That's the super-Reader's Digest version.

Right now, I'm too lazy to go into detail.

The most important thing to remember is that the composer ALWAYS comes first with a piece of music. What I mean by that is the conductor, the orchestrator, and the performers are all dependent on the composer doing his job first. No composer -- no music to conduct, orchestrate, or perform. Therefore, it is right that we generally discuss (and revere and worship, etc) the composers on these websites, for they are responsible, more than anyone else, for the sounds you hear when you pop that CD in the holder.

Having said that, without the conductor, orchestrator, and performers, any music that a composer writes would remain, at best, squiggles on a page and imagined sounds in his (or her) head. The orchestrator is responsible for taking the music that the composer has written on two, three, or four lines, and expanding it or transcribing it onto orchestral score paper (which can contain as many as twenty or thirty lines). The amount of creativity that goes into that task depends in large part on the composer. Some composers really do just sit at a piano, or other keyboard, and improvise music that they write down, without much direction other than pitches, rhythms, and an occasional dynamic marking.

However, it is Far more likely (particularly with the top caliber composers such as Goldsmith, Williams, etc.) that the composer actually DOES have some ideas in mind for the specific instruments he wants to play certain parts. He will indicate that on the reduced score, and it is the job of the orchestrator merely to follow those directions and produce the necessary parts.

Once the music has been completely written out, it is given to the conductor, who will lead the orchestra. At this point in the process, the "creation" stage of the music is technically over. What remains is for the conductor to interpret what the composer and/or orchestrator have written. Markings on the score indicate tempo, dynamic level (loud or soft), and most of the other components of performance, but there are still some decisions left to the conductor. He balances the various instruments in performance (e.g. "Violins, you are covering up the oboe melody in measure 56 . . . Trumpets, could you bring out your fanfare theme a little more in measure 72?") Of course, he is also responsible for watching the movie (or listening to the click track) and keeping the music properly synchronized with what is happening on screen while it is being performed.

Again, most of the composers we discuss regularly have the ability to (and usually do) conduct their own music, simply because they can and it gives them one more chance to insure that what they initially "heard" in their heads comes out of the speakers.

HE WRITES HIS OWN MUSIC, ALREADY
Nothing has been as pervasive or damaging to Elfman's reputation as the constant belief and insistence by others that he doesn't write his own music. Never mind the similarity of style from score to score, the fact that he has continued to write large-scale scores without using Shirley Walker to conduct, who people at one point assumed really wrote Batman; that the scores his Iead orchestrator, Steve Bartek, have done on his own have been completely different from Elfman's
music; and the sheer illogic to the assumption that Elfman could have a hidden army of ghost-writers somewhere without anyone naming names or coming forward. Yes, it is true he came up with the theme to Batman while on an airplane, then went into the john and hummed it into a tape recorder. Many composers and songwriters have been known to carry around tape recorders and hum out a melody when it comes to them; some turn over the tape to an orchestrator to flesh out, many write it themselves. Elfman took his tape of him humming the Batman theme, brought it home and wrote it out himself at a piano with pencil and paper.

"I use orchestrators, not arrangers. The difference may seem subtle. but it's not," he explains. "The orchestrator's job is to take music which has been clearly written and balance it for the size orchestra that has been designated. Steve Bartek has been my primary orchestrator on almost every film I've done. He never changes a melody, he doesn't add counterpoint, he does not change or add harmonies. That's the composer's job. He will elect what instrumentation might best express what I'm trying to convey in terms of doubling melodies and dividing the parts of the string section so
they can be used most effectively. I don't want to minimize this job, it's very important. It's time-consuming and I, Iike most composers, depend on our orchestrator to complete the final stage of the scoring. John Williams uses orchestrators and he certainly doesn't need to. Prokofiev used orchestrators, though he certainly didn't need to. I use orchestrators for the same reason." To give specific examples, if Elfman wrote three parts for strings, Bartek will decide which individual players will play which note to best balance the orchestra. He might also write out more orchestral
parts than are eventually used; for example, the oboe music might include lines from the flute part, so that even though the oboist is not expected to play, his music will include the flute lines in case it is deemed necessary for him or her to "double" (also play) it. It's simply easier to have it all written in advance than to have to rush and have the copyist scribble out new parts on the stage."We may have the first pass of a cue over-orchestrated, and then have to tacit parts, but better that than under-orchestrated," he explains.

The orchestrator is helpful before the recording, as well as during it. "I have a tendency to overwrite, as you're well aware, and Steve is very helpful in finding train-wrecks before we get to the scoring stage. When I'm moving very fast, he'll be able to help me, like 'tell me where I ****ed up by laying it on too dense.' Sometimes Steve will call me up, he'll say, 'Your melody is down there in this very loud section, I think you've got to make a decision between what the trombones
are playing or where the melody is.'"

In two rare cases. Elfman has delegated a cue of a score to an outside composer, just to finish on time, Jonathan Sheffer wrote the helicopter music in Darkman and Shirley
Walker did one of the climactic action cues in Nightbreed. These resulted from Elfman knowing he could write 63 minutes of a 70 minute score in the time allotted, for example and delegating the other 7, often for particularly noisy, sound-effects laden cues he didn't want to deal with, to the outside musician. "The few times that I've asked orchestrators to do an arrangement and take a melody I've written and turn it into an original piece of score, I've always given them composing credit," he states. (For proof, see the end credits of the respective films.) "That same philosophy
applied in many films today would leave very long and embarrassing end credits."

