# The better the composition, the less it matters how well arranged/orchestrated it is



## Arbee (Oct 10, 2013)

I'm just in one of those moods :roll: 

True or false o[]) 

.


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## germancomponist (Oct 10, 2013)

Wrong


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## Neifion (Oct 10, 2013)

Good question! I foresee a lot of opinions coming. 

I say false. I really like Nascence from the Journey soundtrack, but I heard a version that threw some jazzy saxophone lines in there, and that just killed it for me. So that's a prime example of how a relatively small orchestration choice ruined a wonderfully composed song (for me).


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## autopilot (Oct 10, 2013)

The composition is (partly) the orchestration.

It's like saying a car's colour doesn't matter, when everyone knows red ones go faster and get more chicks. 

Argument over.


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## ProtectedRights (Oct 10, 2013)

True!!!

But also the other way around is true. The better the sound the less important the composition. 

A song can be awesome if either the sound or the composition is great. If either of these is mindf*ckingly great, the other part can be total crap and it is still an awesome piece in total.

If both parts are good, you have a true masterpiece.


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## EastWest Lurker (Oct 10, 2013)

False.


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## SymphonicSamples (Oct 10, 2013)

False . One way to look at it is if you take , for example Beethoven's 5th Symphony . A masterpiece on ever level . If you were only given a piano reduction for the 5th , having never heard it before in your life , it would be completely destroyed by any composer without Beethoven's genius to orchestrate what he heard in his mind . A more recent example would be if you took Hans Zimmer's - The Battle from Gladiator , absolutely brilliant piece of music . The same goes , if you had a piano reduction never hearing it before and had to completely orchestrate and arrange it , would it sound the same , no . The genius in great composers is the joining of all the parts that make the whole . The Composition .


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## dgburns (Oct 10, 2013)

ProtectedRights @ Thu Oct 10 said:


> True!!!
> 
> But also the other way around is true. The better the sound the less important the composition.



er....no...?

I think it would be better to qualify that statement first.Taken as a blanket statement,it really makes no sense to me.
I guess it really comes down to what is it you find interests you about music.I think we all hold very deepseated values about music,because it has been around for so long,especially if you do orchestral or western scale music.It's been practiced for hundreds of years,and we are basically following the playbook set way back starting from Fux and the Italians in the late 1500's on.(Corelli,Vivaldi Bach etc)Bach learned by transcribing Vivaldi stuff from string section scores to keyboard btw.
I think if you think about it,you can't separate the idea from the orchestration,but a good idea can benefit from excellent orchestration.But still,a great composition will stand in piano reduction form no matter what.

Idea is KING.all else follows.You feel it in your bones as it comes out.Especially if you have been pounding away at finding it for hours on end.Quite gratifying when you feel something is happening,and for me sound is totally a slave of a good idea.

my two cents-


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## bbunker (Oct 10, 2013)

This is one of those zen questions, right??? Like...if a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, is it as well orchestrated as a Rimsky-Korsakov opera?!?

Seriously though, there are questions with no answer, and there are questions with NOOO answer. This is the latter.

Symphonicsamples makes a good point, but it begs a number of questions. If you strip down Beethoven's 5th to just solo piano, haven't you just created an arrangement of that piece? Is that new arrangement better or worse? Which is better then, an idiomatic and well arranged solo piano reduction, or a poorly re-orchestrated version?

What about a transcription that fails? I could arrange the entirety of Beethoven's Fifth for guitar, but it's so against the idiom of the instrument that I doubt it would be successful, even if I used every droplet of arranging skill I possess. Tarrega was a pretty darn good arranger for guitar, but some of his arrangements fail as pieces of music. Does that mean that a well arranged failure of a transcription is a worse composition? Or that something can be both well and poorly arranged at the same time?

Why stop there, then? Why not say..."The better the composition and arrangement/orchestration, then the less it matters how well the piece is performed." or vice versa?

And if any of our thoughts on arrangement make any sense, why haven't those orchestrative 'improvements' by conductors of the early 20th century taken any kind of root? Why is it that we still play the 'poorly orchestrated' symphonies of Schumann? Isn't it because we complain about the 'technical deficiencies' in his orchestrations, instead of being able to find the right voice for the emotional content of his works? And if that's the case, then if something is not "well orchestrated", then don't we need to figure out if we mean a technically deficient (Schumannesque) orchestration, or one that fails to find the appropriate color for the situation (say, a heroic epic theme played by Contrabassoon in its top register, combined with a choir of kazoos?).

And then some would say that Schumann's orchestration is perfect! (I would, actually...) They'd say that it just needs more work on the part of the conductor and performers, since there are issues of balance, but that his orchestrations could not be improved on as an end result unto themselves. So, the better the composition, the more important is the capacity to assign instruments in a sensitive and meaningful way? Well, no...I'd say that such a skill is important every time pen or mouse click hits paper, wouldn't you?

What about...

"The better the harmony, the less it matters how good the counterpoint is" & vice-versa

"The better the melodic writing, the less it matters how interesting the harmony is"

"The better the text being set, the less it matters how good the song is"


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## germancomponist (Oct 10, 2013)

bbunker @ Thu Oct 10 said:


> What about...
> 
> "The better the harmony, the less it matters how good the counterpoint is" & vice-versa
> 
> ...



