Orchestrator
Conrad Salinger, the orchestrator who gave MGM musicals their sound
1901 – 1962
If you can hear the difference between an MGM musical and everybody else's, you are hearing Conrad Salinger, whose name appears on none of the posters and in the fifth line of the credits.
Fifth line of the credits
There is a sound that belongs to MGM musicals and to nothing else: a string section that seems larger and warmer than the number of players should allow, harmony with more colour in it than the tune requires, and an orchestral cushion under a singer that never gets in the way. Audiences of the 1950s knew that sound without being able to describe it, and it was the studio’s most reliable asset after its stars.
It was substantially the work of Conrad Salinger, an orchestrator on the music department payroll, whose name appears in the credits below the composer, the music director and the conductor.
He was born in 1901 and died in 1962, and outside the profession he is close to unknown. Inside it he has the standing that Robert Farnon had among British arrangers, and for the same reasons.
What an orchestrator does, and why it is not clerical
The distinction between composing and orchestrating is the thing that has to be understood before the rest of this page means anything.
A film composer under a studio schedule produces a sketch. It contains the melodic material, the harmony, the structure and the timings, and it may be very detailed or fairly bare. It is not a score an orchestra can play. Turning it into one is the orchestrator’s job, and the decisions involved are the ones that determine the sound: which instrument takes a line, in what octave, doubled by what, against which accompanying figure, with the strings divided how many ways.
Give the same sketch to two orchestrators and the recordings will be recognisably different pieces of music. That is why the craft matters, and it is also why it is invisible: the finished result is credited to the composer, and it is supposed to sound like the composer, so the better the orchestrator does the job the less evidence there is that he was there.
The same argument is made under Angela Morley, who did exactly this work in Hollywood a generation later.
Paris, and the harmony
Salinger’s training included study in Paris, and it shows.
The harmonic language of the MGM musicals is more chromatic and more coloured than the Broadway pit tradition that supplied most of their material. There are added notes where a simpler arrangement would use a plain triad, inner voices that move against the melody rather than padding it, and a taste for the kind of ambiguity that French music of the early twentieth century had made ordinary and Hollywood had not.
This mattered commercially rather than only artistically. The songs in these films were written by Broadway songwriters in a popular idiom, and the studio needed them to sound expensive. A harmonic vocabulary drawn from the French concert tradition, applied to a thirty-two-bar song by a large orchestra, is a very efficient way of making a popular tune sound like a major production.
The strings
The signature is the string writing, and its principle is division.
A standard orchestral string section plays in five parts. Salinger habitually wrote in twice that or more, dividing each section so that a chord could be sustained across a wide register with every note held by its own group of players. The effect is the one described under Ronald Binge as cascading strings, arrived at independently and used differently: Binge staggered the entries to manufacture reverberation, where Salinger used the divisions to thicken and warm the harmony itself.
It requires numbers, and MGM had them. A studio orchestra of that period could put sixty strings on a scoring stage, and a writer who knew how to divide them had a resource no radio orchestra or recording library could match. A good deal of what sounds like sheer expense in these films is actually orchestration exploiting expense intelligently.
Recorded before the picture existed
A musical is scored backwards compared with a drama, and the difference shapes the orchestrator’s job completely.
In dramatic scoring the picture is cut first and the music is written to it, timed to the frame, as described under Ron Goodwin. A musical number works the other way. The song is recorded first, on a scoring stage, with the orchestra and usually the singer, and the sequence is then shot to that recording, with the performers moving and miming to playback. The music is the fixed element and the film is built around it.
Three consequences follow, and they all favour the orchestrator.
The music can be as elaborate as the writing can support, because nothing has to be fitted around dialogue that is already there. A dramatic cue is written into gaps; a musical number is the whole event, and the orchestra is not competing with anything except the voice.
The recording gets proper attention. A scoring session for a number that the entire sequence will be built on is worth taking time over, with a large orchestra and the studio’s best engineers, and it is the reason these recordings sound as good as they do compared with dramatic scores from the same lots and years.
And the orchestrator’s decisions become permanent early. Once the number is recorded, the choreography, the camera and the editing are all made to fit it. A dramatic cue can be shortened, faded or dropped in the dub; a pre-recorded number cannot, because the film has been shot to it. That is unusual authority for somebody whose name is in the fifth line of the credits.
The films
The credits cover the central run of MGM musicals: Meet Me in St. Louis, Easter Parade, An American in Paris, Singin’ in the Rain, The Band Wagon, Gigi and others alongside them.
The point worth making about that list is that he was staff rather than freelance. A studio music department was a standing organisation with composers, arrangers, orchestrators, copyists and a house orchestra, and pictures passed through it. That is why his influence is so pervasive: he was not hired for the films that suited him, he was there for whatever arrived, and over fifteen years that amounts to the studio’s entire musical output in his idiom.
It also means the attribution problem is structural. A picture’s orchestration was divided among three or four hands under a music director, to a schedule, and the record of who took which number was internal paperwork.
