Daily Inspiration Quote by Anne Dudley

Dudley is talking about orchestration the way a good director talks about blocking: not as a technical afterthought, but as storytelling in three dimensions. On paper, “violins on either side” sounds like a fussy seating-chart preference. In film, it’s a camera move. Splitting the violins left and right widens the emotional frame, giving the audience a fuller “stereo picture” that reads as scale, sweep, and clarity - especially when the music has to compete with dialogue, effects, and the visual noise of modern mixes.

The subtext is that film music isn’t just written; it’s staged. Dudley’s language (“nice,” “good”) is deceptively casual, but it reflects a composer-producer mindset shaped by post-’70s recording practice: the orchestra is no longer a fixed concert-hall tradition, it’s a flexible instrument inside a controllable sonic world. Stereo placement becomes a narrative tool: violins can shimmer like light across a wide landscape, or box the listener in when the scene needs tension. Even the choice to put basses “in the middle” isn’t arbitrary. Centering the low end anchors the score the way a stable horizon anchors an image, giving the mix weight and cohesion so the high strings can move without the whole thing feeling lopsided.

Context matters: Dudley’s career spans the era when film scoring became inseparable from studio craft, surround sound, and hyper-detailed mixing. Her point is pragmatic and artistic at once: where the instruments sit changes what the audience feels, not just what they hear.