Not always, though. You had church funding and then patronage from the state.
Beethoven famously ushered in a new era with his 5th symphony when he secured am advance from the bank to produce it, being the first large work to be produced through commercial investment.
Individual patronage continued through the 19th century with notable examples like Tchaikovsky, though increasingly commercial aspects were present.
Coming the 20th century funding for academia became the norm. Older composers became teachers and younger composers secured funding for their thesis compositions.
At the same time the recording industry exploded. Even avant garde cumposers could make good money by starting their own companies to press and publish their records.
Over time interest in orchestral music has plummeted. I guess there's a mix of reasons for this. But today it will prove very difficult to gather the funds for a large scale composition, preformance or recording, never mind all three.
There are a few composers I support on Patreon who also do their own production via extensive combinations of plugins and soundfonts in applications I've barely ever heard of before. The result is hard to distinguish from a human orchestra, save in the nature of the occasional errors, which are always of composition rather than execution.
This would I think be a lot more common were it not such a niche interest. Even the composers I mention support themselves primarily through orchestration of video game music and the like, using that to subsidize their original work.
I'm not too proud to admit I enjoy the video game stuff, too; I'm no less susceptible to nostalgia than anyone, or maybe somewhat more so. But my point is that, while the technical bar appears fairly high, it is currently within the possible for a composer also to provide the orchestra. It seems likely the technical bar could be lowered, or for that matter that a new production industry could develop in support of those not able to access the more traditional one.
I'm not too proud to admit I enjoy the video game stuff
The stigma against video game music can’t go away soon enough! Composers are creating some really amazing stuff for video games and gamers themselves are an enormous audience for the wider classical music industry to draw upon.
To their credit, a lot of orchestras have recognized this and have been performing video game music for years. Along with film scores (a trend started by John Williams), video game music has breathed an incredible amount of new life into an industry that might otherwise be in far worse shape now.
1. Go find any of the text commentaries that Austin Wintory has done about the Journey soundtrack.
2. Clear an hour off your schedule, close your eyes and listen.
Edit: On second thought, keep your eyes open and enjoy the beautiful artwork by Matt Nava (taken from his book on Journey) as well as a selection of fan art which is equally stunning considering most of the people are probably not professional graphic designers.
Fuck...it's so good it makes me emotional just typing this sentence.
Also worthy of note: Tan Dun and Yo Yo Ma's recording of the Crouching Tiger soundtrack and his recordings of the Bach solos.
Alas, I must end with the complaint that the current recordings of the original Star Wars soundtracks use track listings that are out of order with their "appearances" in the films.
Thanks so much for sharing this with me! Austin's score is deeply moving. Now I can't stop thinking about it.
I think I played the game a long time ago but I believe I was visiting a friend (who had already played through it) at the time and I wasn't in the right frame of mind to experience it. Now I want to track down a PS4 and play it again.
This reminded me of another score I love: Endless Legend by Arnaud Roy. Similar instrumentation to Journey (albeit with lots of human voices). It has a different feel though, for a radically different game (a turn-based strategy game).
Film scores are so completely in the shitter and have been for going on two decades, that maybe they could stand to take some cues from video games. I miss films having memorable, distinctive music. At least for title themes. Even mid-budget films often had that, in the Olden Times of 2+ decades ago. It's one of my kids' favorite things about older movies—they noticed, without prompting, and they love it. Marvel managed, what, a single run of a half-dozen kinda-almost-memorable notes, over 40+ films? What a joke. It's so bad that their deciding halfway in to simply score everything with pop music was kinda an improvement, but is still a form of just giving up.
Where I think orchestras will continue to win out is for live performances. What amplification can do is complete crap compared to pure acoustic much less trying to record and reproduce something without a million dollar sound system.
This is also a case of good old AI automating things that a great many humans enjoy doing saving us from the drudgery of human expression.
Beethoven famously ushered in a new era with his 5th symphony when he secured am advance from the bank to produce it, being the first large work to be produced through commercial investment.
Individual patronage continued through the 19th century with notable examples like Tchaikovsky, though increasingly commercial aspects were present.
Coming the 20th century funding for academia became the norm. Older composers became teachers and younger composers secured funding for their thesis compositions.
At the same time the recording industry exploded. Even avant garde cumposers could make good money by starting their own companies to press and publish their records.
Over time interest in orchestral music has plummeted. I guess there's a mix of reasons for this. But today it will prove very difficult to gather the funds for a large scale composition, preformance or recording, never mind all three.