Composing vs. arranging music

It might sound counterintuitive because many people assume that it’s the other way around, but arranging existing music is actually orders of magnitude more difficult than composing an original piece from scratch.

You can go wild with your imagination when starting from an empty canvas. However, there are tons of preparatory work to do when it comes to arranging/transcribing.

Nowadays, you’d be in luck if the original work is written in sheet music, and you can get a hold of it, because in most cases (especially pop music), the final recording itself is the only starting point available!

In such cases, you then need to listen very carefully to the melody (possibly multiple layers of them), harmonic progression and other details of the original music, identify the notes by ear, then jot them down in sheet music. This is, I’d say, the most arduous part.

Afterwards, it is the ‘case study phase’, in which we need to research the motivation, background and making process behind the original work, so that we can stay faithful to the initial idea when producing the rearrangement.

All of these must be completed before we actually start writing our arranged version, during which we still have to worry about how to integrate our own original twist to it, and how much of such twist should be added so that it sounds refreshing without feeling like plagiarism. Not to mention instrumentation issues and whatnot.

All of these checks and balances are arguably almost absent if we are composing something new, but arranging, or worse: transcribing? It’s an entirely different story!

Don’t believe it? Never try never know! Once you actually get your hands dirty, you’d then start to really respect those who are able to elevate a pre-existing musical work to greater heights, like what Ravel did to Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.