Stevie's brilliant, but violens???
 

OKAY, here's a question - I'm not sure if anyone can answer this -
Did Stevie write the incredible violin parts at the end of "Beauty and
the Beast?" If not - then who????
Listened to it today for the first time in a long time -
still can't believe how beautiful and heartfelt it is.

Paul Buckmaster did the orchestration -- in other words, he wrote it all out for the string players. Stevie doesn't read or write staff notation.

Buckmaster is the same guy who did all the string orchestrations for Elton John's old albums from the '70s.

Yeah thanks! I think I have that someplace right next to my
clock-radio with the mechanical flip-over numbers and the Air Supply
cassette! :laugh:

But she came up with the melody and he basically wrote it out for them correct? He did not come up with the music, he just translated it?

No, Buckmaster would have been the one who "wrote" the orchestration -- in other words, what the string instruments are doing. Stevie wouldn't have done that. That's a function of orchestration.

When you sing "Beauty & the Beast," that's the melody. Stevie wrote that. Did you ever hear the tape of Stevie playing & singing "Beauty & the Beast"? The simple piano part in triple meter & the singing -- that gives a good idea of her contribution to the song, except that she & Sharon & Lori (& whichever other lady sang) would have worked out the vocal harmonies.

So she did not write the music up to the part where the vocals start (since that is all orchestra)?

I would say, based on her piano-playing demo, that she wrote the basic acoustic piano pattern -- the signature pattern: the F | A | C | F2 | A | C, etc. It's essentially the same thing that Roy Bittan played; he would have adapted it from her demo (as he did for many of her songs). His arrangement is, of course, a more complex pattern, busier, beefed up, fuller.

On the album track, the strings are not duplicating the acoustic piano arrangement -- they're doing their own thing. They're playing what Buckmaster (or whoever the orchestrator was) wrote out for them to do.

It would be really easy to hear the various things going on if we had separate tracks to listen to: piano only, strings only, vocals only, etc. I'm not sure what else is on that album track aside from strings, acoustic piano & vocals. I don't think there is a bass or drums. Maybe there's some other sort of keyboard, I'm not sure. I think the instrumentation is given on the WH album sleeve. Do you have that handy?

Believe it or not I got a small chill when I read this 'cause the
"basic acoustic piano pattern" is the core of the song's beauty, i.m.o.
Granted it's "simple" and "less busy" but - yeah. Wow.


:] :nod: