On Aug 23, 2004, at 1:25 PM, Noel Stoutenburg wrote:
I don't think there are firm rules to distinguish between these terms. In my own usage, the use of the words "transposition", "transcription", "adaptation", and "arrangement" is determined by the amount of change to the original material. A transposition only changes the key signature.
Well that raises another interesting point. Strictly speaking, you may be correct, but as a practical matter, if I'm writing a transposition of a piano-vocal piece and I'm at all serious about it, I'm going to review the result to make sure it still works well, and if the transposition calls for minor adjustments I will make them.
Some specific examples:
- Sometimes a piano chord which was playable in the original becomes unplayable when moved to another key. Usually this can be fixed with a minor adjustment that makes no significant change to the sound.
- If a piece goes down too far, the lower note of an octave bass note may feel excessive, so I'll cut it. Similarly, if a piece goes up too far, sometimes I might want to add it.
- If a piece goes down too far, sometimes a closed chord sounds too muddy, so I'll open it up or drop a note.
- Sometimes a whole passage wants to go up an octave instead of down. I'm more likely to do this with a piece which was originally written for a male voice, and the piano part is being transposed down for a female voice to sing it in a lower key. Since the voice is really going up, it's not always all that obvious that the piano shouldn't be going up anyway.
I would guess that on average, about half the time I make no adjustment at all and the other half I do something pretty minor that you would never if you weren't comparing the two side by side. The point is that it makes the final product sound a little better or be a little more playable.
Strictly speaking, I suppose this counts as some sort of "arrangement", but I certainly don't claim to be an arranger in such a case. That makes it sound like a creative input, when it's really just technical. In mind, it's not that much different from typographic adjustments, like altering the cross-staffing, clef-changes, etc to make it easier to read in the new key.
Just more evidence that the difference between the various types of work is a continuum and you can always find a gray area at the margin. I remember another piece which I transposed about a fourth. There was some sort of generic arpeggio pattern that didn't sound nearly as good in the new key, so I rewrote it to have the same harmony and bass note but use filler notes more in the general range of the original, so that 1-3-5-8-5-3 becomes 1-5-8-10-8-5 or something like that. That's one step beyond than the minor technical adjustments I make more routinely, but it still feels like less than true arranging.
mdl
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