Since I spend so much time arranging music, I thought I'd start a topic on the subject.

What makes a good arrangment?  A bad 'un?  What arrangements have surprised you by working, and which have made you cringe?

Is a string band playing a quartet playing an arrangement. or is this just performance practice?  What if I handed out five parts to a brass band piece to a quintet - does me picking the parts constitute an arrangement?  Is a symphonist's piano sketch an arrangement, or is his symphony?

Do I actually arrange music, or do I transcribe it?  Is there a distinction, or is there more of a continuum?

NB

The best arrangements improve on the original. Yes, it is possible.

The worst arrangements? (No, don't get me started).

I tend to view a transcription* as involving creativity/composition as distinct from arrangement, which implies little above mere tranference from one medium to another. Trouble is that many are very sloppy in their use of these words and they have become interchangeable.

*itself distinct from writing down the dots from a recording.

Thanks, Jonathan. I did once arrange Unstern for horn, baritone horn and accordion: not sure if that was an improvement on the original . . .

We live in times where finances are more rarely made available for the performance of large-scale works.  Increasingly scaled-down performances are becoming the "norm"...   ETO, for example,  have toured an arrangement (by Jonathan Dove) of CUNNING LITTLE VIXEN for a 16-piece orchestra...  and it was extremely successful, I would say?

Like it or not, it seems that there is going to be no avoiding this trend in the future.

Who has heard Schoenberg's arrangement of DAS LIED VON DER ERDE for chamber ensemble (including a harmonium..) and tenor & mezzo soloists?  It's a fine piece of work in its own right, and adds an admirable clarity to the work.  Of course, I am also extremely happy with the original

A friend of mine wanted to do a version of Mahler 8 which would then become the Symphony of a Dozen...

There's a fine chamber arrangement of the final scene from Strauss's Capriccio that David Matthews was commissioned to write a while ago for one of the Nash ensemble's 40th anniversary concerts, but there will sadly either have to be a revolution in Germany or a 12-year wait (until Strauss goes out of copyright everywhere) before it's likely to be heard again.

Matthews has also made several chamber / ensemble arrangements of the Tango from his own Fourth Symphony, titled "Five to Tango", "Thirty to Tango", etc., according to the number of performers involved (apart, that is, from the one for violin and piano which he simply calls "It Takes")...

Perhaps, in the same depressing tradition of scaling down, economising and the rest of it, what survives of Ives's Universe Symphony could be arranged as Earth Symphony and Birtwistle's Earth Dances as Moon Dances; maybe even Vaughan Williams's Folk Songs from Somerset could be cut back to Folk Song from Taunton, Brian's Gothic Symphony pared down to the Go-thin Symphony and the Magic Fire Music given a new lean-burn version. It would all give a whole new non-meaning to the expression reductio ad absurdum, would it not?...

Best,

Alistair

Not only would it have been so, but it is so! - just as what I wrote previously contained yet another of my all too many typos, for which, yet again, I apologise!

Anyway, the piece itself remains - er - well, as Baudelaire might have put it - irrémédiable...

Best,

Alistair

My bro and I (him more than me) once arranged Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture for a Consort of Viols, 2 recorders (doubling crumhorns and racketts), a curtal, mixed percussion and pop-guns, titled "The 1612 Overture" - and busked it very successfully in Brighton and in Covent Garden.  I believe Opilec once played the (very busy) percussion in this (in his student days, before he became a renowned Janacek scholar, of course...) - perhaps he can comment, if he is around?