By Arrangement (if not By Appointment)
(Foden programme note - 1991) At this Shrewsbury Festival Concert I introduced my arrangement of Wagner's 'The Entry of the Gods into Valhalla'. It was the only piece of arranged music in what was a serious concert. At the time of compiling this archive (2008) such a level of original music in a brass band concert is apparently unknown. The Festival asked me for an appropriate introduction to the piece, so I took the chance to write a few words about the arranger’s craft....
For a modern brass band concert, tonight’s programme is unusual: it contains only one piece of arranged music, all the rest is original, if any music can be realistically called that. By ‘arranged’ I mean a piece of music originally written for another instrument or ensemble, as opposed to one written originally for a brass band.
In Banding’s one hundred and fifty years’ history, arrangements outnumber originals hugely, let’s say, 10,000 to 1. Leaving aside marches and religious works and etceteras … i.e. works whose primary function is not musical … no works of substance were written for the brass band until the second decade of the twentieth century. Then it was in dribs, drabs and afterthoughts, shavings from the floor of great men’s workshops, until after the Second World War. Before that point The Grand Operatic Selection held sway, the best on offer as aria followed aria interrupted by tutti interludes and frutti ballet music, the frutti not being strictly musical. Looking back at old contest results one can see that certain conductors won multiple prizes time after time. The trick was for each to employ his own select group of soloists, or corner men in band slang, and by conducting up to half a dozen bands at each contest, thereby scooped the not inconsiderable pool of prize money. Upped for inflation it was greatly in excess of today’s prizes. This was perfectly legal in the banding mores of the time.
As banding has developed, and as the quantity and value of its repertoire is thought to have improved, the word ‘serious’ is heard more and more to describe the latest original works. The assumption is that by aiming towards the sunlit uplands of serious art music banding is travelling in the oh so right direction.
However, as the daily fare, the staple diet of bands is the arrangement, it is as well to remember that the craft (and occasionally art) of the arranger has a long and honourable history. Bona fide composers have never felt too much concern about lifting ideas, scorings, nuances etc from the works of others. Unlike arrangers who are honest about their works, putting the composer at the top of the music and themselves lower down.
The most unsung arranger is the school music teacher, fitting all the children into the school concert, whatever their skills or attainments. Making sure that even little Janet and gawky John can find a musical home for their five recorder long notes. Pride in present achievement and encouragement for the future, the humble teacher-arranger ensures hundreds of small steps for everyday mankind, steps that are rather more valuable than some more highly publicised ones.
At the highest point of the craft of arranging and transcription comes Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frederick Handel, both as quick as the other with the re-design of a piece … e.g. Bach with his solo violin E major Prelude turning it into a full orchestral Sinfonia for next Sunday’s church cantata. These are not the peaks of high art but the quiet pastures of the useful, the practical, the valuable and the interesting.
But occasionally something new and fresh does emerge from an arrangement. Am I a heretic to enjoy the Mozart version of the Messiah as much as Handel’s original ? It is different, yes, it adds a new experience, and, it does in no way damage the original. In his turn, Mozart, with his sense of the absurd not to say the scatological, would have roared with laughter to hear Liszt’s Paraphrase on Don Giovanni. These are the biggest people in the history of our music, and half the time they were busy …. Arranging ! They would with very few exceptions have appreciated Liszt’s missionary work on behalf of hardly known composers : his untiring and unselfish efforts on behalf of such as Berlioz, Schumann and Chopin played no small part in their subsequent success.
Liszt’s versions for piano of the Symphonie Fantastique by the struggling Berlioz, or of Beethoven’s Nine Symphonies may seem curious rather than interesting today, but remember that listening in person to a single performance was an experience available to only a very few people at the time. (And that performance would certainly have been very rough indeed by modern standards.) The piano arrangement was the only contact with the composer that you or I might have had, if we had lived at that time. It is a useful thought to remember that what we now consider the great heritage of music was almost all written before concerts became common events outside aristocratic and wealthy circles and well before the easy availability of recorded and radio performances. Being of a certain age I can attest to that as a fact of life during most of my childhood. Does more equal less now?
The ‘new’ Wagner arrangement with which tonight’s concert finishes (The Entry of the Gods into Valhalla) is loosely based on the final pages of Wagner’s opera Das Rheingold. If arranging can be on a scale from the simplest transcription, note for note, right across to the complex creative re-composition of small fragments of melody and rhythm into a new work, this arrangement is somewhere across the halfway line. The reason for this is, as everyone knows, opera uses singers and the relationship of the singers to the orchestra is not at all just soloist to accompaniment, but controls the changing intensity of expression of the music as it progresses. The basic ‘storyline’ is with the singers, but as I mentioned above, the cardboard cut-out Grand Operatic Selection of yesteryear with set-piece arias, awkward transitions, and finales that you can see coming a mile off, is long gone. No-one believes in it any longer. Today’s taste has moved on.
My hope was to create, with an operatic backdrop, a convincing piece of concert music in its own right, melody and drama without words. I cut, spliced, transplanted, reshaped … I hope you like it and that Wagner, music’s egotist supreme, is not too miffed, wherever he is spending eternity, be it in Valhalla or somewhere lower down.
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