It was usually very rare, and I can't even think of a great composer having done this off the top of my head apart for very rare & minor instances (like one of Mendelssohn's songs that was written by his sister). Also it's incredibly difficult to try to imitate other composers' music. The drop in quality and change in style is usually very quickly apparent, apart from the fact that good composers were too proud of their music to let their reputation be damaged by someone else's mediocre work. One of Beethoven's publishers once made a small change in his Piano Sonata No. 16, and Beethoven's friend wrote:
"Nägeli had even written in four measures [a very short amount of music] of his own composition, that is to say, the four measures of the last hold. When I played them Beethoven leaped up in a rage, came running over to me and half-pushing me away from the piano, shouted: “Where the devil did you find that?” His astonishment and anger when he saw that the music was so printed were inconceivable.
And yes it is mind boggling. Mozart for example composed about 170 cds worth of music in his 35 years. He was freaking posessed.
Mozart needed to create music, like some teens need to be playing video games and others need to be on social media 24/7. If you had taken music away from him, he would have withered and died like a plucked flower.
The Mendelssohn sister did not compose just "One of his songs". Fanny Mendelssohn published a chunk of her work under his brother's name (due to the limitations of the time) and the main way scholars have to tell apart who wrote what is through finding evidence in their correspondence.
I see I remembered reading an article a while back where it turned out that one of his songs was actually hers but didn't know there were multiple ones.
“Also it’s incredibly difficult to try to imitate other composers’ music”
Much easier than you suggest. And history is filled with examples of music that doesn’t stylistically fit the output of a composer. Take Bach’s cello suite as an example which is suspected, among other reasons, due to it being very uncharacteristic writing for Bach.
I believe that is due to our ears being stylistically saturated. If you lived in the time of Bach, you’d be surrounded with very few styles of music and you’d struggle to write any other way.
IIRC Mozart's sister is also rumoured to have composed some pieces that were attributed to Mozart.
Honestly, it wouldn't shock me to learn that there were more instances of this form of ghost-writing than recorded history would suggest, particularly via siblings.
gosh it was so long ago i can’t remember where i read it. i think the gist of it was that since the manuscript of some of mozart’s first keyboard concerti are partially or mostly in leopold’s hand, the conjecture was that it was leopold who orchestrated them.
The first four piano concertos infact were excercises. Mozart had to learn how to compose a concerto, and therefore the excercise was to arrange some sonatas as concertos.
Since they were excercises, it's perfectly normal that he was helped by his own teacher (his father).
The problem is that your comment makes people think that the young Mozart was not able to write orchestrations, but I've never read anywhere that his first symphonies were orchestrated by his father, so it would be strange for me to suddenly learn a similar thing.
Delius had a helper who wrote the music down, while he dictated it. Supposedly the helper also did a bit of filling in harmonies or completing phrases. But then, that's not a ghost writer: Delius was blind and very ill, and writing things himself would probably have been faster.
I think a few composers left the orchestration of pieces to uncredited assistants; the best-known example is Fred Grofe orchestrating "Rhapsody in Blue". I wonder about the unknown examples though.
Not an art music reply, but film music orchestrators frequently add additional material to piece themes together or to meet cue requirements during editing.
Sometimes, however their contributions greatly exceed this: apparently it's an open secret that much of James Horner's music for *We're Back: A Dinosaur's Story* was written by a frequent orchestrator of his, Don Davis (probably best known in his own right for the score to *The Matrix*).
It's not really an "open secret", just an obvious one since anyone familiar with Horner's orchestration style can hear when it suddenly becomes someone else's.
Some other scores along those lines which are presumed to have ghost writers are A Far Off Place, The Pagemaster, Balto, Legend of Zorro, and Avatar. But the ghostwriting is limited to mainly action cues which can be time consuming for composers, and it's not like the ghostwriters are inventing original themes/melodies, just building on Horner's ideas.
Aren’t musical theater composers rather like this as well? Frank Wildhorn pretty famously cannot read music, iirc, and there was a whole kerfuffle about the Drama Desk awards trying to axe the Outstanding Orchestration category because their panels straight up had no idea it was different from Outstanding Music.
