Music, Hollywood’s Way II

Regarding David E. Kole’s letter about the “current crop” of Hollywood film composers, specifically Marc Shaiman (“Music, Hollywood’s Way,” Saturday Letters, Sept. 18): Kole’s letter was filled with inaccurate and/or untrue statements.

I am a musician who has worked in the film studios of Hollywood for 30 years, first as a pianist, and then as a composer-orchestrator-conductor. In recent years I have been hired to conduct other composers’ scores when they choose to stay in the booth with the engineer, thereby requiring a separate conductor on stage.

Composing music for a film is a complicated task and requires a team to produce it. It’s not that the composer couldn’t “do it all” (some do more than others) but that the team can expedite the process and the many changes and technical problems that arise.

The team usually includes the orchestrators, the orchestra contractor, the copyist, the music editor, the computer operator for film markings and click tracks, the engineer and the conductor. Movies frequently are given to the composer with a limited time to produce a score. Composing the music takes a great deal of time, let alone orchestrating it and completing all the technical aspects in time for the scheduled recordings.

I have served as Shaiman’s conductor for quite a few movies. He is a consummate musician who can indeed “read and write,” play, compose, arrange, orchestrate and conduct, if only each day had 25 hours in it.

Contrary to Kole’s assertions, no matter how thoroughly musically educated you are, scoring films has to do with dramatic as well as musical judgment (that includes the director and/or producer’s judgment), and what you put on the drawing board at home doesn’t always turn out or sound the way you thought it would. On the subject of film scoring, it is Kole who is “humming.”

ARTIE KANELos Angeles