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Most musicians prefer scoring movies to writing for television. Not so Joe Raposo, 36, whose credits include ballads for Frank Sinatra, The Carpenters and Jose Feliciano, as well as the theme for Sesame Street. At ten, Raposo already showed the facility and ingenuity that are essential for a commercial composer. A piano student, he invented a two-handed speed method for orchestration. Each finger represents a symphonic choir. Notes played by the pinky and fourth fingers of the right hand are assigned to violins and flutes, the third and second fingers represent the clarinets and oboes, the thumbs are both French horns. In the left hand, the second and third fingers stand for the cellos and bassoons, while the remaining two fingers provide the bass line.
For a top composer like Raposo, fees are fairly standard. A film brings from $20,000 to $25,000; a two-hour TV movie is worth $5,000, while a 90-minute TV feature earns the composer $3,500.
No Stravinsky. A six-figure income eases the frustrations of deadline pressure and constant rewriting, as well as condescension from within the industry. Twentieth Century-Fox Music Director Lionel Newman's job profile for a composer is not flattering: "You don't want a Stravinsky because some primitive might be better. We're looking for a man who'll write to script." That sort of remark annoys Jerry Goldsmith. Says he: "There are damn few composers alive or deceased who have had the opportunity we have had to experiment with atonality and counterpoint." Next month Goldsmith will perform his themes from The Wind and the Lion, The Blue Max and The Waltons in London's Royal Albert Hall.
The movies are in fact following Goldsmith's lead into orchestration. Hit movies of the '60s were often scored by individual artists and rock groups: The Graduate by Simon and Garfunkel, Easy Rider by The Band, Steppenwolf, etc. Today, directors want a more symphonic approach. The Jaws theme is played by a 75-piece orchestra. Disaster films have enhanced the value of lush orchestral work. "Imagine," says Newman, "The Towering Inferno, for instance, raging to the obbligato of a Fender bass and a wah-wah guitar."