Is an arrangement a new piece of music?

See more about MusicaNova Orchestra of Scottsdale at
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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.

A Rachmaninoff Cello Concerto?

See more about MusicaNova Orchestra of Scottsdale at
www.MusicaNovaAz.org


Back in 2001, the cellist Rafael Wallfisch recorded the Grieg Sonata as the Grieg "Cello Concerto" in a version orchestrated by Benjamin Wallfisch and Joseph Horovitz. In Gramophone, the reviewer suggested that he would love to hear an orchestral arrangement of the Rachmaninoff Cello Sonata. I was kind of shocked, but could not resist the challenge of looking at the piece and seeing if this was remotely possible. What became clear is that if you were to simply orchestrate the piano part and keep the cello part intact that it would not work at all. For the music to be effective, you would have to swamp the cello part repeatedly, and in many passages where the cello carries the melody,the busy piano part would convert to a busy orchestral part that would be even harder to suppress than the piano. Further, I thought that in the Grieg arrangement the non-virtuoso cello part against the full orchestral writing sounded odd. Unlike at least one reviewer, I thought it was way too clear that I was listening to an arrangement of a piece of chamber music.

So the verdict was generally against the idea. But then I asked myself, what would happen if we took some of those virtuoso lines and transferred them-mutatis mutandis-to the cello? Could you achieve something that would have that Rachmaninoff virtuoso flair but written for the cello?

Over time, this idea evolved into the idea of transforming the music of Rachmaninoff into a Cello Concerto by making the relationship between the Cello part and the orchestra different than that between the cello and the piano in the Sonata. I rewrote a number of the piano licks as cello lines, getting advice from cellists on how to make that work. At the climaxes, where the cello part is, of necessity, swamped by the other notes, I took the cello line and doubled it in other parts of the orchestra and marked the solo part ad lib.

I came up with a version that we did with soloist Zoran Stillin and the Southern Arizona Symphony in 2003. The audience responded really well. I thought the idea worked, but the actual arrangement needed serious revision. I did not go far enough in rethinking the work for Cello and Orchestra. The orchestral scoring was too thick, and there were times when the big tunes were swamped as badly-or even worse- than they were in the original. In a number of places the cello should have been brought up an octave to cut through the orchestra better, and I should have been bolder in giving piano lines to the cello.

The revision I did this summer is pretty radical, so much so that I thought of changing the title from "Symphony-Concerto" to "Concerto", as the cello part is significantly more prominent in this version, and the scoring is much lighter. I did not try to make the orchestration sound like Rachmaninoff's, although it often does, simply because the music demands it. But Rachmaninoff never dealt with the specific problems of this type of scoring. He never tried to orchestrate any of his overtly pianistic works, and even when he agreed to let Resphigi orchestrate five of the Etudes-Tableaux, the works he chose for orchestration were admirably suited to the task.

We will see how well it works in rehearsal, but I am pretty excited about the possibility of this being taken up by other cellists. At least in my head, it really works now. I am very grateful to Peter Eom for being the guinea pig on this new version of the score. We will perform it on October 23 at the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts as part of our season opening concert of the MusicaNova Orchestra.

I will blog again on another interesting aspect of the process of creating this score, which is the extent to which it is still 'the Rachmaninoff Cello Sonata".