Is an arrangement a new piece of music?

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In my last blog I talked about some of the thinking that went into the creation of my arrangement of the Rachmaninoff Cello Sonata as a Concerto. Now I want to ask the salient question-is this arrangement a new piece of music?

The first point that needs to be addressed is that the notes are mostly but far from precisely the same. Quite apart from the changes I made to the cello part, adapting some of the piano filigree and turning it into cello lines, in any orchestration of a piano piece you have to consider that the piano and the orchestra are different creatures, and what works for one does not work for the other.

Let me mention an interesting example, one that gave me enormous trouble. The third movement starts with a piano solo. The melody is played mostly by the right hand pinky finger, with a sixteenth note (semiquaver) pattern in both hands below it. It is very effective, and it sounds great. When I tried to score this literally it sounded awful. The left hand sixteenths could not translate to another instrument and sound anything except overly thick. That register-the octave below middle C-is very treacherous territory for an orchestra and needs to be handled extremely carefully. Busy writing in this octave can easily mess up everything else you are trying to do. I realized that when I played this passage on the piano I severely suppressed the lower octave sixteenth notes to the point that they were barely audible. At this volume, they had a wonderful acoustical effect, freeing up piano strings and giving the upper parts more resonance,helping both the right hand sixteenths and the melody above them to sing.

In order to make an arrangement that sounded good, I had the right hand sixteenths played by a harp, and the left hand sixteenths, transposed up an octave, played as a rolled chord on each beat. To simulate the attack of the piano, I had the lowest note played on a bass pizzicato; to simulate the effect of the pedal, I had the orchestral cellos play the low note sustained; and to simulate the resonance of the melody that was created by the way Rachmaninoff scored it, I had it doubled up an octave-an effect similar to an eight foot stop on an organ. Thus, every parameter of the original was altered in some way. But now it worked!

If I had been literal in my approach to the notes, I could never have made an arrangement that would have had anything like the effect of the original piano part.

Or, at least, the piano part as I hear it. And this is where things get very tricky.

As the above example makes clear, my orchestration of this work is based on the way I hear it, and the way I play it. It is not neutral. Beyond the notes themselves, beyond the spirit of the piece, arrangers imposes-of necessity-something of themselves on the music. In fact, I deliberately use the orchestration to underline structural details that I hear in the score, and sometimes I make points that I doubt were in Rachmaninoff's mind. One example: I use the clarinets to play the rippling piano line that accompanies the first theme of the first movement. At the end of the last movement Rachmaninoff has one of his patented "big tunes" come back for one last appearance, accompanied by a rippling piano line. Although in this instance I could have orchestrated the passage successfully many different ways, I chose to use the clarinets on this part, and the effect is that it creates-by the very use of that same instrument in a similar passage, separated by over twenty minutes of music-a structural unity to the piece, that would be unlikely to occur to someone listening to the piano/cello version. The passages are different enough that their similarity is only clear when you hear the clarinets play both passages.

So I change notes, give the cello some of the piano part (and the orchestra some of the cello part), I impose my own structural imperatives on the music, I change tempos (to accommodate the difference in the acoustical situation) but I do not change harmonies or melodies, and I do not add any of my own material or cut out anything that Rachmaninof wrote. I am certainly truer to the original than Schoenberg was in his bizarre "Cello Concerto In D major by Matthias Georg Monn" and yet I am also certainly further from the original than Wallfisch and Horovitz in their "Grieg Cello Concerto" . How do I characterize this?

What I have done is come up with a title that I think accurately reflects the situation: "Symphony-Concerto for Cello and Orchestra: arranged from the Sonata for Cello and Piano of Sergei Rachmaninoff by Warren Cohen".
Awkward, evasive, and yet the most accurate picture of the relationship of the original to the arrangement I can think of!

Come hear this oddly named work on October 23 at the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts as part of our season opening concert of the MusicaNova Orchestra.