Tutti: Orchestrating Together

The founders of Tutti Music Partners discuss a new model of orchestrating.

By Kristen Romanelli

Jonathan Beard, Edward Trybek and Henri Wilkinson founded Tutti Music Partners when they saw a need for a collective approach to modern orchestration. With a growing client list that includes Bear McCreary, Michael Abels and Ludwig Göransson, this trio hopes to streamline the composer-orchestrator relationship by pooling their strengths and skills. What does this mean for the future of orchestration? Well, Beard, Trybek and Wilkinson called FSMO to let us know!

Kristen Romanelli: So, let’s start off with you each telling me a little bit about yourselves and why you started Tutti Music Partners.

Edward Trybek: Sure, I guess I’ll go first. This is Ed, and I’m actually a guitarist by training, but had been in love with film music and scoring films since I was pretty young. I remember, actually back in high school, I was subscribed to your magazine.

KR: Oh, awesome!
ET: Yes, and I came up to L.A. to study, and after years and years went into the business.

Henri Wilkinson: Hi, I’m Henri and I similarly used to subscribe to your magazine back in the day, when it was the print version. I’m from Finland, originally, and I came here in ’07. I also have a background as a musician, a jazz pianist, but I was super interested in film music, so I came to L.A. and then very shortly after, I met Ed and Jonathan. We can talk about what happened after.

Jonathan Beard: And this is Jonathan. Similarly, I started as a performing musician. I have a background in cello, and I remember in middle school, first with an Alan Menken score, wondering, “Who is this other name and what do they do?” I believe it was Danny Troob [who orchestrated Menken’s scores to Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and many others]. That’s where my path to orchestration began. Then, I got into the John Williams Star Wars scores and learned about Herb Spencer. It kind of went from there. Similarly to the other guys, I moved to L.A. to study and that’s how we all ended up in the business. So, who wants to take a stab at how we began?

ET: You want me to stab it? 

HW: Go for it.

ET: I’ll stab it. So, we actually all met while working for Bear McCreary. At that point, we were all doing some orchestration here and there, but we all got hired by him to orchestrate and do different sorts of music preparation for him. We were all hired within a week of each other. It was a very tight timeframe, this is over a decade ago now, and we did what most people do—you’d work on other projects as the main orchestrator, you would do as much as you can, but at the last minute you pull in other people. We kept pulling in each other because we liked each other’s work and we like getting beers together. (Laughs) Personalities that click are very important.

Then after a few years, we looked at it like, “Well, we’re always pulling each other in on projects and there’s always certain logistical nightmares of pulling people in.” Nightmare is a strong word, but “difficulties and challenges,” I should say, of pulling people in at the last minute. And what we found is that if we were all on a project from the get go, we were all on the same page. We weren’t trying to fill someone in on conversations from two weeks ago with a composer. So, we formed our company with the intent of pulling all our resources together, and pulling our experience together into one place. That way, every project has a sense of unity to it and a sense of calmness. Deadlines aren’t as difficult for three people to take care of as it is for one person to take care of. Jonathan, Henri, I don’t know if you guys want to add anything to that.

JB: As Ed pointed out, it goes back a long time with us just working unofficially as a team. Of course, we’re not the first team of orchestrators to orchestrate a film or TV show, but historically the model of a single supervising orchestrator has continued to be the main way that people do it in the business. More people are brought in, but that supervising orchestrator will dole out cues, pass out portions of the score as they need to to other people beyond what they can do themselves. And so by essentially doing that process from day one, where there are three supervising orchestrators on the film, we’re having all of those discussions that might be more stressful later in the project. We’re having those all together at the front of the project. It really helps unify the musical decision-making process for the score early on, which we find has a good success rate with our composer clients.

KR: Well, can you tell me a bit about how it works? I see that you’re still doing some work with Bear, having recently worked on Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and you’ve done work with Michael Abels. Tell me more about that process.

HW: Generally, the work comes through the composers and we have established a repeat clientele with Michael Abels, Tom Holkenborg, Bear McCreary and a bunch of others. But then occasionally we also get recommended. For example, with Michael Abels, we actually got recommended by Steve Bartek, who is basically Danny Elfman’s main orchestrator and also the lead guitarist of Oingo Boingo. But generally, we establish a successful relationship with a composer and then the hope is that the composer will be so pleased with us and our work that they keep coming back.

JB: We always serve at the pleasure of the composer, of course, but with this being a recommendation-based industry, the hope is that we do a good job and we represent the composer well, and when they have a composer friend who needs an orchestrator, sometimes we get lucky enough to be recommended. That can be a great thing.

KR: I know that there are film composers who have companies set up like this, but this is kind of a new model for orchestrators. As you said, this is a very networking-heavy industry—have you run into any challenges with that, and how do you plan to overcome that?

ET: Like anything, there’s a challenge, but we actually find that doing this has made it easier to network simply because we each have our own slightly different personalities and therefore we’re able to match up a personality with the client. For example, if somebody happens to be a real strong jazzer, Henri will usually go off and nerd out on something off the deep end somewhere. That’s an extreme case, but there are natural personality types that gel one way or the other. That being said, you talk about how these other composers all have teams of people, and it’s absolutely true. You have to have a team at this point, because there’s no way to deliver on the expected timeframe otherwise. In a very strong sense, our company was built as a reaction and as a solution to all of these composers having to build up teams.

JB: And that’s the way in which it meshes with the modern realities and schedules, but it also makes our delivery job so much easier. With those delivery deadlines only getting tighter, having that sort of structure to accompany the new modern composer structure, it seems to help a lot.

