Significant Others - Fernando Arroyo on Musical Collaboration

Episode Date: March 14, 2024

The one who does the work is not always the one who gets the glory. Also… what is an orchestrator, anyway? Find Fernando’s work on his Instagram here

Welcome to Significant Others. I'm Liza Powell O'Brien, and in this week's episode, we looked at the complicated relationship between Duke Ellington and his bandleader and collaborator, Billy Strayhorn. To help us understand some of the intricacies of what it is to work as a professional musician, I'm excited to be speaking today with composer and musician Fernando Arroyo. Fernando, thank you so much for coming today. You have a PhD in composition from UCLA, and you're an educator, and also I know you are a musician as well. Yes, exactly. And I thought this is following up our episode on Duke Ellington and his band leaders, Billy Strayhorn, who had a very complicated relationship. And I really wanted to talk to a composer, first of all, because it's such a specific

art form. And I have many questions. So I'm going to start, though, by asking you to tell us what types of works you compose. asking you to tell us what types of works you compose. I started my undergrad and my master's studying concert music. I always wanted to be a film composer, but as it is with a modern life of a musician and composer, you end up working on all sorts of projects. So just to give an example of how eclectic a year in my life can be, last year I wrote a piano trio. I wrote arrangements for a symphony orchestra, music for a video game a podcast writing music for it, and films and whatever it calls for, you know. And in between that, I also play a lot in the Hollywood studios as a musician.

And I also arrange and have done even music editing for big films. So it's a very eclectic life. for big films. So it's a very eclectic life. We had a really exciting moment, which I told you about when it happened. But our family has known Fernando for years because he used to teach our son piano. And we were vacationing somewhere and turned on the hotel TV and a movie was just ending and I saw Fernando's name come up on and I didn't know at that point that you were a composer I just knew you as our piano teacher and I got so excited in that way that you get when you see someone's name on a piece of work and you're like wait but do they know does he know that his name is on this movie so um do you want to tell us a few of the movies that you've worked on yeah um well in, in that specific movie was Independence Day Resurgence, I think.

And I worked on that more as a music assistant and I was helping the editors and the composers. I've also worked on Midway, Moonfall. In terms of playing, I've worked on Avatar Encanto a bunch of different films and as an orchestrator which is another

interesting thing we might talk about with Billy Strayhorn because it's a very similar sort of role to what he did the last thing I worked on

was a film called Miller's Girl based on a book called Miller's Girl and the film is with jenna ortega and uh martin freeman oh wow yeah and i was the orchestrator for that i've also worked on

if people know for the younger crowd that loves video games league of legends fortnight League of Legends, Fortnite, and Valorant. Oh, wow. Yeah. But you always knew that you, or you began mostly with the ambition to score movies. Mm-hmm. Instead of pure orchestral composition. Yeah, it was very interesting. I mean, as a kid, I had a point where I didn't want to study music. I had my family always knew I liked music. Then they signed me up for piano lessons and I picked up the violin.

And when I was around 16, I said, no, I don't want to be a musician. And then everybody told me I should still try to audition. But since I was a kid, the biggest thing that I did with music, I would play with my toys and build these storylines and then put classical music as background as the score and then one of the uh things that made me want to be a film composer is when the trailer for harry potter came out nobody knew this was before trailers were announced or anything we just knew the film will come out soon and the movie just the trailer just started with um dark clouds

and that little melody. And people in the theater started saying, oh my God, is that Harry Potter? Without seeing the title. And to me, the power of that storytelling device made me immediately curious about it. And yeah, I wanted to study to become a film composer of that caliber. And I thought, well, that means I have to go to a conservatory and study. It's very different these days. You don't need to do that necessarily.

But I did that. And while at a conservatory, I realized that I could also tell stories just with concert music. And I enjoyed that too. But film music was always the main goal. So you mentioned that you've done a bunch of different jobs. You do a bunch of different jobs. So they're sitting down and writing music, which is something I can never contemplate actually doing, but at least I understand what it is. Mm-hmm. So what are the others? You mentioned how being an orchestrator is its own thing. So why don't you tell us what that is? Being an orchestrator, it's interesting that you talk about Billy Strayhorn in this podcast.

And he's the focus because being an orchestrator can mean many things. Someone like Billy Strayhorn was an arranger, orchestrator that would take, you know, Duke Ellington's idea and blow it up from a piano sketch or a simple song into an entire big band arrangement or orchestral arrangement. And as we know with Billy Strayhorn, many times he was actually writing the music. Right. And then he was credited as just an additional person, you know? Right. In the world of film music,

there's also orchestrators of different levels. We have people like John Williams who write a very detailed sketch of their music that includes what instrument is going to play everything. And then brilliant orchestrators like Conrad Pope or Bill Ross, who are legendary. Bill Ross, for example, is the arranger for Barbra Streisand, amongst others. They take that and they transform it into a full score so that the orchestra can play it. That requires a lot of knowledge and skill of the orchestra and how every instrument works. And then there is the orchestration style that we see a lot of these days, which is composers will write on the computer and then an orchestrator will grab those computer sounds, try to make sense of it as best as they can

and make it playable for the musicians. And then the third level of this is many times the orchestrators end up writing the music. And that is a very, it's a bit of a contentious situation in our industry, but it really demonstrates how there's a lot of talent behind the scenes that comes not just with talent, but with technical knowledge of composition, of the orchestra, and of how musicians interpret the music. Because that's the big thing about a great orchestrator is knowing how to write something so that the musicians see it and immediately understand how to perform it. Yeah, that was one of my favorite details about Billy Strayhorn was that he and they did seem to say that Duke Ellington had this ability to but that he wrote for the actual saxophone player that was going to have that part,

that he knew what they could do well and what their sound was, and he would write to that in addition to writing, you know, within Duke Ellington's voice. When you say that sometimes the orchestrator ends up writing the music and that that's contentious, how does that come about? There's a combination of things. So one of the big things with billy strayhorn is that he was a collaborator right and he started as somebody that was helping out ellington then

as you mentioned on the podcast when the ellington had to redo had that big concert yeah that had to redo that uh what was it an opera turned into a musical, right? Right. And he ended up doing most of the work and ended up being quoted as, what was it, an orchestration producer or organizer, something like that. Basically, like he's the guy who did the notations almost. Exactly. Like it was very reductive. Exactly. And that was, they say in the coverage that I read anyway,

that that was mostly the fault of the press, that the press was so starry-eyed over Duke Ellington, who was such a massive star, that they just kind of didn It's impossible for a single person to put that much musical output. So they have teams of composers, younger composers usually that are, if it's a healthy relationship, they're credited as additional music. Many times they're not even credited. And then the big name composer comes and shows their name, you know? And when it comes to the orchestrators many times it happens when it's music that is more complex than what the composer is able to do so they might write like a simple melody on the piano and then the orchestrator will actually write an entire

orchestral piece out of that and many times it's some things that we have all listened to and heard to that are iconic. Wow. And we just don't know. It was somebody else. Is there a union for composers? This is one of the most interesting situations in this industry. So we have a musician's union. The musician's union includes musicians,

arrangers and orchestrators and conductors, but it does not include composers. There have been attempts to create unions before, very unsuccessful. There's many reasons why they're not successful. I have an opinion as to why, and I think partly it's because of this system where people write for other people. It wouldn't mean they would need to be credited properly or the pay would need to be appropriate. It's not always the case. It sometimes is. But it would also mean that the high, high paying gigs might come lower for the composers that are on the A-list.

But either way, it's a very symbiotic industry because we need each other, you know? Because even for myself, I'm a composer, I've orchestrated all these things, but if I were to write music for a very big project, the timelines that are required for this, you will need help. So you will hire orchestrators,

you will hire somebody to write some of the smaller pieces of music, or we all wish to live in an ideal world where we could write everything. Well, there's only one composer that gets a lot of that right, and it's John Williams. Because if you work with John Williams, you're going to give him his time, you know? And that's just how it is. So, but it's up to basically the goodness of the name brand composer to share appropriately the recognition of what the work is that's actually been done. Yes, exactly. from what little I know about the Writers Guild, it's actually extremely well delineated in terms of, you know, chain of title and who wrote what and what percentage of words. There are people who literally are counting the words

to figure out who gets which credit. But I think when it comes to the, I mean, I don't know if it's harder when it comes to music. There's always going to be a record of who wrote what. Yeah, I mean, there is a way. Ideally, there's something called the cue sheet, which will show who wrote what minutes of music.