Why the craft went uncredited
The pattern on this page is the one this whole site keeps returning to, and it is worth naming as a pattern rather than as a series of coincidences.
An orchestral arranger or orchestrator determines how music sounds, and is credited either not at all or in a form the audience does not read. The reasons are commercial and they are consistent across countries and media. A record company sells an orchestra and a leader. A film studio sells a composer and stars. A publisher’s library sells a catalogue. In none of those transactions does the customer want a fourth name explained to him, and in none of them does the person who supplied the sound is in any position to insist.
British examples run through this site: Billy Ternent writing Jack Hylton’s identity, Ronald Binge inventing Mantovani’s, Charles Williams supplying music that reached millions anonymously. Salinger is the American case, working at a larger scale with a bigger orchestra, and the outcome is identical.
What cannot be settled
Two things about him are genuinely open, and both are consequences of the department system rather than of neglect.
The first is which cues in which films are his. Where studio music department records survive, individual numbers can be attributed with confidence. Where they do not, a claim that a particular sequence is his work rests on stylistic identification, which is real evidence and not conclusive, particularly since the department’s other orchestrators were working to the same house standard and had heard him do it.
The second is how much of the harmonic character was his choice as against the composer’s. An orchestrator elaborates a sketch, and the line between elaborating and composing is not fixed. A sketch that specifies an added ninth is one thing; a sketch that leaves the voicing open and gets one is another. Without the sketches, the division of credit cannot be established, and the sketches are the part of studio paperwork least likely to have survived.
A third question is smaller and more answerable, and nobody has answered it: how much the studio orchestra itself contributed. A section that plays the same writer’s divisions week after week develops habits of balance and phrasing that are not in the parts, and those players stayed for years. Some of what is heard as orchestration is very likely performance practice, learned in the room and never written down.
What is not in doubt is the aggregate. Something distinctive happened to the sound of American film musicals during the years he worked on them, it did not happen at other studios, and the musicians who were there said it was him.
Frequently asked questions
Who was Conrad Salinger?
An American orchestrator, born in 1901 and dead in 1962, who worked at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer through the studio's musical era. Conrad Salinger is generally regarded as the person most responsible for the orchestral sound of the MGM musical, and his name is unknown outside a small circle of musicians and film-music specialists.
What is an orchestrator?
The person who turns a composer's sketch into the full score an orchestra records. The composer supplies melody, harmony, structure and timing; the orchestrator decides which instruments play what, in which register, doubled by what, with which string divisions. Those decisions determine how the music actually sounds, which is why a great orchestrator can be more audible than a mediocre composer.
Which films did he work on?
The central MGM musicals of the 1940s and 1950s, including Meet Me in St. Louis, An American in Paris, Singin' in the Rain, The Band Wagon and Gigi. He was a fixture of the studio's music department rather than a freelance hired per picture, which is why his fingerprints are on so much of the output.
What was distinctive about his writing?
Divided strings and harmonic colour. He wrote for the string section in twelve or more parts rather than the standard five, using the divisions to sustain rich chords across a wide register, and his harmony carries a French influence unusual in Hollywood at the time. The result is a warmth and depth that competitors could hear and struggled to reproduce.
Why isn't he famous?
Because orchestration is credited in small type and understood by almost nobody outside the profession. Audiences attribute a film's music to the composer named in the titles, and studios had no interest in complicating that. The situation is identical to the treatment of British arrangers described across this site, and the mechanism is the same: the credit convention did not match the work.
Was he a composer too?
He worked chiefly as an orchestrator and arranger, which was a full profession and a well-paid one at a major studio. That is not a lesser activity than composing but a different one, and the distinction is often lost in later accounts that want every musician to have been a frustrated composer. Some were; the evidence that he was is thin.
How does he compare with Robert Farnon?
They are the same craft on two continents, and the parallel is close. Both were arrangers whose reputation among musicians far exceeded their public profile, both were praised specifically for the movement of inner parts and for string writing, and both worked in an industry that credited the name on the label. Farnon was called the Governor by British arrangers; Salinger occupied that position in Hollywood.
Did British arrangers know his work?
Closely. American film and record orchestration was studied by British arrangers as a matter of professional development, and MGM musicals were widely seen in Britain, so his scoring was among the most-heard examples of the craft available. Angela Morley's orchestral pop arrangements come from the same lineage of thinking about a large string section.
Can specific cues be attributed to him?
Sometimes, and not reliably. A studio music department distributed a picture's orchestration among three or four people under a music director, working to a schedule, and the paperwork that recorded who did which cue was internal. Where studio records survive an attribution can be established; where they do not, a claim about a particular number rests on stylistic judgement.
Where can the work be heard?
In the films, which is where it belongs and where it is best heard, and in the soundtrack releases assembled from studio recordings. Some of those releases include material cut from the finished pictures, which is useful evidence: an unused cue shows the orchestration without the interference of dialogue and effects.
- Sources
- Checked
- REF/CS-001 · 4 sources