I have a bit of a difference of opinion as to what constitutes orchestration. In your list above, there doesn't seem to be any essential difference between arranging and orchestration. The way I was taught, the orchestrator does not add or omit any notes or change any voicings, counterlines, melodies, or accompaniment figures. Once one starts in on any of that, he is an arranger, not an orchestrator. As I mentioned before, the difference is in responsibility. The responsibility for the final sound shifts from the composer to the arranger.
Bingo! We are, indeed, discussing responsibility, which does, indeed, shift in various times and places between not only composer and arranger, but historically among composer, arranger and performer. The orchestration of virtually all Renaissance instrumental music was open, and it was expected that the band leader or choir director would distribute the instruments that happened to be available among the parts. Singers and instrumentalists alike were expected to have the skill to improvise and ornament--the modern term would be "stylize"--their lines. The responsibility for the final sound lay as much on the performer as on the composer, and both knew and understood that simple fact.
Baroque ornamentation ("stylization") came in two flavors, French and Italian. In France and in music in the French style, it was the responsibility of the composer, and the ornamentation of individual notes became part of the actual melodic line. In Italy and in music in the Italian style, it was more often the responsibility of the performer, with the most famous case being Corelli's adagios and the way he would improvise on them in performance. But all Baroque performers understood and accepted a greater degree of responsibility for the final sound, comparable only to jazz performers in today's music.
Today's parallel to this "separation of responsibilities" can be found in today's popular music, musical theater, and yes, opera. What's important to the listener is in part the skill of the composer/songwriter, but in much greater part the individuality of the singer who recorded it or the actor presenting it on stage. Both arrangement and orchestration are vital to the "final sound," but the average listener doesn't know that and doesn't care. Nelson Riddle had as much responsibility for Frank Sinatra's hits as Frank or the songwriters did, but only musicians are aware of that simple fact.
Since musical theater predates movies, it's easy to see how corporate creativity became the rule. Theater is the art of illusion, and moviemaking even moreso. Each is created by specialists, each with creative excellence in his own part of the process. The first layer of skill to be farmed out as unnecessary for the composer to do himself was the actual copying. The second was orchestration, entrusted to a skilled professional who had the trust of the composer. There are good reasons why Robert Russell Bennett was the first call orchestrator for an entire generation of musical theater composers, but even he was regularly replaced by someone else for the dance orchestrations in a show. They were different specialties, if the composer or producer or director felt that was important.
I've seen an interesting trend among music educators. When they prepare printed programs for their show choir or vocal jazz concerts, they more often credit the arranger and don't even mention the composer/songwriter. Their judgement of the relative importance is pretty clear. And if an arrangement is actually a transcription of someone's recording, they go even farther and credit "As recorded by ..." rather than either arranger or composer. Yet both arranger and composer are there, lurking in the background.
People may put down George Gershwin as a "serious" composer because he had Ferde Grof� orchestrate a lot of his work and freely admitted that he lacked that skill, at least in the beginning, but he was simply following the normal Broadway practice of his time.
On the other hand, someone has mentioned that in the work of R. Strauss, Wagner, et al., the orchestration becomes so important to the final sound that it is inconceivable to imagine anyone but the composer doing it. But we find almost exactly the same thing with record producers Quincy Jones and Jimmy Jam in the 1970s and '80s, with recording arrangements just as complex, but made up of multiple layers of synthesized pointilism rather than multiple layers of orchestral pointilism, and created by arrangers rather than the songwriters on the megahit recordings by Michael Jackson and others. You simply can't transcribe those arrangements for acoustic instruments on a one-to-one basis; you have to reorchestrate completely.
What I try to impress on my arranging students is this: It is an arrangement that makes ANY composition performable by a specific soloist or ensemble; no arrangement, no performance. Composition and arrangement and orchestration are overlapping but separate skills. In the corporate creativity of musical theater and the movies, normal practice is to separate those skills and assign them to individual specialists. When one person--let's say Beethoven--has done it all himself, it's easy to think of those skills as part of composition, but they are still separate skills whether done by one person or more than one. Strauss was gifted as a composer, as an arranger, AND as an orchestrator.
Composition is the 10% "inspiration." In our family my wife is the composer, able to create good compositions starting with nothing but raw musical materials. Everything else, including both arrangement and orchestration, is the 90% "perspiration." That's where my own skills lie, and when I do act as composer I get better results when I convince myself that I am actually arranging!
John
-- John & Susie Howell Virginia Tech Department of Music Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240 Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034 (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
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