Arranging Music - can it ever IMPROVE the original?

there's a job in music that involves tons of creativity expertise a chance to work with some of the top musicians on the planet potentially even make lots of money and if you're any good at it you'll be doing all of that while making life-changing art that affects people all over the world that can literally move people to tears but if I told you this was a job that no one really wants no one ever dreams of becoming you don't find kids at school staring out of the window dreaming of this profession you'd wonder what on Earth I was talking about well here are some examples of songs and pieces of music that use this profession see if you can guess [Music] [Music] friends get back here now priest I Have A Little Priest did you figure it out yet we're talking about the job of Music arranging the art of taking an existing piece of music and giving it a Fresh coat of paint and if you're thinking that arranging doesn't sound very creative it sounds like somebody repainting a house rather than a passionate artist with a unique Vision well that's exactly the kind of thinking that deters people from considering arranging as a career it's also often completely wrong [Music] Perfect by the end of the video I hope to have convinced you that the humble Act of arranging can be totally transformative a good arranger can make a modest song into something amazing and an amazing song into something even better [Music] it's strange that music arranging has a pretty low reputation because right back to the grandest of Grand Old Masters J.S Bach himself arranging music has been part of a composer's work here's an arrangement bucketed for solo organ of a concerto by Vivaldi and it works well although if this video is anything to go by it seems to Newton organist who has three hands [Music] this was perhaps more of a charity makeover a few people in Boston were lucky enough to hear an orchestra so part of the idea behind such Arrangements was simply to allow more people to actually hear the work in some form it was an approach which continued throughout the 19th and 20th Centuries with the rise of pianist composers like Franz list here who made piano transcriptions of say Beethoven Symphonies allowing the audience to hear the pieces for the very first time [Music] there's also the reverse process where official was written for sure [Music] destruction of a wider foreign [Music] thank you one of the most celebrated pieces of this kind of traditional Arrangement is ravel's orchestration of mazovsky's pictures at an exhibition [Music] but to me it provides a bit of a cautionary Tale As far as Arrangements go mazovski wrote the series of 10 short piano pieces very quickly in 1874 but they were only published five years after his death each of the ten movements has a distinctive and Atmospheric color so they quickly became an obvious Target for an orchestral arrangement the race was on to make the most successful Arrangement the early leader was Mikhail tushmalov but he was soon caught by the creativity of prom's founder Henry wood but the first prize ended up going to Maurice faravel who made his version in 1922 after which Henry wood withdrew his own version and banned future performances of it in deference to ravel's skills it's not hard to love ravel's version it's not just his obviously god-tier skill with an orchestra it's the way he brings out little moments that go unnoticed in some other versions compare this passage from tushmarlov's arrangement [Music] [Applause] this one by Ravel foreign [Music] of emotion that creates a moment an atmosphere that's just not there in the tushmala version but ravel's version is a good example of how arranging can reveal as much about the arranger as about the original composition here's conductor and composer Thomas golca who made his own arrangement of the piece in the case of musorkski Ravel pictures one must constantly choose between Russian Aesthetics from the 1870s and French Aesthetics from the 1920s Ravel as an artist comes from a very different time and place to mazursky and his instincts are inevitably a little different take the old castle movement for example Moody chords and a haunting solo line what's the best way to arrange this Ravel opts for a lilting saxophone solo [Music] it sounds Sultry and wonderful but it's hard to imagine it's a choice mazovski himself would have made to schmalov opts for the koronglay which is a safe choice but my personal favorite is Henry Wood's choice of an off-stage euphonium [Music] ravel's Arrangement overall is polished and sophisticated like Ravel himself and there's no doubt audiences have loved it over the years but you can't help feeling it's smoothed over a few of mazovsky's more interesting rough edges the point is that arranging can achieve wonderful things but it's always going to be bringing with it the characteristics of both the arranger and the time and the place that they're arranging in and sometimes those things will be very different from the original [Music] the time between mazovsky's death and ravel's Arrangement saw the birth of a new art form Jazz and in jazz Arrangements were rather the norm than the exception you can map with the different styles of music in the 20th century by watching what kind of arranging goes on take the famous jazz standard autumn leaves for example you might start out as a crooner ballad [Music] become a liberace-esque cheese fest in the hands of someone like Roger Williams [Music] or in the jazz styles of Bebop fusion and Beyond the tune becomes barely audible among the stream of notes [Music] well it could still be lots of fun I'm skipping over a lot of arranging that goes on in jazz especially big band arranging because I'm really concerned with why people arrange and I think it's fair to say that even through the changing styles of jazz the philosophical reasons are largely the same is that true let me know in the comments if I'm talking rubbish what I will say is that you can definitely see some of the reasons people don't Aspire specifically to be arrangers in jazz people like Psy Oliver Fletcher Henderson and Billy strayhorn literally invented the big band sound but rarely get the recognition that they deserve and the same is true in the theater and film world where a lot of jazza ranges ended up who outside those worlds knows the name of say Jonathan tunick who orchestrated many of sondheim's shows or the countless minions as Vanity Fair recently called them who orchestrate and sometimes even compose for the named composers on Hollywood films there's one arranging trick that probably first emerged in jazz and gradually also took hold in popular music and that's what you might call the mood switch where you take the emotional settings of the original and flip them over leaving you with the same Melody but a very different atmosphere probably the earliest Jazz moods which I can think of is the classic Body and Soul written by