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Arrangements and original music

The question of the pros and cons of arrangements has recently come up. Among the various kinds of large instrumental ensembles, the symphony orchestra has long had the highest status, although there was a time before about 1850 when it was almost universally acknowledged that military bands played better than the few symphony orchestras that existed by that time.

It seems odd to me that piano transcriptions of orchestral works (think Liszt) and orchestra transcriptions of piano works (think Ravel) have been accepted as high art, but band transcriptions have not. When a pianist or violinist plays transcriptions of operatic music, it's art, but not when a trombonist does.

It also seems odd to me that with isolated exceptions, the composers known for orchestral music have written no band music and the composers known for band music have written no orchestra music--or at least nothing that has entered the repertoire.

That said, the fact remains that orchestras continue to play the same core repertoire and it appears that bands do not. I played for five years with the Prairie Brass Band in Illinois and toured England with the Illinois Brass Band one summer. It is my observation, admittedly limited, that except for the marches, hardly any any original band music more than 15-20 years old gets performed on our concerts.

We play arrangements (of classical music, pop songs, movie music, and lots of other things) because our audiences seem to enjoy them. Most people like to hear familiar music. Audiences for bands are apparently much more likely than audiences for orchestras to appreciate new music. But once the novelty has worn off, do we think that audiences will not enjoy them any more? Is that why there seem to be few performances of our own "classics"?

I wish bands played more older repertoire and orchestras played more newer music. It would also be nice to find an orchestra as willing to play arrangements of, say, Year of the Dragon (and leave the trombone solo alone!) as bands are to play Brahms.

I also wish the artistic value of a piece of music would be determined on its musical merits without regard to what instruments are playing it. I'm afraid that the facts that there is so little in the way of a recognized core repertoire and that so much of our programming is devoted to arrangements give the impression that original music for band is not intrinsically interesting enough to have any staying power.


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David Guion

Who is General Failure? And why is he
reading my hard drive?

david@xxxxxxxxxxxx


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