How the hell do you write like this?

Yeah well, people already answered “there are no tricks, come back in 30 years” and you gotta start somewhere!

Definitely! It is a useful device, too bad it’s been run to the ground because of a lot of poor writing.

Kinda off topic: funnily enough, I was the first one that showed Chris Elfman’s version of that train scene, as he never saw it before. A very surreal experience!

 

You missed the far more important underlying message there -- "say something complex in the simplest way possible", "do a piano reduction of your idea", etc. To write like John Williams, you don't start off by writing like John Williams. To write like John Williams, the "trick" is to get better at writing properly cohesive, simpler cues. If using string ostinatos tastefully is part of that equation, then cool! There's helpful aesthetic advice in what Young said, but it won't replace the need to write something worthwhile underneath the orchestration, hence Doug's advice. It needs to be built on top of that idea (as you're obviously aware).

Sort of like a brass "bwah". They can be a useful tool, but when literally all your brass does is fart, it loses efficacy quickly.

Oh interesting! I would think he would have heard the finished score.

 

It was very funny, he got called to replace Elfman in a couple of scenes, but he never heard Elfman’s take on those scenes, which surprised me

He’s such a fantastic and warm person, his reaction was very positive, and his only criticism was on the final few bars, which cut the tension way too early (which is why he was called in the first place). Another interesting point that was made by another person on that day was that you can kind of hear that Elfman writes on a DAW directly: his parts are unnecessarily complicated and dense, with a fuckton of counterpoint; this can be explained by him inputting lines on a computer and not writing them on paper.

 

That's such a weird way to solve the issue. You'd think having Elfman rewrite the end would have been the go-to; bringing in someone else to write a single cue is a recipe for losing cohesion (and bingo, modern blockbuster).

Really interesting point, though; I'll have to stew on that. I have noticed it gets really easy to simply add parts in a DAW that tend not to be meaningful and build far too quickly.

 

Yeah, apparently there were some unclear political things going on, that is often the case. Sometimes composers don't have time to rewrite and things like this happen in Hollywood, or ego gets in the way, etc...

I think also Mike said it in one masterclass: as soon as I'm writing on paper, I know exactly which of the many notes are strictly necessary. This concept of "you're not gonna waste your time handwriting something on the score that you don't absolutely need" is really interesting. By the same token, as soon as I move to paper, whatever confusion I have in my head gets cleared out and I know which version of "the melody" I actually meant. A lot of advantages on writing on paper!

Thank you for the comments and the replies! (Sorry everyone for going off topic here!)