Christopher Young - "Species" (2) Protostar (1995)

Christopher Young (born April 28, 1958) is an American composer of film and television scores. Many of his compositions are for horror and thriller films, including Hellraiser, Species, Urban Legend, The Grudge, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Drag Me to Hell, Sinister, Deliver Us from Evil and Pet Sematary. Other works include Rapid Fire, Copycat, Set It Off, Entrapment, The Hurricane, Swordfish, Ghost Rider, Spider-Man 3, and The Shipping News, for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score.

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Movie Species (1995)
Score orchestrated by Pete Anthony (1963)
Directed by Roger Donaldson
Written by Dennis Feldman

1M2A. Sil Escapes Pt. 1 aka Protostar (0:00)
1M2B. Sil Escapes Pt. 2 (3:00)

Orchestra conducted by Pete Anthony

Excerpts from an interview by Dan Goldwasser with Pete Anthony:

Let's just start from the beginning: what is your musical background?

I was primarily a composer. I have a degree in composition from Williams College, and then I went right into the film scoring program at USC. After that, I studied composition and orchestration privately. I've always played piano - poorly, I might add - and I used to be a fairly good trumpet player for about 14 years, until the end of college.

How did you get into orchestration?

My first exposure to the industry was working as a proofreader for other orchestrators. One of my early mentors was Patrick Russ, who at the time was very busy working with folks like Maurice Jarre, Elmer Bernstein, Michael Kamen, and others. So, I studied with him and learned from him as we worked. At one point, Pat let me take a sketch he had already orchestrated and orchestrate it myself. So, I took it home and did the work - then I compared it to what Pat had done and listened to the final recording of the piece. I did that a number of times - he was a great mentor and teacher over several years.

Do orchestrators lend their own "voice" to a piece, depending on the detail of a sketch?

At times a composer will rely on the orchestrator to really fill something out, using a somewhat established vocabulary. At other times, the composer may know exactly what he wants and hand over a very complete sketch. But getting a complete sketch doesn't mean the orchestrator checks his brain at the door - you can get a very detailed sketch from a composer and hopefully still bring something of yourself to it. When you add to a piece as an orchestrator, you do not diminish the composer's idea or indicate any lack of ability on his part. What you're trying to do is think of the simplest ideas that can take what he's already done and bring it to a higher level. Most composers are appreciative of that - you're trying to take their music to a higher level. A composer writing out a sketch might not necessarily have the time to think out all of the details of all the parts of an orchestra.

What was your big break in the industry?

The first composer I ever worked with was Dan Foliart, who was working primarily in television. He was the first guy who was willing to give me a job. I started out, actually, helping him use his computer. I was tech support for a now-extinct program called Cue for the Macintosh that essentially laid out click tracks - much like Auricle does today. Dan got really busy - so I orchestrated a cue or two, and that went well - so I was able to orchestrate some more. I ended up working with him on two television shows over a few seasons, just helping him out. At the time, I was still studying orchestration and composition. The first film I worked on was with Daniel Licht, who introduced me to Christopher Young. I worked with Chris on Rapid Fire - he was just looking for consultation on a cue he'd written in a Chicago Blues style. Since I didn't know anything about that, I went out and did some research - the cue looked fine! Then he called me for Jennifer 8, which was the first big film I orchestrated. That was one of those examples where I took immaculate sketches and essentially copied them out onto the right sized score paper so the copyists could extract the individual parts. And then my first big job conducting was also with Chris, on Species. Before that I had done a little bit of studio conducting.