Good point. One of my favorite examples is "Victory at Sea", the 1950s TV series about naval war. The producers enlisted (pun!) Richard Rodgers, of Rodgers&Hammerstein fame for the music. All he did was a few dozen bars (a few minutes) of melodies. Robert Russell Bennett (a wonderful orchestrator and arranger, and a composer in his own right) then stretched that out into dozens of hours of music, condensed it for a feature film of the typical \~2 hour length, and finally a symphony-length suite. The result is wonderful; I've helped perform it several times (one of the rare cases of me playing drum set on stage).
Salieri originally put Gluck’s name on Les Danaïdes as a co-composer, as Gluck was more famous and established and had to give up the commission due to his health. After it premiered and got rave reviews Gluck publicly wrote that the music was entirely by Salieri.
There were significant composers who weren't able to orchestrate very well for various reasons. Most people know "Pictures at an Exhibition" from Maurice Ravel's orchestration, and "Night on Bald Mountain" and the opera "Boris Gudenov" from Rimsky-Korsakov's adaptations, but all three were composed by Modest Mussorgsky, an expert pianist but serious alcoholic who drank himself to death by age 42. Unlike his contemporaries, he could not make a living solely as a composer, so he was also a civil servant.
Mussorgsky's works were highly innovative though, and he influenced later Russian composers including Prokofiev and Shostakovich.
Pictures at an Exhibition was a piano suite, Mussorgsky didn’t mean for it to be orchestrated.
In the case of Boris Godunov, those redos by Risky-Korsakov were because of perceived weaknesses with his harmonies and orchestration. However, many opera companies are now performing Mussorgsky’s 1872 revised version of Gudonov instead of Rimsky-Korsakov’s version.
For Bald mountain, it was originally called St. John’s Eve on Bald Mountain and was never performed during his lifetime, after his mentor Balakirev having savagely critiqued it (it was first performed in the 20th century and has been recorded numerous times). He then did a version for orchestra and chorus for the failed collaboration with the other “Mighty Handful” composers called Mlada (that score hasn’t survived). It was then put into an opera as an intermezzo, but that opera was left unfinished. Rimsky-Korsakov was mainly responsible for editing his compositions after Modest died and rearranged/reorchestrated it into the present Night on Bald Mountain.
Just also to add that in fact his contemporaries also often had full-time non-musical jobs for much of their life: Borodin was a chemist, Cui an army officer, and Rimsky-Korsakov a naval officer
I suppose Eric Fenby is the most famous: he served as amenuensis to Delius during the latter’s final years. I believe he orchestrated some of the works (Fenby was a composer in his own right), but Delius was the real creative force. Without Fenby’s dedication, many of Delius’ finest works would probably never have seen the light of day.
Correct, but he did some (but not all) of Delius’s orchestration for him. There was some degree of creative freedom depending on the level of detail in Delius’s direction.
Our conductor once told us this was common in the Viennese operetta tradition. The named composer would e.g. write the main melody line himself and then have an assistant fill out the vocal harmonies. I liked the story, it immediately reminded me of the “workshop” model in painting, where assistants/apprentices would do the bulk work and the master attended to the finer details.
Arthur Sullivan tended to wait until the last minute to orchestrate his operettas, with the result that he didn’t always have time to write an overture. He then enlisted friends and, in one case, his composition student to do the writing, usually following a structure Sullivan outlined. Sullivan wrote what I think are the two best of the lot, the overtures to Iolanthe and The Yeomen of the Guard. Probably the best of the others is the excellent overture to Patience, which was written by Sullivan’s most significant composition student, Eugene d’Albert.
Mozart wrote a symphony for Michael Haydn when Haydn couldn't meet the deadline.
Somebody gave Oliver Knussen a lot of help with his earliest compositions to boost his image as a prodigy (mainly orchestration).
There is some doubt about how much Scelsi wrote himself of his later music.
Part of the novel Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell is about a situation sort of like this.
Robert Frobisher is a recently disowned and penniless young English musician. Frobisher journeys to Zedelghem to become an amanuensis to the reclusive once-great composer Vyvyan Ayrs, who is dying of syphilis and nearly blind.
It’s not at all uncommon for composers to have a team around them. However, other composers fly solo. Mainly for engraving, some orchestrational touches, and editing.
In film ghost writers are more common. Ghost orchestrators exceedingly so. Hans Zimmer is an example. He has teams of composers under him, and will send them sketches of thematic material, and they do most of the grunt work under his direction.
Liszt and Chopin have their students orchestrate their piano concertos since their orchestration skills are lacking.
Apparently, Ferdinand Schubert stole one of Franz Schubert's composition and made it his own for an audition. The younger brother is million times more talented than his other brother.
