who truly write their own music…but i have so much detailed information regarding this, so it would all day to explain, and if i know you guys correctly, you are all sick of reading this post allready, or hate me because you can sense that i am “hating” or “dissing” or whatever you want to call it, your master or “god” that is Elfman. When i have clearly stated that i love the guy to death.
BUT, my point is that Elfman makes up melodies, on the piano i doubtlessly assertain, and gives it to his old band mate, hopefully good friend (because he owes him everything) and lead guitarist of The band the mystic knights of the oingo boingo, whom i guess you are all proud to know danny was a part of, but it was his older brother who started the band.
Danny write the lyrics and sang, i doubt if he wrote any music.
Anyway, my point is, that without Steve Bartek, who has conducted almost every single movie elfman has scored (except for batman and edward, wich was conducted by the talented shirley walker, and orchestrated every single project danny has been involved in. Wich means that wihout Bartek, the scores would sound COMPLETELY different and so much more tame and hollow, that you would not recognize it and probably would not even have fallen for it, or maby you would, scince the melodies are all elfman, but the orchestration, wich is, essentially, the art of deciding what every musician in the orchestra (the ensemble of instrumentalists) should do. How the violions should sound, wich section of instruments should do what, and all the beautiful and sudden and impactfull dynamism that we all, and myself, once thought to be all elfman.
Do you see where i am going with this?
My point is, that they are both geniouses (sorry for the bad spelling, i’m european) in their own right.
Elfman has the melodies, even though bartek has composed many things by himself, check it out, maby it will remind you more of elfman then you would want to, and when you realise elfman had nothing to do with it at all, you should start to wonder, is it really right of me to think of myself as a fan of Elfman, and not a fan of Bartek?
I think they are a great pair. had bartek been comissioned to orchestrate and conduct the music of another composer, it would have sounded a little different, and maby not suited the films of burton as well, but scince over half the talent, the way i see it, lies in the hands and patience of bartek (heh, i’m thinking of bartok all the time).
So i think that on the albums it should say “Music composed by Danny Elfman (unless there are additional composers who lend their music, wich is often the case, more often then you would like) and Orchestrated and Conducted and Arranged by Steve Bartek. Because a lot of people do not do the same amount of research as, ehem, some people do, so they go around fooling themselves. Oh Elfman is a genious and Elfman is a god of music, and such, wich i once thought, but then i grew and learned.
Elfman is wonderfull, but in order for his music to shine and exalt, he is in need of a talented orchestrator.
Luckily they found one-another. A beautiful alloy of mind and harmony if you ask me.
I’m sorry if i crushed peoples perceptions, it was only my intent to share some of my own thoughts, and i tried to be humble, if i failed at this, blame it on the fact that i’m from northern europe.Thank you for listening (both to elfmans (and barteks) beautiful music, and to me)
Good-pie
From an FSM interview with Steve Bartek back in December of 1995.
Lukas Kendall: How do you work with Danny?
Steve Bartek: When Danny works with a director, he sits down and he mocks up all his themes on his computer. His synthesizers and samplers play back the major themes for the director, and they spend weeks sorting through that stuff. When it comes down to starting my involvement, he takes those sequences, of which some are fully fleshed-out orchestrations on the computer and some are merely sketches, and sits down scene by scene and writes it onto paper. He actually takes a pencil writes notes and translates what’s in the computer down to notation and in doing that he finishes writing most of the stuff, by adding things here and there that aren’t in the computer, making sure he hits things on screen, adding dynamics and color. Then he hands them to me. What I get is usually a fairly fleshed-out sketch not all the time, but most of the time. Sometimes it’s too complete; there were some times on Batman he got so many things going that they didn’t work together, and I had to sort through them to make sure that what we had would actually work. But he actually does physically write stuff down on paper! [laughs]
LK: When he mocks it up on computer, is that just from playing it in? He didn’t mention that part of the process.
SB: He didn’t? Oh. Well, yeah. On the first movie, Pee-Wee, he couldn’t. He had one little synthesizer and a keyboard and there wasn’t a lot of sequencers that could handle that kind of stuff. Getting it to lock to picture was even difficult at that time, there was only one little box that you could get a click to lock to the video. But by the second or third film, technology picked up, and Danny’s grasp of it all picked up, too. The beginning of Pee-Wee, he was playing to screen on the piano. By the end of Pee-Wee, he was locking things to click and handing them to me.