But there is a thing that it's always something that younger composers or composers that are writing under somebody else constantly are talking about. We always say, oh, did you get cue sheet? Meaning, did you get your music credited so you get some residuals from it? Or many times you might not even be credited as that. There's been situations where somebody gets hired to write a score, their music is not approved,

but for whatever reason, the studio cannot fire them and they hire an entire different team to write the music and they're credited as different team to write the music and they're credited as score producer or something else it's it's a very interesting side of the industry that i don't think most people outside even the composing side of it yeah even within producers and writers and my friends who are producers directors right they don't know about not thinking about it they don't even know about it interesting so in in terms of the framework of this you know lens of this podcast of being intimately related with someone and helping each other as you say to sort of realize a common goal. I'm fascinated

in how many different versions of that you have, right? Oh, yeah. I mean, one of the things that I love about writing music for media is that I get to build collaborations with incredibly different people. One of my favorite projects I've worked on was a podcast, and I'd never written music for a podcast where i was already good friends with the music editor i mean the sound editor and the producer but the writer him and i had just met and we ended up becoming really good friends this was a thing we did over covid and sometimes when you meet somebody that you just understand each other creatively, even if you don't speak the same language, like I speak music, he speaks as a writer, as a director, we get to communicate in very clear ways. hire composers and having those conversations was really complicated and I in the beginning I think I was trying to you know really describe what I meant and I realized over time I think less is

more if I just say I wanted to feel this way or you know that I had to really dumb it down because I was I was not speaking the right language when I was trying to do it too clearly. Yeah, one of the things that I always say as a composer to directors, or even not a director, let's say an orchestra that commissions a work from me, like I'm writing a piece for a local orchestra right now, and the person who commissions is a conductor, and I always say, describe to me as you would storytelling wise or as you would to an actor because the thing that music can create is subtext that isn't there

and i always with my students my composition students one thing that i always teach is you know we create expectation and then we break it and how we play around with that within the sound world of music is where we can get very creative. And that comes understanding that comes from the relationship with the other creatives where they tell us, oh, why is this character crying? Not that they're crying, but the important thing is why. And a lot of those conversations also come to the point where many times I say, you don't need music here. Your scene is working. Because many times what happens with creatives, they think a scene might feel weak, but it's just within the context.

And when you put music before and after that scene, it creates a different kind of context for that. it creates a different kind of context for that. It's amazing to me how profoundly impactful music can be. And it's making me think of this moment that was actually on Conan's show where they had Harrison Ford on and they showed him doing his classic Harrison Ford kind of scowl. And they played the typical action film music behind it. And then they said, okay, let's try something different. And they had him do the scowl and they put like, I don't know, polka music or something behind it. And then they said, okay, let's try something different. And they had him do the scowl

and they put like, I don't know, polka music or something behind it. And it's just like dislocating. It's very strange. And it really, I don't know, it's a great demonstration

of what a big deal it is. One of my favorite moments in film music ever is in the movie, The Truman Show, where the music works in four different levels we have the music he listens to as truman in his everyday life there's a music that the

audience that watches the show listens to as the soundtrack for the film then there's the music we listen to as the audience of the film and then it's the combination of all of them and there's a moment in the film where he starts discovering you know he starts figuring out that things are not right and then the composer did this very interesting thing that he started transforming little by little the music in that cue from electronic instruments into a real orchestra oh wow almost like him discovering the real world or the truth. And it's, I love that you can do that with music. So did you notice that when you watch a movie,

are you clocking that stuff immediately? Is that all you're paying attention to? Or did you learn that after re-watching it a bunch of times? I try not to focus on what the music is doing because then I don't enjoy the film. Right. But sometimes you can't avoid it. Yeah.

You know, as professionals, I'm sure as a writer, every time you read something, you're like, oh, that was interesting how they phrased that or how they did that or how this is structured.

You can't avoid it. But I try my best not to. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just noticing I would never have picked up on that, I don't think.

Well, but that's the beauty of music. I think with that specific one, I didn't pick it up until I rewatched it. But then there's these things that you can do with music that are so subconscious, because there's an ambiguity to music that you can give the sense of a specific emotion, or rather a specific, a general emotion, and then it's up to the listener to interpret that in their own experience, especially music without lyrics, which is often the case of film music. So you've mentioned Harry Potter and Truman Show. Do you have any other like pop culture favorites? Oh, so many.

There's so many in terms of film music or anything. Oh, so many. There's so many. In terms of film music or anything. Anything. I mean, to me, one of the most incredible pieces of music is Bohemian Rhapsody. Yeah. And not just because it's a great song, but I don't think I've ever seen anywhere that that song starts playing and at least 10 people start singing it. Yeah. Everywhere in the world and that's just to me the power that that can have yeah it's incredible another more recent example

that is i went to the hollywood ball last summer to see this amazing talent jacob collier i don't know if you know i've heard the. He's an incredibly talented young musician, but he's probably 30. But one thing that was very special to me is his music is pretty complex in the world of jazz, but manages to marry it with more modern sensibilities. And seeing that most of the audience was, I would say, under the age of 20 years old.

Wow. And behind me, there was a group of 15-year-olds that were singing his songs and singing as a choir at the Hollywood Bowl. And it was a very rare thing to see. And they viewed him just as, you know, you would go to a Taylor Swift concert and see people screaming like crazy fans. And it was very special to see that very cool yeah do you what is the relationship like between a composer and a conductor i've always wondered and i was reading this for one of the other episodes we were working on i was reading about wagner and how his you know favorite conductor was so in love with him that when his wife left, you know, the conductor for Wagner, he was like, I've got to let her go. You know,

it's going to the great man. So what can I do? And I don't know if that's like, I mean, it's interesting. I, you know, there are composers, several composers that like to conduct their own music. When it comes to my film, several composers that like to conduct their own music. When it comes to my film music, I do like to conduct it because of the time constraint. And then I want to quickly change something or if it doesn't work, I want to quickly change it. But then we have composer conductors, very famous ones like Leonard Bernstein. conductors, very famous ones like Leonard Bernstein. Now, I prefer, personally, I prefer not to conduct my music because I want to hear what somebody else has to say with it. So when I write a piece of music, and I don't like playing my own music either, because once I'm done with it,

I want to give it to the performers to see what they do. Sometimes, many times I disagree with it, but I view that as part of creating art. You know, once you've built it, you have to let it go so that somebody else can interpret it. And some conductors, I've had even fights with conductors that conduct my music because they want me to be overly specific in every single thing whereas i like to see what somebody else wants to interpret and you know the musicians understand it sometimes the conductor doesn't um and it's such a hierarchical world right it really is it really is uh it's you know sometimes I circumvent that by going up to the musicians during the break and say like, oh, play it that way. Oh, boy.

And it's, yeah. How does that go? It's generally fine. Yeah. It doesn't matter most of the time because if the performance works, that's all that matters. Yeah. Yeah. There's also in the modern concert world, there's a very different thing that when you get commissioned to write a piece for an orchestra, we get very little rehearsal time as modern music.

Because as contemporary music, because they're playing maybe Beethoven or Brahms or Shostakovich. And this is the reason people came to the performance. I'm familiar with this um this uh phenomenon it's same in the theater world where like the theaters need to program the greatest hits so that people you know can have their comfort food but then this tiny little portion of the budget might get you know dedicated to developing new work which is vitally important, but vastly unrefunded. Absolutely, because we always think like we need to, you know, I always think of people like Billy Strayhorn specifically for these kind of things. Because when there's a big name, the big name gets a lot of the recognition and the people that are true talents often go unrecognized. Right. Because they don't get the spotlight often enough.

recognized because they don't get the spotlight often enough. And when they do, many times they seem like, oh, we're throwing a bone to this person, you know, rather than giving it the respect that that music requires. And this goes beyond just the organizations. This goes even to musicians. I can tell you the amount of times that I'm playing as a violinist. I'm sitting in an orchestra and then we're playing a new work and the musicians don't take it seriously because they want to play brams or beethoven or you know which i love that music too but then i often think this deserves the same respect as that does even if you don't

like the music our job is to treat it as if it's a gem you know because maybe the musicians back in the day they didn't think that of beethoven or they didn't think that of many composers. Right. You know. Yeah, I'm sure. Ego exists across all time. So I'm sure there were people who were annoyed they had to play Beethoven when they were doing it. Brand new.