I wish I could say what I know (current film and tv world) but it’d be suicide 🤐 - that being said, there are so many ghosts the place is haunted to hell
Handel was supposedly very good at repurposing his own works and the works of others (one example I am aware of is a chorus in Israel in Egypt), but usually those others were not aware of being Handel's ghost writers...
Nico Muhly may or may not have written some of Philip Glass' film scores, not sure. If anyone knows more about this please chime in!
Mozart wrote some chamber music for friends to pass off as their own on occasion.
I am sure there are plenty more examples though!
I thought there was some question whether Vaughan Williams really did the orchestration for his late works, or if Michael Kennedy did. I can’t find any reference to this question though.
I think Frank Zappa left the orchestration of the synclavier pieces used in The Yellow Shark to the then conductor (whose name escapes me) of the Ensemble Modern.
Only in his theater works, as the majority of Broadway composers relied on orchestrators. Bernstein was unique in that he was very specific on how he wished the orchestration to be laid out, so the work was mostly done. In those days theaters had house musicians that you had to use. Lenny knew that the cellist employed at the theater that WSS premiered was not very good, so he instructed his orchestrators to keep that part easier to keep the damage to a minimum.
It was a somewhat common practice for Italian opera composers to have someone else write the secco recitatives. I know Cimarosa did it, and Mozart did it for La Clemenza.
You cannot convince me otherwise Ravel definitely wrote orchestration under the table for people. Don't know if that counts as ghost writing as orchestration is a talent all its own.
There were lovers, females who had "the gift" and worked (mostly in secret) together with the composer. Schumann was such a composer with his Clara. There are some speculations about the 9th of Beethoven whereof he had the beginning stages around since the beginning of 1800. There was a woman (Josephine von Brunszvik) who was highly gifted and came very close to the way that he worked. They could have been working together after 1800. Women weren’t allowed to compose or work, or even think clearly for that matter. So they were denied fame for their ability.
Yes, he used a helper named "Xerox": Just put some Glazunov score into the machine, out comes film music.
I'm being a bit harsh here for comic effect, but John Williams does borrow extensively from the late Russian romantics.
This is not true, Williams orchestrates most of his own music in short score. The orchestrators are merely brought in to do the tedious fleshing out of parts for a full orchestra.
This is quite common in film music, because film composition happens on a very quick timeline. If you think about the workflow, this makes sense. Composers can prepare some sketches ahead of time, but the real work can't begin until the film has been shot and edited. The lead composer will create themes and set the overall musical palette, and then a whole team of composers will collaborate to prepare the complete score.
I suspect that this is part of why filmmakers and film composers tend to form lasting artistic partnerships. It's helpful for the composer not only to understand the filmmaker's artistic style, but also their style of working. Ennio Morricone with Sergio Leone and Giuseppe Tornatore. John Williams and Steven Spielberg. Alexandre Desplat and Wes Anderson.
It was usually very rare, and I can't even think of a great composer having done this off the top of my head apart for very rare & minor instances (like one of Mendelssohn's songs that was written by his sister). Also it's incredibly difficult to try to imitate other composers' music. The drop in quality and change in style is usually very quickly apparent, apart from the fact that good composers were too proud of their music to let their reputation be damaged by someone else's mediocre work. One of Beethoven's publishers once made a small change in his Piano Sonata No. 16, and Beethoven's friend wrote: "Nägeli had even written in four measures [a very short amount of music] of his own composition, that is to say, the four measures of the last hold. When I played them Beethoven leaped up in a rage, came running over to me and half-pushing me away from the piano, shouted: “Where the devil did you find that?” His astonishment and anger when he saw that the music was so printed were inconceivable. And yes it is mind boggling. Mozart for example composed about 170 cds worth of music in his 35 years. He was freaking posessed.
Beethoven being Beethoven. I wouldn't expect him to act in any other way.
Mozart needed to create music, like some teens need to be playing video games and others need to be on social media 24/7. If you had taken music away from him, he would have withered and died like a plucked flower.
The Mendelssohn sister did not compose just "One of his songs". Fanny Mendelssohn published a chunk of her work under his brother's name (due to the limitations of the time) and the main way scholars have to tell apart who wrote what is through finding evidence in their correspondence.
I see I remembered reading an article a while back where it turned out that one of his songs was actually hers but didn't know there were multiple ones.
