DC Database talk:Movie Template

"Musicians" vs. "Composers"
I'd like to suggest changing "Musicians" to "Composers" in this template, and if it's agreed upon, I'll do it myself in one swoop in a short amount of time. I'd actually started to, because I didn't see it as a change that needed to be proposed in a talk page as much as I did an error that merely needed fixing, a la a typo, however my changes were reverted and it was explained to me that this would need to be brought up here first. My apologies! Anyway, standard nomenclature for an individual who writes any variety of orchestral music, be it for its own purpose (symphony, sonata, opera) or to serve as a score for another work (film score, television score, incidental music), is "composer". The composer (noun) composes (verb) a composition (noun). The act of writing music is composing. A musician, on the other hand, is a performer. Most composers can play an instrument, and is probably able to be a performer, but if "musicians" is to be an actual credit in an movie or television show's credits, it can only accurately refer to the group of individuals who performed the music written by the composer.

For example, John Williams is listed as the musician for []. The score for the 1978 film calls for 33 individual brass, woodwind, and percussion parts, as well as five string parts -- string sections have several players per part as opposed to brass, woodwind, and percussion parts who only have one person per part, usually around 20ish -- culminating in roughly 100 performer... at the very least, since oftentimes film composers, when given a big enough budget as well as an orchestra of the London Symphony Orchestra's caliber and John Williams' reputation, may often beef up their string sections if they so desire. 100 necessary performers is not an unreasonable minimum. All that to say: If John Williams' were indeed the "Musician", then he would have performed thirty-eight individual parts, five of which he would have re-performed and re-recorded about twenty times over, resulting in a minimum of one-hundred full performances allllll by himself.

You see, then, why composers being listed as "Musician" is a bit problematic. :-D Ultimately, calling the composer the "musician" is comparable to calling Bill Gates a cashier, or da Vinci a doodler, or a mansion a hut. It's simply inaccurate, and frankly won't take me long to revise if given clearance, both the template and each individual movie page. Thank you! --532250 (talk) 11:57, March 22, 2016 (UTC)