Is there a composer or a number of composers that when you play that person's music, you feel as if you are in a relationship with them? Is that a weird thing to ask? Yeah, no, absolutely. I think for me, the one composer where I get that almost every time is Beethoven. And I think this is a very cliche answer for a lot of musicians. I was going to say the same thing, actually, having grown up playing the piano. It's the exact same. So that's very interesting. Yeah, there's something about him that just speaks very naturally to the most intrinsic parts of our humanity, I feel.

There's something very special about him that even the simplest thing can feel so deep. But then beyond him, I feel like almost all great composers have something like that. And music that if you're in the right mindset, it just overtakes you and you can feel it's so personal. Another composer for me like that is Chopin. There's something about his music

that just immediately grabs you. And I always say, music that commands you to listen is music that, you know, transcends. Because there's music that you have to sit with it for a while before you really get into it. But then there's music that within the first few notes, you're like, oh, I know what that is. Where are you in the whole AI thing?

Like, do you worry about AI creating music? Are you not worried about it? I'm not so worried about the music that AI will create. I'm more so worried about the people that make the decisions choosing that music. Yeah, right. Just because it's cheaper and faster. Absolutely. Because I think there is one aspect, and I know a lot of people don't agree with this, but there is one aspect that AI won't be able to replicate, which is our lived experiences and our mistakes.

Because many times there's music theory and all these things we can use to compose. But many of the most interesting things that happen in music started as a mistake. Oh, that's interesting. Or as something that the composer sat down and tried something new and different that maybe was out of the ordinary, but it worked. Emotionally, it worked. And then it became part of the theory. Right. One thing that I always teach is that music theory was always after the fact.

That's interesting. You know? Yeah. Bach didn't used to compose as we analyze Bach today. We analyze Bach in a way that we can understand what he did. Right. But it's very interesting when I used to teach at UCLA theory, my students would say, oh, you've taught us all these rules. But then we're looking at Bach and he breaks them all.

Like, well, yes, because one thing is theory. The other thing is the practice. Yeah. You know, and I think AI will always struggle with that aspect. Right. Because that's just something, it comes from our mistakes and our problems and our mental state in that day. You know, if you're feeling depressed or happy or whatever, I always say we don't feel emotions as singular. If you're feeling angry, you feel angry and euphoric and sad. Or if you're feeling happy, you're feeling all this mixture of things. It's not just happy. It's a mixture.

And I think that's the hardest thing to convey. Do you ever compose with anyone else? Do you ever compose with anyone else? Yes, I've done it a few times. It's interesting. It's not my preference because I think that has to do more with my personality because we all have our specific ways that we like to do things. But I've done it a few times uh most recently i've collaborated with a good friend of mine composer ben zecher and we've worked on a couple of projects that somewhere his projects his projects where he asked me to co-write some stuff with him

one of those cases where he didn't have enough time so i wrote and then he would come in and give me his notes and then in that case i'm at the service of his vision sure then I've had other situations where I've been asked to write something with a team that there's three composers and each of us write a piece that's fine because we each do our own thing but the most interesting collaborations I think are always one that I'm about to start doing in the next year or so, which is writing with a lyricist. Oh, and you've never done that? I've never. I've written music that other lyricists did, but this is going to be for a musical. So it's a very different thing.

Yes. It's very different than writing, you know, somebody writes a song and then I kind of arrange it or this is more a long form thing. And I'm very curious about it. Yeah. I would imagine there are as many versions of that, you know, set up as there are people in the world that it can go any number of ways. The three more fascinating ones to me are, well, one of the most famous ones is uh elton john you know we saw that in his in the movie then there's this great collaborator of um alan menken howard ashman who apparently was one of the biggest influences in disney in the disney renaissance for all of that, all of those great films. And he was a gay man too. So he was, yeah, incredible. Yeah.