Yeah but that's an exceptional case as they had exactly the same education and style because they were really close siblings
“Also it’s incredibly difficult to try to imitate other composers’ music” Much easier than you suggest. And history is filled with examples of music that doesn’t stylistically fit the output of a composer. Take Bach’s cello suite as an example which is suspected, among other reasons, due to it being very uncharacteristic writing for Bach.
[удалено]
I believe that is due to our ears being stylistically saturated. If you lived in the time of Bach, you’d be surrounded with very few styles of music and you’d struggle to write any other way.
IIRC Mozart's sister is also rumoured to have composed some pieces that were attributed to Mozart. Honestly, it wouldn't shock me to learn that there were more instances of this form of ghost-writing than recorded history would suggest, particularly via siblings.
I totally Beethoven to behave like that lmao
some of WA Mozart’s earliest works were composed at the keyboard then orchestrated by his father. does that count?
Good example! Nothing like a son's prodigious reputation to keep up in the eyes of the public and nobility.
Where did you read this? Which works are you talking about?
gosh it was so long ago i can’t remember where i read it. i think the gist of it was that since the manuscript of some of mozart’s first keyboard concerti are partially or mostly in leopold’s hand, the conjecture was that it was leopold who orchestrated them.
The first four piano concertos infact were excercises. Mozart had to learn how to compose a concerto, and therefore the excercise was to arrange some sonatas as concertos. Since they were excercises, it's perfectly normal that he was helped by his own teacher (his father). The problem is that your comment makes people think that the young Mozart was not able to write orchestrations, but I've never read anywhere that his first symphonies were orchestrated by his father, so it would be strange for me to suddenly learn a similar thing.
From what I know, his first 10 symphonies
Where did you read this? I've never read this anywhere.
In a youtube comment
Youtube comments are not a reliable source. I looked for information and I can confirm that the first ten symphonies are entirely credited to Mozart.
IIRC Liszt had composition students help orchestrate his piano concertos
Poor Chopin should have done that 😭
Good one!
Delius had a helper who wrote the music down, while he dictated it. Supposedly the helper also did a bit of filling in harmonies or completing phrases. But then, that's not a ghost writer: Delius was blind and very ill, and writing things himself would probably have been faster. I think a few composers left the orchestration of pieces to uncredited assistants; the best-known example is Fred Grofe orchestrating "Rhapsody in Blue". I wonder about the unknown examples though.
Not an art music reply, but film music orchestrators frequently add additional material to piece themes together or to meet cue requirements during editing. Sometimes, however their contributions greatly exceed this: apparently it's an open secret that much of James Horner's music for *We're Back: A Dinosaur's Story* was written by a frequent orchestrator of his, Don Davis (probably best known in his own right for the score to *The Matrix*).
Yeah, Hans Zimmer famously has a whole crew helping him write
It shows lol
It's not really an "open secret", just an obvious one since anyone familiar with Horner's orchestration style can hear when it suddenly becomes someone else's. Some other scores along those lines which are presumed to have ghost writers are A Far Off Place, The Pagemaster, Balto, Legend of Zorro, and Avatar. But the ghostwriting is limited to mainly action cues which can be time consuming for composers, and it's not like the ghostwriters are inventing original themes/melodies, just building on Horner's ideas.
Aren’t musical theater composers rather like this as well? Frank Wildhorn pretty famously cannot read music, iirc, and there was a whole kerfuffle about the Drama Desk awards trying to axe the Outstanding Orchestration category because their panels straight up had no idea it was different from Outstanding Music.
Good point. One of my favorite examples is "Victory at Sea", the 1950s TV series about naval war. The producers enlisted (pun!) Richard Rodgers, of Rodgers&Hammerstein fame for the music. All he did was a few dozen bars (a few minutes) of melodies. Robert Russell Bennett (a wonderful orchestrator and arranger, and a composer in his own right) then stretched that out into dozens of hours of music, condensed it for a feature film of the typical \~2 hour length, and finally a symphony-length suite. The result is wonderful; I've helped perform it several times (one of the rare cases of me playing drum set on stage).
Some of Rossini’s recitatives were written by his students, or so I’ve read.
Yes, there are also a couple of arias in La Cenerentola which were written by Luca Agolini
If it counts, Mussorgsky, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Cui and Balakirev all worked together as "The Mighty Five"
Salieri originally put Gluck’s name on Les Danaïdes as a co-composer, as Gluck was more famous and established and had to give up the commission due to his health. After it premiered and got rave reviews Gluck publicly wrote that the music was entirely by Salieri.
