Film Orchestration - Part 2: Concert Halls, Studios & Seating 1

When we talk about film orchestration, we also need to take things into consideration that are different compared to traditional orchestration.

Probably the biggest difference lies in the fact that traditional orchestration usually targets a concert performance in a concert hall while with film scores we obviously have a recording of the music as the final product. This seems like a small difference and the argument "the music should work in any context" is definitely valid, but the development in the last ca. 20 years has shifted these worlds apart quite considerably.

While it usually is no problem to reproduce a Williams score in the concert hall, it takes excessive amounts of technical support to reproduce a Hans Zimmer score on the stage and make it sound good. Or to put it the other way around: orchestras that try to perform Zimmer scores in a classical concert hall setting with traditional approaches usually fail at getting anywhere close to the sound from the recording.

So when we talk about film orchestration, we really need to start with the big picture here which is the arrangement of the orchestra in the room.

A typical concert stage often looks like this (in this case the Berlin Philharmonic):

The main purpose of the entire seating is to project as much sound as possible into the audience. The arrangement in different levels as well as the seating of the orchestra first and foremost is designed to create the most balanced sound for as many people as possible in the audience.

The projection of the instruments (=into which direction the instruments emit most of their sound) is massively different for each instrument and also each frequency range. For instance, the violins project most of their sound upwards while the trumpets project relatively focused on the axis of the bell. In a concert stage a lot of acoustic measures are taken to redirect and focus the sound into the audience. Most concert halls come with a reflector over the stage as seen here (KKL Lucerne):

All concert halls are designed with careful consideration regarding reflections and diffusion in the room. For instance in the picture above the texture on the walls and balconies has not an optical purpose but is designed to diffuse the sound in the hall. If you have flat surfaces, there might be seats that get for instance a direct reflection of the sound of the trumpets from a wall nearby which will completely unbalance the sound for these listeners. In most concert halls, center mid/front seats are acoustically the best but there is a lot of care being taken to balance out the sound for as many seats as possible.

Concert stages around the world follow more or less two basic layout types:

1. The Shoebox layout, as seen at the picture above or for instance the Musikverein Wien: 

Basically, the room is a big cuboid. These venues are often a bit undemocratic regarding the acoustic quality for the seats with the audience in the middle of the room getting a better sound and the ones closer to the walls a more compromised sound.

2. The pentagon layout (or related).

Basically, the Berlin Philharmonic was the first concert hall that was built like this in the 60s:

There's a lot going on in this design but the basic idea is to avoid parallel walls and reflections that happen between such walls to make the sound experience more democratic for ever listener in the room. As this design worked really well it was adapted worldwide in concert halls that were built later, like the Sydney Opera House or the Disney Concert Hall.

Why am I diving so deep into this topic? Because it shows the fundamental differences to film score recording.

The consequence of a concert hall like this (or also the Shoeboxes with the reflectors) is that most of the audience loses a clear definition of the stereo position of the instruments. With all these reflections and diffusion, the sound that you hear on most seats is more or less a mixed amalgamation of an orchestra sound without a lot of definition. Only if you sit in the very first few rows you will be able to close your eyes and clearly be able to point at where exactly the musicians are sitting.

The seating arrangement of an orchestra on stage most of the time follows this layout:

or this (violas and celli switched):

The choice of seating order usually follows three requirements:

1. Ideal coordination: It is desirable that the musicians hear each other well so instruments with usually similar tasks are seated close to each other. Also, they should all be able to see the conductor which is of course why larger instruments are further in the back (as well as elevated over the others)

2. The properties and dimensions of the stage/room: Sometimes there is not enough space on the stage to use the standard seating (e.g. Musikverein Wien is very crowded on stage when a full symphony orchestra needs to fit) and sometimes a certain layout sounds better in the room.

3. Literature: Older works were sometimes written with a different layout in mind. The older "German" seating order has Violins 1 and 2 sitting opposite of each other with all the consequences that arise from that seating (e.g. basses moving to the left)

And there are also specific works that require a different seating by request of the composer. Mixed forms between these seatings are also possible but roughly this is how an orchestra would be seated on stage and also in the scoring stage. There are a lot of advantages of this seating arrangement which has been optimized over centuries to create the best balance between a good sound and an optimal environment for the musicians to hear and see each other in a full orchestral arrangement.

However, I was mentioning that stereo imaging mostly gets lost for the audience in the concert hall. In the scoring stage and the recording setup that we have there, we tend to get a quite sharp stereo image with usually a clear definition of the source of a sound in the stereo image. With the seatings as above and recordings in comparatively smaller spaces we tend to get problems in the scoring stage that we don't have in the concert hall. For instance, a placement of the double basses and the frequency fundament so far off center in the stereo image can indeed create a limp sided orchestral impression.

Also, a lot of scores these days are not being recorded in tutti but more in sections. In the next part we will look at how scoring stages differ from concert halls and how the seating in modern scoring as well as recording strategies change from this traditional setup.