Johnny Green the original is melancholy an introspective my heart is Slinky in Coleman the hawk hawkins's version hmm more extreme kinds of switches have become a Surefire way to get noticed in the pop world [Music] as well as on reality TV and even here on YouTube [Music] it's strange that wear Arrangements in box Time used to be a way of giving more attention to the composition they now become a way to piggyback on the success of a famous tune plenty of bands and singers have found their first taste of success with a well-chosen arrangement of a famous track and where it can sometimes be a bit cheesy other times it can be a revelation well so now we're starting to stray over the Border a little not just arranging in the sense that bark or list or Ravel would understand it but adding our own twist to the recipe or quite literally dancing to a different beat one of this successes in the world of virtuosic pianist composers was a man named Leopold godovsky and he was an arranger who did something so much more than just put old notes on new instruments critic Ernest Newman said of him it has a remarkable country for drawing out of another man's work something that was not formally expressed by the man but that was latent in his work golovsky's form of creativity seemed to thrive most when he was adding herbs and spices to another composer's work so you might have tasted this recipe Chopin's minute wolves godovsky's version of the same meal is packed full of extra spices and flavors thank you it's an approach in a way that's closer to the thinking of a jazz arranger and if you like your Cuisine a little more modern there's another Chef who does almost exactly the same thing but in a much more contemporary way [Music] Jacob Collier made his name with extravagant Arrangements of old tunes and often adds extremely rich and multi-layered harmonies and textures over the top turning something familiar like say the Christmas carol In The Bleak Midwinter into a Fantastical many colored Beast alone are great examples of how our engine can be so much more than just taking some notes from the piano and sticking them on something else like say a string quartet it can radically alter the entire feel of the work and become a complete artistic object in its own right and it's sometimes surprising how few of the ingredients you need to change just as modern chefs take traditional Regional Cuisine may be deconstructed or add a shockingly modern twist so classical composers find new expression in Old pieces often keeping many of the original notes intact Stravinsky did it in polchinella and see my video about artists stealing for more on that Luciano Barrio did it with his wonderful folk songs which add the tiniest of quirky modernist twists to the traditional recipe [Music] and more recently Thomas addis's Arrangements of cooperam to mix a metaphor for you like some kind of oral Kaleidoscope the original is still there but it's deeply changed [Music] [Applause] let's go [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] to me this is one of the best examples of a work that might only technically be called an arrangement but is as beautiful a creation as anything Addis has done and I don't mean that in any disparaging way [Music] these are all examples of pieces where the voice of the arranger takes on a stronger role if ravel's Arrangement was as it were accidentally 1920s French Addis is more knowing about the anachronistic nature of his arranging he's not making any attempt to hide that he's operating in a very different time and place we see the original that through the fragmented window of the present our final example didn't have such issues of authenticity because the singer in the original and the arrangement were one and the same person but before we look at that let me just say that I made some arrangements of my own recently for a sort of classical super group The Between Worlds Ensemble and I've made a video which is available to my patrons over on patreon where I talk about the process of arranging some Italian folk songs and some of the lessons I learned so if you're interested do sign up there and you'll be supporting the channel in the process oh [Applause] [Music] Joni Mitchell's both sides now it was one of her first and most popular tracks when it first came out back in the 1960s they're acting strange they shake their hands they say I've changed while something's lost but something's gained in living every but the new version which she recorded and performed live in the year 2000 added layers of emotion which a lot of listeners found overwhelming now or friends they're acting strangers [Music] every day apparently not just reaction vloggers but the orchestra themselves during the recording process were brought to Tears by the power of the new version the hankies were out apparently [Music] the impetus for the arrangement came from Mitchell herself I saw Mabel Mercer do it in her 70s and I thought it was a wonderful performance and I went back to tell her I said you know I've heard that song performed by a lot of people I didn't tell her I was the author you know I said but it takes somebody your age to pull it off and she went huh I've Looked at Love from both sides now foreign when I wrote it I took a lot of ridiculing for it I was just miscast in it I think as a young girl that that I I really like the performance I did in my 50s so Mitchell called up a ranger Vince Mendoza who recast the song completely from its solo guitar Origins into a new version for full Orchestra it starts in a very nostalgic space with a single five note motive weaving in and out of itself like a sort of Dreamscape [Music] foreign Avengers the arrangement here forms a sort of Cloudy backdrop which perfectly sets off the solo line as Mitchell suggested she was now in her late 50s and with a voice enriched by the depths of life's experience and tinged with the Husky Timbre of a thousand cigarettes the song lyrics take on an added poignancy that just wasn't possible for her when she was back in her 20s [Music] when the orchestra climaxes towards the end of the song it feels as though the emotion has become too much words even song words are no longer enough and the instruments must take the weight of the expression when extra layers of emotion and meaning are stacked on top of the original that surely when arranging can be said to be a truly worthy profession [Music] and whilst we're on the subject of Arrangements you can check out my video here where I arranged a piece of electronic music that was originally written for the op1 by Jeremy Blake from the red means recording YouTube channel and made a version for full Orchestra which you can see on that video thank you for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: David Bruce Composer

Views: 40,649

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Id: C6WOQg3d48c

Length: 18min 39sec (1119 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 05 2023