This is such an annoying question. I'm trying to think of a way to phrase it that isn't stupid. But one of the, I don't know if it's a debate, but one of the questions that came up when I was researching the Strayhorn-Ellington relationship is that sort of, you know, Ellington was indisputably a genius. And he was so clearly his own talent that he was it was possible to imitate him. And Strayhorn also indisputably a genius and could imitate Ellington, but maybe didn't have his own voice in the same way. And the dumb version of that question is, which is a greater genius? I don't think that's an interesting question at all. But I do wonder, sort of, if you aspire to one version of that, which one would it be? I think, you know, this is a very interesting question when it comes to film music.

You come across a lot of composers that want to imitate John Williams. Some so much so that it becomes almost indistinguishable. To me, the answer to that question is we all have influences that regardless of what that is and we need to be genuine to those but then you need to write whatever feels right at the moment my film music is very different than my concert music my concert music has very specific influences that are just for me to know and some people might hear them some people might not does it feel different when you're working in those different modes absolutely and is there one that's better i like them both to be honest because when it comes to film music i can or video game whatever it is there's a clear storyline that i most follow there's a clear

i would say writing concert music is much more of a struggle because it's more personal. And also there's no guidelines. There's nobody, there's no story guiding you. Is it a pure art, would you say, or no? I don't think so. Okay. I think both of them require, it depends on how you approach it.

Sometimes with film music, I do approach it very much as pure technique because I know what the job is needs to get done and we go with that but i think both of them if you put yourself in a position where you're really following the story because even my concert music always has a storyline it's usually for me to know not necessarily for the audience if you put yourself in that mindset, then both of them have a pure art form side to it. It's very, you have to find what the music is. And that applies for both. You have to find what the piece is going to be. And some of the greatest music, whether it is film or pop or jazz, whatever it is, it's always that when people are genuine to themselves and not afraid of their influences. I think one of the most harmful things to tell a young artist is you have to be original.

Right. Because originality to me doesn't come from trying to be original, but being true to who you are, because we have all these influences that come throughout our lives. But within that, there's always going to be that side that is our own experience of that art that influenced us and how we heard it and why we felt it. And that's going to come through. One of the most interesting classical composition teachers in history, her name was Nadia Boulanger.

Her sister was an amazing composer too, Lili Boulanger. She taught so many incredible composers, including Astor Piazzolla, Ginastera, a bunch of very famous composers. One that most people might know was Philip Glass. Philip Glass didn't write like Philip Glass before he studied with her. He wrote these more complex orchestral pieces, trying to be more like the musicians of his time. And then he came to her and she noticed, I think it was four or five bars of music. And she said, this, this sounds different. What is this?

And she pushed him to write like that. And with so many composers who do that, because she recognized why in all those influences came out as genuinely them. And to me, that's enjoyable. And you learn a lot from imitating other composers. Yeah, for sure. You know?

I have just the last question, unless there's something else someone wants me to ask. And we ask everybody this. You can answer it in whatever way you want. But is there a person or an event or a thing that you consider a significant other in in your trajectory? Yes. I would say it's not a specific person, but it's all the musicians I've got to work with, especially the ones that became close friends. Because I feel as a composer getting to play and performer getting to play with so many amazing artists of all different styles.

Every time I have that experience where i get goosebumps it makes me realize why i love what i do so one of the things i being a composer is such a lonely career because you're sitting in a room by yourself yeah and the significant other is the musicians when you get to play with them and hear them bring what you do to life and you know and that's just as billyrayhorn and Ellington did, writing for specific players, I've done that too. I have a specific musician in mind when I write that. Sometimes I get them to play it, sometimes I don't, but it's still there.

And I think all of those artists are sort of like my significant others, you know? Because they're the people I spend most of my time with. That's lovely. Thank you so much. Thank you. This is really fascinating. I could go on and on and on, but I think this was good. Yeah.

If you're curious to hear Fernando's music, you can find some of it on his Spotify channel. And join us next week on Significant Others to find out which literary lion begged his wife to let him sleep with a sex worker in Morocco. Significant Others is produced by Jen Samples. Our executive producers are Nick Liao, Adam Sachs, Jeff Ross, and Colin Anderson. Engineering and sound design by Eduardo Perez, Rich Garcia, and Joanna Samuel. Music and scoring by Eduardo Perez and Hannes Brown.

Research and fact-checking by Michael Waters and Hannah Sio. Special thanks to Lisa Berm, Jason Chalemi, and Joanna Solitaroff. Talent booking by Paula Davis and Gina Batista.