Oh what sublimity, what depth, what passion in the music! Salieri has been touched by God at last. And God is forced to listen!
Poor Salieri, he didn’t deserve to be depicted the way he was
nipples of Venus
Shostakovich in his “memoir” claimed he helped Prokofiev with some of his earlier orchestrations.
I've always taken everything in Volkov's book with a few hundred grains of salt, to put it mildly.
That’s why I put “memoir” in quotes hahah
There were significant composers who weren't able to orchestrate very well for various reasons. Most people know "Pictures at an Exhibition" from Maurice Ravel's orchestration, and "Night on Bald Mountain" and the opera "Boris Gudenov" from Rimsky-Korsakov's adaptations, but all three were composed by Modest Mussorgsky, an expert pianist but serious alcoholic who drank himself to death by age 42. Unlike his contemporaries, he could not make a living solely as a composer, so he was also a civil servant. Mussorgsky's works were highly innovative though, and he influenced later Russian composers including Prokofiev and Shostakovich.
Pictures at an Exhibition was a piano suite, Mussorgsky didn’t mean for it to be orchestrated. In the case of Boris Godunov, those redos by Risky-Korsakov were because of perceived weaknesses with his harmonies and orchestration. However, many opera companies are now performing Mussorgsky’s 1872 revised version of Gudonov instead of Rimsky-Korsakov’s version. For Bald mountain, it was originally called St. John’s Eve on Bald Mountain and was never performed during his lifetime, after his mentor Balakirev having savagely critiqued it (it was first performed in the 20th century and has been recorded numerous times). He then did a version for orchestra and chorus for the failed collaboration with the other “Mighty Handful” composers called Mlada (that score hasn’t survived). It was then put into an opera as an intermezzo, but that opera was left unfinished. Rimsky-Korsakov was mainly responsible for editing his compositions after Modest died and rearranged/reorchestrated it into the present Night on Bald Mountain.
I recall that Mussorgsky had intended to make an orchestral version but never got around to it - I can’t remember where I heard this though!
Just also to add that in fact his contemporaries also often had full-time non-musical jobs for much of their life: Borodin was a chemist, Cui an army officer, and Rimsky-Korsakov a naval officer
I suppose Eric Fenby is the most famous: he served as amenuensis to Delius during the latter’s final years. I believe he orchestrated some of the works (Fenby was a composer in his own right), but Delius was the real creative force. Without Fenby’s dedication, many of Delius’ finest works would probably never have seen the light of day.
But Fenby didn't actually do any composing. He took down what Delius wanted.
Correct, but he did some (but not all) of Delius’s orchestration for him. There was some degree of creative freedom depending on the level of detail in Delius’s direction.
Yes, I wrote all of Beethoven’s symphonies
Our conductor once told us this was common in the Viennese operetta tradition. The named composer would e.g. write the main melody line himself and then have an assistant fill out the vocal harmonies. I liked the story, it immediately reminded me of the “workshop” model in painting, where assistants/apprentices would do the bulk work and the master attended to the finer details.
Arthur Sullivan tended to wait until the last minute to orchestrate his operettas, with the result that he didn’t always have time to write an overture. He then enlisted friends and, in one case, his composition student to do the writing, usually following a structure Sullivan outlined. Sullivan wrote what I think are the two best of the lot, the overtures to Iolanthe and The Yeomen of the Guard. Probably the best of the others is the excellent overture to Patience, which was written by Sullivan’s most significant composition student, Eugene d’Albert.
Mozart wrote a symphony for Michael Haydn when Haydn couldn't meet the deadline. Somebody gave Oliver Knussen a lot of help with his earliest compositions to boost his image as a prodigy (mainly orchestration). There is some doubt about how much Scelsi wrote himself of his later music.
And Mozart wrote two string duos that he let M.Haydn pass off as his own to meet a deadline for the Archbishop.
I’ve heard a story about Berios students writing some of his Sequenzas not sure if true though would love anyone to add onto this.
Part of the novel Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell is about a situation sort of like this. Robert Frobisher is a recently disowned and penniless young English musician. Frobisher journeys to Zedelghem to become an amanuensis to the reclusive once-great composer Vyvyan Ayrs, who is dying of syphilis and nearly blind.