Elfman's first film was the aforementioned Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, and he briefly toiled with the idea of doing it the usual "rock and roll method," i.e. playing themes and having an orchestrator take it from there. But he realized. "to really get your voice sounding original, you need to do more than that. I started doing that for two weeks on Pee-Wee, and realized, this isn't going to work. I forced myself to start writing the stuff out." He got by on Pee-Wee by the fact that "it was a very
simple score", same for Back to School. "I got up to Beetlejuice and over the course of ten scores got to the point where I could handle more complicated music and I had to push myself to do Batman. Once I got to Batman I had the confidence to hold much denser pieces in my head,
because in order to write I have to mentally freeze the entire piece of music and write it down one part at a time. Same thing leading into Dolores Claiborne, I couldn't have done that at the time I did Batman, because at that point I couldn't really do dissonance, I had a hard time holding onto chords with odd voicings and movements, and moving things around in a non-rhythmic way. The key scores for me were Pee-Wee to Beetlejuice to Batman to Dolores, those were the big jumps, for me at least I'm not saying they were great leaps for music-kind."

LOOK: SCORES!
"It's always amazed me how far and widespread the rumor that I hire other people to write my music has gone," Elfman states. "It's most interesting to me that Steve Bartek, who has orchestrated 95% of my music, never seems to be the one given that credit, which usually gets bestowed on conductors and secondary orchestrators, for reasons which I can't fathom. I've only heard a
thousand times that Shirley Walker 'really' wrote the score to Batman, that Bill Ross 'really' wrote the score to Beetlejuice, that Mark McKenzie 'really' wrote the score to The Nightmare Before Christmas - the list goes on and on, and it's very boring."

Elfman's initial response to a request to print his sketches was an emphatic "No way!" and one just has to look at his work to see why he might be defensive. "I'm embarrassed for good musicians to see my written music. My writing is self-taught, and as is with any illiterates learning to write, they often teach themselves in peculiar ways. My uses of sharps or flats often have a random quality as to my ear A-sharp and B-flat have no difference. To a trained musician, of course, they are different, in how they're read. Often I catch myself writing in sharps and realize I should be in flats and switch half-way through a phrase, creating some very confusing looking notation, particularly
when changing keys. In that sense, I'm certainly an orchestrator's biggest nightmare. Also, I'm most
comfortable writing in treble clef, even if it means using 15 or 31vb [one or two octaves lower than
written] next to the phrase because this requires the least amount of concentration while I'm writing. When I feel alert, I write in bass clef, it just depends on the time of day. My writing is very much like an illiterate person who taught themselves the alphabet and how to type while writing a novel. They may be able to accurately tell their story, but it will be filled with misspellings and grammatical errors. Because of this, they, like myself find the viewing of their original manuscripts to be embarrassing. I can't make up for a dozen years of training that I never had, but musically
speaking, I am able to say exactly what I wish to say, though often in awkward ways."

So basically, Elfman is a bad speller. However unlike a self-taught novelist who can use a spell-checker on a computer, there's no spell-checker for writing music with pencil and paper. "Those misspellings stay forever in my music," he says.

I hope this gives you a clearer picture of Danny Elfman+s way of composing. Indeed the music he writes is intirely his own.

SFT

Anyway, I just wanted to point out that Elfman does get a lot of heat for his composing only-no orchestrating/conducting. Back during my senior year in high school, a guest independent composer came during Career Day and he ranted about how Elfman doesn't even write his own music and how Goldsmith is a musical God. I suppose this guy knew what he was talking about because he's in the business (besides, he had to explain it to us...) and he's been around these big-namers, I think.

I've heard stories of a couple of big-name composers (whom I won't mention), and they WERE NOT from other composers.

That's NOT to say that this is the case with Elfman (since he was brought up). However, people in the business WILL know more than us. Now, as to whether or not somebody's going to start talking smack just because they're jealous, who knows. BUT even if some of the stories are true, would you really believe them? If somebody came up and said "Jerry Goldsmith doesn't write his own music," would you believe it? Of course not. However, if the story were true, we'd never know. Because we refuse to believe anything bad about our favorite composers.

By the way. Let's not forget the copyists in all of this.

P.S. I'm not bashing Goldsmith. That was just an example.

And further, let me give you this little piece of the same article, wich was left out before:

"There's a big bitter contingent of people out there who feel like their place is being robbed by people like me," states Elfman the composer, forced back into self-reflexive mode and still paying for the career-defining error of admitting he has no formal education. "The most annoying thing about composers is their inability to accept the possibility that one could be self-taught. That doesn't exist in any other field in film. A director doesn't need to go to film school and no one will question him. But a composer cannot be a composer doing their own music without going through formal musical training. If that's what they think, fine, I don't give a ****. The fact that there are a lot of composers that on their own would be better orchestrators than me, that's great. I think a good proportion of the composers working out there are really just orchestrators, and haven't a ****ing clue what to do with a melody or how to use it or how to do variations on a theme; and/or they're songwriters who do what I'm accused of doing, although I don't, which is just coming up with melodies and hiring a team to adapt it into a score."

This is kind of what some of you where pointing out....

SFT