Eeeh, this is very simplified critical listening. Take any arrangement, identify which instruments are playing. Recipe? No, music is about voices that are saying something. Each instrument is expressing a different voice. The recipe is nothing, the intent is everything.
You are supposed to decide who is talking and give them a reason to, at least in your own head. You are supposed to say something unique, not reproduce what others have said. Music is an ongoing conversation, that eludes you. That one unique expression and conversation is what justifies a recording of it. To put in on record that this conversation exsisted at that point in time. Then it makes sense to revisit it. It wont make sense to revisit a reproduced, formulaic conversation without intent.
I think this recipe analogy quickly gets old and counter-productive. Students will start to use recipes as blueprints, and slam others for not complying with the “right” recipe. The recipes ends up like canons, a conservative and so very classical idea..
I'm sorry but I feel like you live in a bubble of musicians and people who have been doing this all their life. It might not be useful for you as someone with a ton of experience, but for people like me who are just starting with orchestration even the critical listening part is incredibly hard. Even though I've been listening to classical and orchestral music for years I still have trouble listening to the recipe with 4 voices and identify the exact instruments (especially brass and woodwinds).
Also to be completely honest I really really really don't want to do music in terms of artistic intent or trying to say something. It's like with paintings, a lot of people enjoy talking about artist's intent and expressing themselves in various ways in the way they paint it, but to me paintings are way more about the mechanical aspects and how it's drawn. As a person with a technical/math background I care a lot more about patterns and nuances and the actual tangible bits than artistic expression.
That's not to say that artistic expression isn't important, and to a lot of people it is. But for me it really is not the end goal. Whenever I hear people talk about "feeling the music" I instantly feel like that's just not me. I prefer to analyze it. That doesn't mean I don't feel emotion when listening to something, but I really couldn't care less if it's because of a unique of a snowflake instrument and careful arrangement, or if it's a synthy electric guitar hans zimmer-esque thing layered on top of something any classicial musician would condemn.
It's not even about originality. Any time there is some super artistic hipster thing that's extremely original and artistic I usually don't feel a thing and just roll my eyes. I'm sorry, I know these things are important to a lot of people. But just as composing "unique" music by following a recipe or a pattern or an analytical process sounds to you, you have to realize that there are people who feel exactly the opposite way.
When I hear a musician improvise something amazing and then ask them how they did it and they say "I don't know, I just felt it this way" it instantly loses a ton of value in my eyes, as compared to when they say "I felt like it should be like this, so I made conscious decisions to do it that way". I know this is sacrilegious to even think, let alone say publically, it is how I feel.
I'll close this with a real life experience of this type. I was having a group discussion in a "library" about generating music using AI when this old gentleman (a lifelong musician) sitting nearby spontaneously raised his voice and said something like: "Are you crazy? Machines producing music? Music should be about feelings, about expressing the author's torment, about communication and explaining their life's journey through the music. A machine couldn't possibly every do this" ... it was an interesting experience, but as someone who tried pursuing a PhD in machine learning and wanted to focus on generating music using AI, I just disagree. It might be that way for some people, but I'll be just as happy listening to a "Chopin piece" generated by an algorithm after it crunched through everything Chopin ever wrote as I would be to the original piece. Because I would believe that maybe the algorithm could potentially express what Chopin wanted even better than Chopin himself (oh god I'll get crucified for saying this, am I not?), because it could just look at everything he ever did, find the patterns, and compose the ultimate distillation of his "life's work".
The same way I feel that a small and simple recipe could distill a specific feeling in a way that is extremely useful and compact, regardless of how it is later used. It might be blasphemy to some, especially people who spent their life studying music, but for people who dedicate their life to other things, these alternative approaches are incredibly useful.
edit: Since I've already said enough to be crucified for I'll add one more thing. I also feel that teaching music theory in terms of musical history is wrong
Almost every music theory I've read starts out with "we explain it this way because that's how it's been done". Only recently have I started looking at books that just analyze music theory in the raw form (e.g. with linguistics) and holyshit it's so refreshing. Even just the notation itself is ridiculous and full of arbitrary poo, while looking at something like 7th chords on a Tonnetz diagram is mindblowingly glorious. I just wish more people cared about a principled and logical approach, rather than reiterating the same old ways they've learned this. A good example is that here (Czech Republic and I think in Germany too) we write H instead of B and B instead of Bb ... and if you google the historical reasons for that it just makes me suicidal just thinking of all the people who didn't care to fix this at any point and just accepted this. I still say B and fight with everyone I speak to about this and revert to just saying chord names in english, because the notation in our native language just gets idiotic.
