The Value of Arrangements

The standard way to approach the idea of musical arrangements is through an analogy with literary translations – an arranger translates the music from one medium to another so that its meaning will be comprehensible in this new medium. Though the meaning may remain comprehensible, just as with translations something will be lost through the process of arrangement and something will be gained. The analogy can be extended to describe the performance of music, because the performer himself is a new medium, and although it might not involve a translation between different languages per se, the use of the language will inevitably be personalised to satisfy the performer’s proclivities. 

It is in this sense that translations, arrangements and the performing arts as a whole may appear derogatory to the original spirit of the compositions. They are tainted by a mediating agent. They are impure. Indeed the performing arts is condemned to be impure because we performers deal with things of the past (be it the immediate past or the distant past) and we cannot prevent the present from contaminating any enactment of the past. However, impurity as a phenomenon is in itself rather fascinating, and to ‘contribute’ to that impurity has proved to be entertaining. Purity is a meaningless description without the existence of impurity and vice versa. It is only through exposure to arrangements or heavily edited editions that the original can appear ‘pure’. Neither purity nor impurity can obliterate each other because they are the very reason for each other’s existence. It is this ambivalence, this traction of ontology [of existence], that arrangements play on. 

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Today’s programme embraces the parallel existences of what is and what is not Bach, not only in terms of the impurities brought about by my arrangements and my act of playing, but also in terms of the sheer diversity of Bach’s output, smudging the boundaries of the ‘authentic Bach’. For example, one can find so many technical oddities (including parallel fifths) in the early capriccio written when he was about 19, that it seems at first glance to have little semblance to the mastery found in the much later preludes and fugues from book 2 of the Well-Tempered Clavier, and one of the most impressive of that collection is the D major fugue—apart from the mathematically sublime tour-de-force-stretto-on-the-third, it also shows Bach’s ability to spin an innocuous subsidiary subject (the same subject can be found in the E minor sinfonia) into webs of closely-knit imitations. But then these preludes and fugues are hardly representative of something that is ‘purely Bach’. One would struggle to establish a Bach from these 24 pieces (let alone his whole output), because they all divert our attention to something else—the E major fugue starts off like some Renaissance church music by Palestrina, the D major fugue has resonances of early 17th century Italian (Venetian) canzonas, the E-flat major prelude borrows the simplicity of lute writing , the Gallant style F major fugue shows stodgy old Bach keeping up to date with what is fashionable, and the capriccio literally comes out of the 17th century practice of harpsichord writing. There is also the comparison between the improvisatory rambling of the organ fugue and the stubborn unchangeability of the big Chaconne and also the mini-chaconne in the capriccio. Somewhere amongst this kaleidoscopic collection lies what we each individually recognise as ‘being Bach’. 

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Music as some form of intellectual entertainment does not necessarily have a bearing on music as some form of humanist desire to be unhooked from worldly suffering. They exist in different dimensions that coincide occasionally and randomly. Their coexistence is of a completely different sort to that of purity versus impurity. The rhetoric that defines and defends the value of arrangements epitomises an aristocratic lust for amusement. That has no place in music that moves. An act of arrangement cannot in itself be considered emotive. 

“Rhetoric, both in the forms of arrangement and performance, creates layers upon layers of commentaries on the original work. We lose the immediacy, and we lose also the ineffable because we lose sight of the real presences.” This narrative is but one take on the creative process of music making. It is one that places the original work—originality and authenticity—at the heart of everything. It presents the view that secondary literature including reviews, reviews of reviews, critiques, analyses and arrangements all detract from the essence of the original object. 

Busoni’s argument goes something like “Musical notation is inadequate and hence flawed. Everything that is derived from musical notation—compositions, arrangements, performances, renditions of any kind—will by implication of the original sin be flawed. Everything that is material, be it sound or notation, is imperfect. There has never been immediacy and there will never be immediacy except in the percipient’s own imagination. What the arrangement does in vandalising the original is negligible compared to what notation has always done and will continue to do in vandalising the musical idea.” 

The view put forward by Peter Szendy in his book Listen: A History of Our Ears goes “Schumann claimed there are no musical works that cannot be improved and perfected. The arranger as a critic holds the possibility to propel the imperfect original to the ideal Work.” 

The beauty in Szendy’s argument lies in the glimmer of hope it gives to the arranger. It places the original not as a goal but as a point of departure, and it places the perfection of a musical work not in a different plane infinitely far away from the mortals but on a definite point along a line to which we approach infinitesimally. 

Probability. The amount of thinking we put in is to increase the probability of coincidence of the two dimensions of music making—the intellectual and the emotional. Rather than presenting the performer as a mediating agent between an ‘original’ and the audience, the process of arrangement places the work more immediately within the performer’s voice, and this immediacy in turn increases the probability of an intellectual discourse flipping into an emotional experience, hence the value in making changes to Bach, and also to Bach-Busoni, or Bach-Liszt, or Bach-Naoumoff, or Bach-Sitkovetsky, or Bach-Stokowski, or Bach-Stephen Hung etc.