femmenietzsche:

Many of the people contacted for this story—composers, lawyers, music supervisors—requested anonymity, fearful that they might jeopardize career opportunities by speaking openly about how their business works. The vibe is “The first rule of Fight Club is: You do not talk about Fight Club.” Which is perhaps why a series of tweets the veteran composer Joe Kraemer (Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation) posted last year ricocheted throughout the composing community. “I can count the number of mainstream Hollywood composers that I KNOW write all their music themselves on one hand, John Williams being the most famous example,” Kraemer wrote. “Everyone else is a team leader, a figurehead for a team of composers.”

Williams has described his methodology, which is not all that different from the way Brahms would have done it: “While composing, I’m scribbling with a pen and throwing pages all over the room.” He makes music with the most traditional of tools: a Steinway and staff paper. His orchestrations are, as he has said, “articulated down to the last harp.” Williams is the image of the composer as solitary artist that most of us hold in our heads. He is an industry paragon. It’s even said that directors sometimes work around his music rather than the other way around.

The Williams approach, as Kraemer noted, is exceedingly rare these days. As the Hollywood composer I spoke with put it, “The name brands have had people write their music for 20-plus years.” A veteran Hollywood music supervisor described how it works. “The composers have six or seven projects on the go at any point,” he said, referring to lead composers working in television. “The leader sets the ‘tonal palette’ to get them going. And then the minions do the actual writing.” Let’s say you’re one of these minions—an additional composer or a studio assistant who is allowed to write—and you’re working on the score of a tentpole movie with a major film-music studio. You’re assigned a number of “cues”: bits of the score that you will compose to accompany specific scenes. The lead composer—whose name will go on the final product—has worked up the overall direction. Zimmer calls it “the sketch.” As Devo founder turned film composer Mark Mothersbaugh (Rugrats, The Lego Movie, and four Wes Anderson films) once described it, “You give them themes, you do a rough mock-up, and then those people fine-tune it all.” In some ways, it’s a system that resembles the assembly-line studios of contemporary artists such as Mark Kostabi and Jeff Koons.

As a fine-tuner, you write the actual music for your assigned cues and submit demos to the lead composer’s studio. Then comes a process of feedback and approval, followed by the actual recording—which could mean an orchestra. To put film scoring into culinary terms, the cues you’ve written go into a soup (the score) created by many fellow sous chefs (additional composers) working under an executive chef (the lead composer). Part of the idiosyncratic beauty of a Hollywood film score, as the Hollywood composer I spoke to phrased it, is its “cool collaborative aspect, a handed-down-the-line feel.” When the team clicks, there is a shared sense of energy and enterprise. For many young composers, it’s what draws them to Hollywood as opposed to Carnegie Hall.

If their contributions end up being credited (usually as “additional composer”) and the pay is decent, the participants can be quite happy. They can pay the rent. They might someday rise to the level of lead composer, as did John Powell, Henry Gregson-Williams, and Lorne Balfe, brilliant film scorers all, coming out of Zimmer’s behemoth Remote Control studio in Santa Monica. (The minions there are sometimes referred to as “Zimlings.”)

And then there are the ghost composers. As much as ghost composing is virtually unknown among the moviegoing public, it enjoys a long tradition as an entry-level rite of passage. One of the gods of film scoring, Ennio Morricone, was a ghost composer before earning his first credit on a feature in 1961. “I’ve been a ghost myself (on really big movies),” Zimmer has noted. Occasionally, the issue of ghost composing pops up in the media, as when, in 2014, the deaf Japanese composer Mamoru Samuragochi, a so-called “digital-age Beethoven,” was found to have employed a ghost composer for 18 years. It was regarded as a scandal.

On the message boards of VI Control, an online composer community, the conversation inevitably veers toward ghost composing. “When I saw the ‘composer’’s site with ‘his’ reel populated by the stuff I did 100% on it I wanted to puke out of shame for that person,” a poster called AudioLoco wrote last year. Another poster alluded to big-name composers accepting industry awards for music they didn’t write. Ghost and additional composers speak of moments of almost comical awkwardness, as when a director, reviewing the score, marvels at a beautiful passage and exclaims to the name-brand guy who did not, in fact, write it, “Oh, we’re so lucky to have you!” The awkwardness is compounded when the actual, unacknowledged composer is sitting in the room. It’s part of the frustration that ghost and additional composers feel: The world has no clue what they do. “You’re not just arranging,” the Hollywood composer said. “You’re writing.”

The issue of payment can cause frustration too. The composer on the Emmy Award–winning series told me that he got $150 up front per cue, the length of which can vary. He might spend as many as 10 hours on each one. “When you break it down, it’s like minimum wage,” he said. The fee for a cue can also fluctuate greatly depending on the project and the lead composer; one ghostwriter on big movies mentioned getting $1,500 per minute of music. When it comes to royalties, the veteran Hollywood-music person told me, the standard split with the lead composer is 50-50 per cue, even if the additional or ghost composer does all the work. (After all, the lead composer is putting a roof over everybody’s head.) In certain studios, if the lead composer does anything on the cue—suggests that the tambourine be lowered in the mix, for instance—the lead composer’s share can increase to 75 percent. And if the cue comes back from the studio, network, or streamer with a “note” (a requested change), then the lead composer can take 100 percent. It is thought that this motivates the minions to deliver flawless cues.

I mean, “the master supervises and directs a bunch of journeymen who then do most of the work themselves” has been the basis of the workshop form of artisan production for approximately ever, that’s how ancient statues, renaissance paintings, and modern manga are made too