Transcriptions and Arrangements

The transformation of a piece through a change of medium, a simplification, or an elaboration, is usually referred to as an “arrangement.” Such transformations have a long pedigree in Western art music, and they were critical to the dissemination and appreciation of new music before the era of recording. Keyboard or chamber arrangements of larger works served as the primary means by which music lovers could acquaint themselves with or reexperience the opera arias, string quartets, and symphonies they could otherwise hear only when larger or more appropriate forces were available. Our ready access to recordings has perhaps led us to regard such arrangements as somewhat unworthy stand-ins for the originals. Nevertheless, one must admit that even today they offer a more active way in which to explore repertoire than does listening to a recording, even if some aspects of the original must be sacrificed to the limitations of the substitute instruments and their players.

If the transformation is fairly literal, often reflecting merely a change of medium while preserving most “essential” aspects of the original, we tend to call the result a transcription—that is, an arrangement in which the hand of the perpetrator is not much in evidence. Of course determining what we ought to regard as essential is by no means trivial, but for the moment let us agree that it is the user of the arrangement who will decide whether the particular version at hand is adequate for his or her purposes. Fairly literal transcriptions, as in the ubiquitous piano-vocal scores used by vocal and instrumental soloists and choir directors, are still in evidence in rehearsal or even in performance, when hiring an orchestra might come only at an unmanageable cost. The pianist literally fills in for the missing ensemble, and it works out well enough. An arrangement, in contrast, often involves more extensive changes, which may either simplify, as in pedagogical volumes or in the numerous anthologies of “piano classics,” or elaborate upon the original, as in Godowsky's versions of Chopin's Etudes or Liszt's expansions of Schubert's lieder. A Machaut ballade with an inner part added, a sixteenth-century chanson laden with ornamental passaggi, a concerto with a cadenza inserted in place of the original fermata, even a realized basso continuo part: these are all expansions of simpler versions, whether improvised by performers or composed in advance and transmitted in notation.