Extreme Dynamics

Musical notation is depending a lot on common practice. Unfortunately, there are quite a few people who believe just because they know musical symbols and can input them into a software qualifies them to competently orchestrate music.

Just the other day I was looking at a score sheet by someone who seriously decided that it was a good idea to put quadruple forte (ffff) at the end of their piece with notes that all had an accent. With a score like this, it is hard for musicians who read this to develop any trust in you knowing what you're doing or even worse: take you seriously.

But let's back up a little and talk about dynamics in the orchestra. The common dynamic range in an orchestra is from pp to ff. Anything beyond that is rare and needs a very plausible reason. 

Unfortunately, the DAW world and samples have made us believe that dynamics are absolute values, like you could assign absolute values to the modwheel that fades through the dynamic layers of your samples.

In reality, dynamics are relative. A mp in one context can mean something quite different than a mp in another context. Even the very same mp could mean something very different for instance for the 1st Horn player than it does for the 4th Horn player.

One of the examples where this can be easily observed are trombones. If you write a forte for them in the context of them providing long note brass harmony underneath a sweeping string theme, you will get a very different dynamic from them compared to the forte that you would get from them in a unison thematic statement in a piece like Vader's theme.

It is essential to understand that musicians are not "sample triggers" that happen to be alive and that you can manage like the samples in your DAW but to understand that they know and hear their contextual role in the music and adapt accordingly. They have trained their whole life to interpret musical symbols with the contextual common practice and you as a composer or orchestrator should know these common sense rules as well if you seriously want to notate something for them.

Coming back to our ffff finale mentioned above, dynamically there will not be any difference than notating it ff. If the musicians feel that they are playing the big finale, and it is well written and the intention gets transported, they will automatically interpret this ff appropriately, just like the gazillions of other finales they have played in their lives with similar attitude. Extreme dynamics beyond the pp or ff range very often feel to them like you keep beating a horse that is racing at max speed already.

Having said that, there are rare cases that justify the use of extreme dynamics (and yes, there are and were composers who go way beyond what I mentioned above, for instance the serialists from the mid 20th century). For instance in a general ff, if some thing should blare out on top of this, it might be worth considering using a fff. Or on instruments like clarinets who are capable of creating an almost inaudibly soft tone, it might be worth considering using ppp in certain cases. However, from my experience even using these extreme dynamics doesn't mean that you get a different result in the first run compared to ff or pp but more often, it needs a verbal hint from the booth or conductor after the first read through to take this seriously.

Personally, I think I can count the instances where I used triple dynamics in the last 5 years or so on one hand. Trust your musicians to understand your intention and don't write your score sheets as if they were living Kontakt instances.