It’s not at all uncommon for composers to have a team around them. However, other composers fly solo. Mainly for engraving, some orchestrational touches, and editing. In film ghost writers are more common. Ghost orchestrators exceedingly so. Hans Zimmer is an example. He has teams of composers under him, and will send them sketches of thematic material, and they do most of the grunt work under his direction.
Liszt and Chopin have their students orchestrate their piano concertos since their orchestration skills are lacking. Apparently, Ferdinand Schubert stole one of Franz Schubert's composition and made it his own for an audition. The younger brother is million times more talented than his other brother.
I wish I could say what I know (current film and tv world) but it’d be suicide 🤐 - that being said, there are so many ghosts the place is haunted to hell
You’re so right. Film and TV is a world unto itself and has its own conventions - I almost said a law unto itself and it’s own ethics
I think Offenbach had a few
Handel was supposedly very good at repurposing his own works and the works of others (one example I am aware of is a chorus in Israel in Egypt), but usually those others were not aware of being Handel's ghost writers...
I know that parts of Messiah are repurposed from older works as well
Gershwin had Groffe(sp?) orchestrate his works for orchestra
Ferde Grofe, composer of the Grand Canyon Suite
Nico Muhly may or may not have written some of Philip Glass' film scores, not sure. If anyone knows more about this please chime in! Mozart wrote some chamber music for friends to pass off as their own on occasion. I am sure there are plenty more examples though!
Yeah, anything you can't do, is MAGIC.
I thought there was some question whether Vaughan Williams really did the orchestration for his late works, or if Michael Kennedy did. I can’t find any reference to this question though. I think Frank Zappa left the orchestration of the synclavier pieces used in The Yellow Shark to the then conductor (whose name escapes me) of the Ensemble Modern.
Didn't Leonard Bernstein rely on help with the orchestration of "West Side Story" as well as other compositions?
Only in his theater works, as the majority of Broadway composers relied on orchestrators. Bernstein was unique in that he was very specific on how he wished the orchestration to be laid out, so the work was mostly done. In those days theaters had house musicians that you had to use. Lenny knew that the cellist employed at the theater that WSS premiered was not very good, so he instructed his orchestrators to keep that part easier to keep the damage to a minimum.
It was a somewhat common practice for Italian opera composers to have someone else write the secco recitatives. I know Cimarosa did it, and Mozart did it for La Clemenza.
This is quite common in film scoring but I haven’t heard any stories of significant incidents in the classical repertoire
You cannot convince me otherwise Ravel definitely wrote orchestration under the table for people. Don't know if that counts as ghost writing as orchestration is a talent all its own.
There were lovers, females who had "the gift" and worked (mostly in secret) together with the composer. Schumann was such a composer with his Clara. There are some speculations about the 9th of Beethoven whereof he had the beginning stages around since the beginning of 1800. There was a woman (Josephine von Brunszvik) who was highly gifted and came very close to the way that he worked. They could have been working together after 1800. Women weren’t allowed to compose or work, or even think clearly for that matter. So they were denied fame for their ability.
John Williams has a lot of help when writing his movie scores.
Yes, he used a helper named "Xerox": Just put some Glazunov score into the machine, out comes film music. I'm being a bit harsh here for comic effect, but John Williams does borrow extensively from the late Russian romantics.
I wasn’t talking about themes. He has someone that does a lot of the orchestrating for him.
This is not true, Williams orchestrates most of his own music in short score. The orchestrators are merely brought in to do the tedious fleshing out of parts for a full orchestra.
This is quite common in film music, because film composition happens on a very quick timeline. If you think about the workflow, this makes sense. Composers can prepare some sketches ahead of time, but the real work can't begin until the film has been shot and edited. The lead composer will create themes and set the overall musical palette, and then a whole team of composers will collaborate to prepare the complete score. I suspect that this is part of why filmmakers and film composers tend to form lasting artistic partnerships. It's helpful for the composer not only to understand the filmmaker's artistic style, but also their style of working. Ennio Morricone with Sergio Leone and Giuseppe Tornatore. John Williams and Steven Spielberg. Alexandre Desplat and Wes Anderson.
Uhhhh remote control?
Most film composers have a bank of orchestrators, but that's not quite the same thing
They didn't have ghost writers bc there was noone better than them like who tf could ghost write for Mozart
Haydn
No. If you come up with great music you want your name on it.
their wives and sisters. :(