Geachte heer Bach, In de afgelopen decennia heb ik, bij het bestuderen en bewerken van uw muziek, zoveel vragen verzameld dat ik, zou het mij vergund zijn om eens een middagje met u door te brengen, niet zou weten waar te beginnen.
I studied composition for 3 years with Tristan Keuris and Ton Lambij. I did not graduate because I quit in an early stage. At the time I was busy performing with and arranging music for Calefax. Creating new music requires time that I did not have or wanted to invest. Arranging is faster & easier…
I see an arrangement as a new conception of an older musical idea. Staying true to the original musical message with new instrumental means, it should give way to new aspects of the composition that were hidden in the original instrumentation, usually as the result of that instrumentation. Even the simple deed of redistributing lines or parts in what we call an instrumentation can shed new light on a piece. Most arrangements that I view from other arrangers are simply that – an instrumentation. But a real arrangement can deliver much more: a new composition, based on the original idea, now truly dedicated to the new instrumentation, without being slavishly true to the original notes, because they were meant for other instruments!
In other cases my work goes beyond that, and the original musical message becomes so blurred that out of the original music a truly new expression emerges in the form of a new piece. The next step of course is an entirely new composition. But even that can be disputed. How original can we be, bombed as we are daily with omnipresent music and immersed as we are in a great musical tradition? Therefore I see the sequence Instrumentation – Arrangement – Composition as a continuum. There are no dividing lines. A good composition is all that counts.