LK: But was he notating?
SB: Yeah.
LK: How on Pee-Wee did you set up a system whereby he would write it down, since he hadn’t done that at that time?
SB: It all metamorphosed through the film. Bob Badami, the best music editor in town, led us through all the steps and Danny realized what he had to do to get his point across. He quickly realized that handing me a tape was not going to get him what he wants. The more he started writing things down on paper, the more he could communicate. Before that time, he had a perfectly working knowledge of muiic notation because when I joined the band, he had written a piano concerto, fully handwritten for piano and a small ensemble. He considers notation a problem for him, because the fine points of dynamic markings, where they go exactly – he’s not good at bass clef, but he does everything in treble clef with an octave marking so you know exactly where he wants it to sound. If he’s writing a low line he marks it how many octaves down and is very clear about it. His notation is not strictly normal, but for anybody who knows anything about notation you can look at it and figure out what he’s saying. It’s not personal, he didn’t make it up. It’s all real notation, but he uses it in a slightly different way, because of his own limitations. At the beginmng of Pee-Wee it wasn’t like he didn’t know anything about notation, he perfectly well knew things about notation, he was just scared and reluctant, like we all were, it was the first one. By the end he was writing it on paper and it was all locking to click. In between there, there was some oddball stuff, but that was his first film.
LK: What do you mean, “oddball”?
SB: Well, there vas one scene that was him on tape just playing along, and Bob Badarni and I had to figure out how to work the bar beats and hits and all that stuff. But that was the only time he’s ever done that, Iike the first film – from that point on he realized the importance to get exactly what he wants, and to notate it and communicate to me how to get it.
LK: Now, had you done large-scale orchestration yourself?
SB: Before Pee-Wee? No. [laughs]
LK: So you were coming into this blind as well.
SB:: Oh yeah, he dragged me along with him. I’d gone to college, went to UCLA. studied composition and orchestration and then played in a rock band for ten years. I used any orchestration skills only in our largest ensemble, which was eight pieces. And suddenly we had this Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure with the full orchestra, and it was a challenge. We had help from the conductor, Lennie Niehaus, in the sense that it went from Danny to me to him. Danny gave me sketches, I orchestrated them the way I thought they would be, and then Lennie took them; basically I arranged them and then Lennie, although his agent doesn’t want him to have the credit officially, orchestrated the stuff. It was kind of a funny set-up but he took my stuff and corrected it, made it right, whatever mistakes I was making.
LK: Right, as far as balancing instruments, and sub-dividing sections…?
SB: Yeah, and writing out a full score which I didn’t have a clue exactly how to do. So from that project, watching what Lennie did to what I gave him, set me up for the rest of my career. [laughs] Anything I know from the mechanics of orchestration I owe to Lennie, watching how he set up the page, how to make sure the conductor can read it and all that kind of stuff.
LK: What’s your working process now with Danny?
SB: I go up to his house and we meet, he plays it for me and we talk about it. I make notes on whatever score he gives me, if that happens. Lately he’s been sending his sequences to a computer guy who then prints them out and then we go over the print-out, and he makes notes on the print-out himself.
LK: So you work off the print-out, or a hand-written sketch?
SB: Work off a print-out that he has made notations on top of. The step I told you where he sits and writes it down? He saves himself time by having all the stuff in the computer written down, almost 50% of his writing is right there. As he puts his notes on paper he adds things, changes things on the computet print-out. But that’s just in the last two or three projects. The last two projects he did practically half the score as synth pre-lay anyway, To Die For and Dead Presidents. It was bssically just orchestra sweetening once in a while. We had strings and some French horns on Dead Presidents, and we had a small orchestra on To Die For, but they were basically sweetening synth tracks that had all this percussion. We also went in and put rhythm section on top of some of it. Every project has been a little different. Dolores Claiborne was all strings, so it was much more fun for me because there were all these string lines that l had to sort out and make happen in the orchestra.
LK: Danny said “There’s never been a note in one of my scores that I didn’t write.”
SB: Yeah.
LK: Not even a note?