Two other examples from the view of the "modern" world:

The better the singer looks like, the less it matters how good she sings.

The better the GUI of a library looks like, the less it matters how good it sounds.... .

o/~ o=< o-[][]-o


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## Guy Rowland (Oct 10, 2013)

False


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## dgburns (Oct 10, 2013)

germancomponist @ Thu Oct 10 said:


> bbunker @ Thu Oct 10 said:
> 
> 
> > What about...
> ...



nice one! o-[][]-o 

too much thinking going on in here ! :mrgreen:


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## RiffWraith (Oct 10, 2013)

germancomponist @ Thu Oct 10 said:


> Wrong



Right!


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## Musicologo (Oct 10, 2013)

It depends on the values of each listener. 

1) I value melody and symbolic manipulation a lot, i like to look at a nice score. For the timbre quality and the quality of the recording is not that important because I can "imagine" the rest. So for me the the affirmation stands true.

2) my friends doesn't understand anything about notation and only cares about sound. I can give him a dance track with 2 chords and he loves it because it's very well produced and can't get his head around a jazz song with 1000 chords and beautiful modulations because it was recorded on-the-fly with a cheap guitar and a bad voice. His values are "sound".

So, in the end, again, like everything: it's relative...


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## guitarman1960 (Oct 10, 2013)

Interesting question but there is no answer that covers the whole spectrum of music. If you are talking classical orchestration using sample libraries you get one answer, if you are talking abstract electronics like Tangerine Dream you get another answer.

It's when you combne fantastic sounds with fantastic ideas that the magic happens :D


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## Cinesamples (Oct 10, 2013)

I'll just say this, if I were to orchestrate the theme to E.T. from just a simple one-line melody with chords, it would not even come close to JW's orchestrated version.

Orchestration is HOW a composition is presented to an audience. It can make all the difference.

MP


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## clarkcontrol (Oct 10, 2013)

To the OP: pretty much false. There will be a very few exceptions.


The only corollary that could be considered true would be this:

The better the music, the less important the RECORDING QUALITY.

Note that I'm not referring to sample library quality, I consider that to be a part of the music. 

What I mean is that you can use crappy mics crappy interface crappy reverb crappy bitrate etc. 

You could record it on a crappy four track etc. and these things WILL NOT matter if the music is awesome.


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## rgames (Oct 10, 2013)

It depends on how the composition uses sound as a fundamental element.

Many compositions will still be good for a lot of different orchestrations / instrumentations. The Bach inventions are a good example. The music is really independent of the particular instruments (or sounds).

However, you *can* make a good composition sound bad with a bad orchestration. A Bach invention on kazoo is likely to sound bad even though it's a good composition.

However, a composition that relies on specific sounds or voice pairs for effect is much less amenable to alternate orchestrations. Those elements are more "sound design" elements.

It comes down to the difference between music and sound design. Music is the part that can be written in piano reduction. A good piece of music will usually still sound good regardless of reduction or alternate instrumentation. A good piece of sound design is, of course, dependent upon the sound and often cannot be reproduced with any other sound.

rgames


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## dcoscina (Oct 10, 2013)

I would say if the music is good, it matters less about the samples used in the arrangement. 

Though cheesy samples can hurt a piece, it's worse if the piece is generic and predictable even if it uses the latest greatest libraries. I know, this is sort of an off shoot of the OP.


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## Arbee (Oct 10, 2013)

Wow, thanks for all these replies to what was quite an impulsive question.

Can I rephrase slightly - can a melody, together with its fundamentatl chordal/harmonic structure, be so compelling that you need to listen to repeatedly regardless of the particular arrangement?

.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Oct 10, 2013)

The correct answer is (as other people have said in so many words):

Not enough information to answer the question!

This is sort of like the old A&R swagger of yesteryear: "I can tell a good song from a piano/voc demo."

Well, sometimes. A Stevie Wonder song, for example, sure. But Talking Heads? Zeppelin? The Ting Tings?


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## Dan Mott (Oct 10, 2013)

True and False

If only one is good, then it won't sound good.

I think having both is what makes a great song/composition. Music and Sound.


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## Musicologo (Oct 10, 2013)

Again, personal taste. Arbee, for me absolutely. Most of the time I prefer to listen to piano + vocal versions of pop tunes sung by random strangers. I often just go to youtube and put something like "irving berlin piano" or even "lady gaga piano" and I love to listen to that. Simplicity for me is absolutely the key, specially if the covers have imperfections and personal expressions and are not "copies of the cd". 

But for many others I'd say it's exactly the opposite: many people need the production and the sound to appreciate the music. If they don't have the beat, the arrangment the orchestration, the music will simply suck to them.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Oct 10, 2013)

Well, the reason there's not enough information to answer the question is that it depends totally on the music. Taste has something to do with it, but you can't play a piano/vocal demo of a Penderecki dance tune.



On the other hand it's hard to think of any jazz standard that doesn't work beautifully with just the chords and melody.


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## guitarman1960 (Oct 11, 2013)

I know Oasis are a band you either love or hate, but you can tell what great songs they are when Noel Gallagher just strums them on his acoustic and sings them. Noel is a top grade songwriter and no mistake.


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