\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMany of the people \ncontacted for this story\u2014composers, lawyers, music supervisors\u2014requested\n anonymity, fearful that they might jeopardize career opportunities by \nspeaking openly about how their business works. The vibe is \u201cThe first \nrule of Fight Club is: You do not talk about Fight Club.\u201d Which is \nperhaps why a series of tweets the veteran composer Joe Kraemer (Mission: Impossible\u2014Rogue Nation)\n posted last year ricocheted throughout the composing community. \u201cI can \ncount the number of mainstream Hollywood composers that I KNOW write all\n their music themselves on one hand, John Williams being the most famous\n example,\u201d Kraemer wrote. \u201cEveryone else is a team leader, a figurehead \nfor a team of composers.\u201d
Williams has described \nhis methodology, which is not all that different from the way Brahms \nwould have done it: \u201cWhile composing, I\u2019m scribbling with a pen and \nthrowing pages all over the room.\u201d He makes music with the most \ntraditional of tools: a Steinway and staff paper. His orchestrations \nare, as he has said, \u201carticulated down to the last harp.\u201d Williams is \nthe image of the composer as solitary artist that most of us hold in our\n heads. He is an industry paragon. It\u2019s even said that directors \nsometimes work around his music rather than the other way around.
The Williams approach, as Kraemer noted, is \nexceedingly rare these days. As the Hollywood composer I spoke with put \nit, \u201cThe name brands have had people write their music for 20-plus \nyears.\u201d A veteran Hollywood music supervisor described how it works. \n\u201cThe composers have six or seven projects on the go at any point,\u201d he \nsaid, referring to lead composers working in television. \u201cThe leader \nsets the \u2018tonal palette\u2019 to get them going. And then the minions do the \nactual writing.\u201d Let\u2019s say you\u2019re one of these minions\u2014an additional \ncomposer or a studio assistant who is allowed to write\u2014and you\u2019re \nworking on the score of a tentpole movie with a major film-music studio.\n You\u2019re assigned a number of \u201ccues\u201d: bits of the score that you will \ncompose to accompany specific scenes. The lead composer\u2014whose name will \ngo on the final product\u2014has worked up the overall direction. Zimmer \ncalls it \u201cthe sketch.\u201d As Devo founder turned film composer Mark \nMothersbaugh (Rugrats, The Lego Movie, and four Wes Anderson \nfilms) once described it, \u201cYou give them themes, you do a rough mock-up,\n and then those people fine-tune it all.\u201d In some ways, it\u2019s a system \nthat resembles the assembly-line studios of contemporary artists such as\n Mark Kostabi and Jeff Koons.
As a fine-tuner, you\n write the actual music for your assigned cues and submit demos to the \nlead composer\u2019s studio. Then comes a process of feedback and approval, \nfollowed by the actual recording\u2014which could mean an orchestra. To put \nfilm scoring into culinary terms, the cues you\u2019ve written go into a soup\n (the score) created by many fellow sous chefs (additional composers) \nworking under an executive chef (the lead composer). Part of the \nidiosyncratic beauty of a Hollywood film score, as the Hollywood \ncomposer I spoke to phrased it, is its \u201ccool collaborative aspect, a \nhanded-down-the-line feel.\u201d When the team clicks, there is a shared \nsense of energy and enterprise. For many young composers, it\u2019s what \ndraws them to Hollywood as opposed to Carnegie Hall.
If\n their contributions end up being credited (usually as \u201cadditional \ncomposer\u201d) and the pay is decent, the participants can be quite happy. \nThey can pay the rent. They might someday rise to the level of lead \ncomposer, as did John Powell, Henry Gregson-Williams, and Lorne Balfe, \nbrilliant film scorers all, coming out of Zimmer\u2019s behemoth Remote \nControl studio in Santa Monica. (The minions there are sometimes \nreferred to as \u201cZimlings.\u201d)
And\n then there are the ghost composers. As much as ghost composing is \nvirtually unknown among the moviegoing public, it enjoys a long \ntradition as an entry-level rite of passage. One of the gods of film \nscoring, Ennio Morricone, was a ghost composer before earning his first \ncredit on a feature in 1961. \u201cI\u2019ve been a ghost myself (on really big \nmovies),\u201d Zimmer has noted. Occasionally, the issue of ghost composing \npops up in the media, as when, in 2014, the deaf Japanese composer \nMamoru Samuragochi, a so-called \u201cdigital-age Beethoven,\u201d was found to \nhave employed a ghost composer for 18 years. It was regarded as a \nscandal.
On\n the message boards of VI Control, an online composer community, the \nconversation inevitably veers toward ghost composing. \u201cWhen I saw the \n\u2018composer\u2019\u2019s site with \u2018his\u2019 reel populated by the stuff I did 100% on \nit I wanted to puke out of shame for that person,\u201d a poster called \nAudioLoco wrote last year. Another poster alluded to big-name composers \naccepting industry awards for music they didn\u2019t write. Ghost and \nadditional composers speak of moments of almost comical awkwardness, as \nwhen a director, reviewing the score, marvels at a beautiful passage and\n exclaims to the name-brand guy who did not, in fact, write it, \u201cOh, \nwe\u2019re so lucky to have you!\u201d The awkwardness is compounded when the \nactual, unacknowledged composer is sitting in the room. It\u2019s part of the\n frustration that ghost and additional composers feel: The world has no \nclue what they do. \u201cYou\u2019re not just arranging,\u201d the Hollywood composer said. \u201cYou\u2019re writing.\u201d
The\n issue of payment can cause frustration too. The composer on the Emmy \nAward\u2013winning series told me that he got $150 up front per cue, the \nlength of which can vary. He might spend as many as 10 hours on each \none. \u201cWhen you break it down, it\u2019s like minimum wage,\u201d he said. The fee \nfor a cue can also fluctuate greatly depending on the project and the \nlead composer; one ghostwriter on big movies mentioned getting $1,500 \nper minute of music. When it comes to royalties, the veteran \nHollywood-music person told me, the standard split with the lead \ncomposer is 50-50 per cue, even if the additional or ghost composer does\n all the work. (After all, the lead composer is putting a roof over \neverybody\u2019s head.) In certain studios, if the lead composer does anything\n on the cue\u2014suggests that the tambourine be lowered in the mix, for \ninstance\u2014the lead composer\u2019s share can increase to 75 percent. And if \nthe cue comes back from the studio, network, or streamer with a \u201cnote\u201d \n(a requested change), then the lead composer can take 100 percent. It is\n thought that this motivates the minions to deliver flawless cues.
I mean, \u201cthe master supervises and directs a bunch of journeymen who then do most of the work themselves\u201d has been the basis of the workshop form of artisan production for approximately ever, that\u2019s how ancient statues, renaissance paintings, and modern manga are made too
Modern statues and painting too. Occasionally I\u2019ll read in an Art with a capital a publication that the art world\u2019s dirty little secret is that many well known artists don\u2019t make their own work anymore while putting on a pretense that they personally did all the painting and whatnot.
On an amusing sidenote, the conditions this article discuses is kinda a plot to a Columbo episode from 2001 wherein a famous composer has been passing off the work of his \nprot\u00e9g\u00e9 as his own and then kills him to keep it a secret.
Like, y'know Lauren Faust didn’t draw every frame of MLP:FiM? Applejack’s character designer didn’t even draw most Applejacks! Hell, the core studio only even did keyframes, the rest was probably offshored to Korean inbetweeners! Whoooooo cares
(and meanwhile it’s been centuries since anyone would think to expect her to grind and mix her own pigments\u2026)
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