Reverse transcription- strings to piano

Since Mike says, any piece can be reduced to a 2 hands piano piece I've always wanted to see how a composer reduce an existing piece to really see its essence. Well, it's not a two hand reduction but it's close.

Thank you Doug !

Btw, I would really love to see it on atmospheric pieces or really busy stuff like action scenes musics because I don't understand them very well.

 

Yes, very much. Its easier for me to imagine the string line without the piano as the piano's percussive nature throws me off with such a long drawn out line. Which leaves me wondering how many composers before MIDI wrote to the piano as opposed to wandering through the woods writing melodies in their head? Of course there's the proverbial "napkin", but you only see themes, not symphonies written on these napkins.

However, its only fair to point out that many pieces in fact do translate very well to the piano so the real difficulty is more with very very slow film music such as in the example you cite and the very complex pieces.. Even a fast action piece such as JW's Scherzo for Motorcycle and Orchestra translates quite well to the piano though its a bit tricky to play! The more puzzling ones to me are where there are multiple melody lines and counterpoint or huge divisi sections (such as in Gliere Symphony No.3). These are very hard to fully conceive in your head as well as extremely difficult to play on the piano so I presume these were more thematic ideas that were then orchestrated with extensive counterpoint (Gliere taught Prokofiev, but neither Gliere nor Prokofiev left a book for us). And many of the more popular "classic" pieces (such as Stravinsky's Petrushka), are playable on the piano but require tremendous virtuoso technique, so they couldn't have been written by any run-o-the mill composer. And I doubt they could have been written to DAW tracks with MIDI either. Many of these had to be conceived both on the piano and on paper.

This discussion leaves me with the question then of why the most capable virtuoso musicians today do not compose? Some such as Horowitz (well he's no longer with us, but he's the only recent virtuoso example I can think of) have "dabbled" or done transcriptions but where are the great virtuoso composers? (as history shows, the two clearly go hand-in-hand). Again, I suppose JW is our best modern day example. So is it better to transcribe or practice? (of course both).

In any case, fun discussion, thanks Doug!

 

I always wanted to see an example like that too, thanks Doug!

Yes, very much so. It was like hearing two different pieces. I never could decide whether this "piano sketch first" aproach was for me or not, because on the one hand it helps tremendously to expose a lack of development, which is my main problem with composing, but on the other hand I really can not imagine how the final thing would sound. So I might need to find something that is a bit more middleground I think, like a synth or a set of synths with different ADSR settings.

Thanks for sharing this with us Doug!

 

Could it also be a factor that we've "figured out" much better how to make virtuoso players than composers of the same level and that to parents who want to nudge their child towards a certain path it's much more obvious how to get a good teacher for the performance side instead of the composing side?