KR: So are you guys employing an array of arrangers and orchestrators that you can kind of pull from? As a second part to the question, are you setting up any sort of mentorship for people who are up and coming and want to get into orchestrating?

JB: Ooh, that’s a great question. I’ll take a stab at this one, guys. Jump in if I forget anything. The short answer is yes. With there being three lead orchestrators to begin with, most of the time we can do all of the orchestration ourselves, but we have a number of assistants who we have trained to help prepare our scores for us, who we mentor very actively. Occasionally, if it’s really tight and [the assistants] need to jump on a cue or two, that’s the way that getting orchestration experience has always happened. And so, we have a team of people who we really trust a lot. In those rare occasions where we need more than just the three of us, we’re ready to grow if we have to.

KR: [FSMO is] still read by lots of students, and if someone reading this wants to get into the orchestration side of the business, what sort of skills and mindset are you looking for in orchestrators? What makes a good orchestrator? Who do you look up to?

ET: Obviously, being a studio musician. There’s sort of a base level of skill and craftsmanship that one needs to have, which you can get from study and practice. Beyond that, having the right personality and attitude is very important, because as an orchestrator, it’s important to understand that you are there to facilitate a composer’s vision, and the composer is there to facilitate the director’s or producer’s vision. We’re all there to try and put forward the story. There really is no room for your own ego. I’ve met a number of younger people who treat orchestrations like, “Well, I want to be a composer, but I guess I can orchestrate a little for now.” Aside from feelings, it’s like, “This is what I do for a living.” Beyond that, it’s just kind of like, if you have that attitude, why would somebody want to hire you as an orchestrator? It doesn’t make sense. You need to be passionate about and interested in it. If you’re not excited to look at scores, then maybe this isn’t quite the right path for you. I can definitely say that all three of us nerd out on stuff all the time—looking at a score, taking a picture then sending it, “Check this thing out. What the heck is John Williams doing here? That guy is insane. Awesome!”

JB: But in a good way.

ET: Yeah, in a good way, obviously. You know what I mean. I feel like if you don’t have that love and excitement for it, then it’s a different thing. That’s not to say that that person couldn’t be a phenomenal composer—they definitely can—and they might even be a great orchestrator. Some of the older generation of people, like Bill Ross or Pete Anthony—I look to them and I say, “How have they lasted in this industry for so long?” And it’s because they’re all very good at what they do and they also know how to have the right personality type for it. Sometimes you deal with difficult personalities in the business, sometimes you have wonderful people that are just an absolute breeze to work with. You can’t control it.

JB: Just be ready to flow with anything that comes up. Sometimes there can be high pressure situations, so that’s a really good personality trait. It’s funny—technical proficiency and understanding of the orchestra are really important, but that’s step one. The assumption is that if you want to do this for a living, that part is already in place. From there, you have to grow with it and recognize those other factors that go into the whole process. One of the beautiful things about this business, as Ed was pointing out, is that every layer of this whole operation of creating music for film is in service of something greater than itself. That is actually a really nice thing, if you think of this as a service-based industry and that your job is to give the absolute best service you can. That’s the kind of attitude that can take a student in the right direction in terms of breaking into the world of orchestration.

HW: And I’ll add one more thing to that. I don’t know if it’s a personality trait or a learned skill, but a certain attention to detail [is necessary]. Orchestration as a craft definitely needs that, because it’s our job to realize the composer’s creative vision for the orchestra, and it’s also our job to do everything 100% correct. The goal is to have no questions from the musician. Everything should be legible at the session. An anal- retentive attention to detail is almost required by the profession. I’m sure Jonathan and Ed would agree.

ET: Yeah, I’d agree. We have to dot every I and cross every T. Let’s say if you have a tiny error on a violin part—and it can even be something relatively insignificant, but if it’s unclear and now somebody raises their hand and you have to explain it, that actually sows a huge seed of doubt in the rest of the orchestra. Suddenly, other musicians would be like, “Oh, well what about this thing in my part? What about this?” And suddenly one little thing that maybe took 10 seconds has now cost you two minutes of time because other people started questioning the notation. The way we look at it is that if there’s something that takes me three hours to do something on a page, it doesn’t matter. It’s worth it if that saves us 30 seconds of session time. The weird thing about music notation is that it’s precise in a way, but it’s very imprecise in other ways and it can be interpreted in different manners. You have to actually write and orchestrate it in such a way that anticipates the psychology of the player and how are they going to react to what they see. If somebody sees a page all black with ink, the first reaction is, “Oh, god.” There are tricks you can do to make it suddenly seem like, “Oh, this is fine.” It may still be just as difficult, but there are always tricks and methods to make things flow better.

HW: This is a constant learning experience still for us. We’ve been working in this craft professionally for over a decade, and every time we go to a session, every time we get to hear these wonderful musicians play this music, we get to learn. We get to hear firsthand where something worked and something didn’t, and we get to talk to the musicians at a break or after the session and ask, “Hey, what did you think of that notation?” and, “Do you think this could have been done in a different way that would be more easily realized?” I think part of what makes it fun for us is that it’s a constant learning experience—we learn from our wins and we learn from our mistakes...which we never have any, of course. (Laughs) But you know.

ET: I mean, look, if Ravel—probably one of the greatest, if not the greatest orchestrators —was always asking musicians, “How can I do this better? How can I be better?” you owe it to yourself to ask. And the musicians, the true pros, all open up and are more than happy to share their thoughts on something. Sometimes overly so (laughs), but generally it’s good.

—FSMO