SB: No. An orchestrator’s job is to take someone’s stuff and make it be what the composer wants it to be. In doing that, you do sometimes “add notes,” but you don’t change melodies, you don’t change harmonic structures, you don’t change the composition. I don’t know what you’re needling at by saying that…
LK: Well, I mean of course you’re not writing the melodies, but I’m just trying-
SB: Right. Well, the problem is that people come to me and give me credit for writing Danny’s music. They hint that well, “We know that you really do that stuff” – that’s why he’s sensitive, that’s why [agent] Richard Kraft is sensitive. Danny’s gotten lots of flak over it. They can’t believe that someone who’s a rock and roll singer in an offbeat Los Angeles band can actually write the music that he writes.
LK: I was just wondering to what extent Danny’s music requires adjustment, without changing the concept, but making it playable…
SB: No. Concepts are never changed. Concepts are never changed except by him. He’s in full control of his creative output. I never assume to go and change things. We’ve had extra orchestrators; at the end of a project when things have to be done, I farm out some of the orchestration, and at certain points we’ve had some orchestrators who have totally changed his stuff, and we’ve had to re-do it. We haven’t worked with those orchestrators again, because that’s kind of what orchestrators see themselves as, frustrated composers most of the time, and like putting their own two cents in somebody else’s music. And it just doesn’t work with Danny. When he writes down a certain voicing, he wants that voicing. He doesn’t want added notes, he doesn’t want this or that, he’s fairly specific about what he writes and what he wants to get out of it.
LK: I understand I ‘m just trying to play Devil’s advocate a little bit…
SB: Yeah, I know – Danny’s kind of given up on it. He was on the Academy committee for film music and they all just treated him like he was a hummer. Because he’s a vocalist in a band, they thought, oh he just sings his parts and somebody else does all the work. That really is not the case. Danny does so much work. He’s a workaholic. He spends so many hours in front of his computer, in front of the screen, working on every film, big or small, and he works hard at making sure that each one is something fairly new, that he approaches it a different way. Which is why he didn’t want to do Batman 3. He just had no interest in doing that kind of thing again.
LK: He said the reason he didn’t do it was, for one, they didn’t ask.
SB: Well, besides that. At the end of Batman 2 he said, “I don’t want to do this kind of thing again. Big adventure films – suck.” Certain scenes he was told, “These are your scenes, go with the music,” and he spent a lot of time on details to make the music happen. And it went into the movie and was buried. He could have gotten the same effect by spending half the time. The music didn’t have to be so detailed, from the way they dubbed it. Overly detailed music played soft sounds really small. He was frustrated at the end of Batman 2, so whether they asked him or not for Batman 3, he had told me that this was really the last one he was going to do. And since then he’s steered away from them.
That ought to clear things up for you on Elfman’s and Bartek’s relationship on film scores. You can read the rest of the interview here:http://www.boingo.org/articles/FSMBartek.html
endymion09 Wrote:
> there are in fact few hollywood composers today
> who truly write their own music…but i have so
> much detailed information regarding this, so it
> would all day to explain> Anyway, my point is, that without Steve Bartek,
> who has conducted almost every single movie elfman
> has scored> Because a lot of people do not do
> the same amount of research as, ehem, some people
> do, so they go around fooling themselves. OhSorry, you’re wrong. Steve Bartek has conducted only a handful of Danny Elfman’s scores (CHICAGO, ANYWHERE BUT HERE, the re-recording of Herrmann’s PSYCHO, the choir in A CIVIL ACTION), and none of them are considered a major Elfman work.
Conducting is not an indication of a composer’s skill. Rather, it’s an entirely different skill altogether.
Bartek is a highly skilled orchestrator, and has worked for numerous composers. None of those scores sound anything like Danny Elfman. Hard to explain that based on your theorizing.
Ryan
Endymion09, these kinds of stories about Elfman have long been debunked. Danny composes way more of his own music than you give him credit for. Follow your own advice and do some research with real, credible sources.
Yeah. Essentially, the role of orchestrator is more technical and organisational than creative. I can’t believe people still won’t credit Elfman’s sheer ability because of his less than traditional musical background. Why can people teach themselves to paint or act or dance on their eyelids but not write music? My music teacher has often told me that she can teach anyone the theory of writing music, but not the creativity to do it.
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