My music editor was Josef von Stroheim, whose father was the silent-era director, Erich von Stroheim. I said, Well, I ve seen a picture. Now sit down on the bench, I m gonna show you how it operates. Later when we got to editing the music, he involved me in the editing process, and I edited some of my own music. Which is hard to do today, especially since they aren t using Moviolas anymore.
Composing is the initial piece of music.
You start out with a sketch, a basis for the composition. Then you go on to making it bigger, adding more riffs for the different dramatic elements of the film. Orchestration is what I call painting by numbers . You take the sometimes elongated riffs and fill them out so a whole orchestra can play it. Then the incidental music is written to fill in the gaps.