Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Arrangement vs Transcription

I really like to arrange music. In case nobody knows what an arrangement is, The American Federation of Musicians defines arranging as "the art of preparing and adapting an already written composition for presentation in other than its original form. An arrangement may include reharmonization, paraphrasing, and/or development of a composition, so that it fully represents the melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic structure."

Now that we have that figured out, some people are really dumb when they comment on a video that says for example:

Title of Piece | [Type of Ensemble ARRANGEMENT]

If they had read the title, they would see that it's an arrangement, which as we know is defined as the description I posted above. Some people have the nerve to comment on it like "This is really good, but it isn't accurate to the original piece."

Really? No shit. It's a fucking arrangement, it's not supposed to be exactly like the original piece. If it was supposed to be exactly like the original piece, then it would say this:

Title of Piece | [Transcribed for Type of Ensemble]

Now, if I had posted an arrangement with that title, then the person would have a right to say something, but I DIDN'T!

A transcription in music is defined as rewriting a piece of music for another instrument or ensemble than which it was originally intended. 

In a nutshell, transcriptions are faithful adaptations, whereas arrangements change significant aspects of the original piece. Some people need to be educated about what these terms actually mean.

1 comment:

Laurent said...

To be honest I didn't know most of this, thanks for informing me. :)