Longtime Point Dume resident Pete Anthony has become one of the most prolific film orchestrators and conductors in the industry. With nearly 350 movie credits, his musical work includes everything from superhero action films to comedies and animation. He’s done numerous film series and sequels, including “The Hunger Games,” “Men in Black,” “Kill Bill” and the Bourne movies.
Anthony met with a group of over 10 Malibu residents in his personal studio last week and spent two hours explaining what a movie orchestrator does, as part of the ongoing Salon Series, put on by the city’s Cultural Arts Commission.
A graduate of Williams College and the USC Thornton School of Music’s Screen Scoring for Motion Pictures & Television program, Anthony has been orchestrating and conducting for over 30 years. He just returned from London, working on the Harry Potter prequel, “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” with a 150-person orchestra on Abbey Road.
Arts Commissioner Richard Gibbs, a film composer, did the Salon Series introductions.
“Anthony works more behind the scenes than the artists we usually feature,” he said. “I’ve always worked with orchestrators, and Pete is one of the top five in the world. He can take something that’s not working and make it work.”
An orchestrator takes a film composer’s draft piano score or short score (often indicating specific instrumentations or effects) and prepares the music for performance by an orchestra, composing parts for various instruments as needed.
“I get hired because there’s a full orchestra,” Anthony said. “There may be 75 to 100 players, and with equipment and rentals, an orchestra costs a studio $60,000 to $75,000 per six-hour day — about $10,000 an hour.”
“We’re concerned with how things look on a sheet of music, and write parts for each musician,” Anthony explained. “[Because of the expenses involved with an orchestra], it has to sound right, right now.”
Anthony has unusual sensory ability. “I see colors when I hear music,” he said. It’s an auditory-specific form of a neurological condition called chromaesthesia that occurs in about one out of 3,000 people. He shares this ability with a number of successful visual artists and musicians, including Pharrell Williams, Billy Joel and Lady Gaga.
“I first want to know if the scene is indoors or out, if there are people talking, whether there’s a close-up of a face, or it’s full-frame or full body,” Anthony said of when he begins a new project.
He starts off with the woodwinds, calling them “the true characters in an orchestra.” In “Peter the Wolf,” “The different instruments represent different animals,” he pointed out. In addition, he said woodwinds convey feminine or masculine as well as light or dark. “Traditionally, a girl is represented by a flute. If there’s an English horn, that person is a goner. If there’s a flute, they’ll live,” he joked.
The brass section makes “40 percent of the total mass of sound” in an orchestra. “You never have a hero in a film without French horns being involved in some way,” he observed. “And an ensemble of horns just screams out ‘hero or adventure’ while a trombone ensemble is serious.”
“You gotta have tubas,” he said. “Some famous tuba solos were in ‘Jaws.’ To me, it’s like music to sacrifice virgins by — it’s totally exciting.”
The variety of percussion instruments in the world make it impossible to mention them all, but each culture has its own percussion — African, Asian, Cuban, Brazilian, etc.
“It’s such a huge part of film scores, and composers always add a lot because it adds excitement, and it’s kind of a wild card,” Anthony said.
When it comes to strings, “a violin solo has a specific dramatic impact, as it did in ‘Schindler’s List,’” he said. And “strings are the closest to the human voice.”
Movie music can be melodic or “colorist” — a non-melodic style that conveys raw emotions and “has no real rhythm or structure,” like the screeching violins in the “Psycho” shower scene. Current film composers who tend to fall into this category are Jerry Goldsmith, Danny Elfman and Marco Beltrami.
Anthony likes orchestrating for the film industry “because there are so many different kinds of music you can work on, and there’s money to pay for it.” He also does conducting, arranging and freelance composing, and has worked on TV, records, commercials, jingles and video games.
Anyone interested in registering for future Salon Series events can go to malibuartsandculture.org/194/Salon-Series.