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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume 33 No. 4. 7 April 1970

Arrangement

Arrangement

Arrangement has been central to popular music from its birth. Today, because of the vast idiomatic range of pop music, it has become a particularly rich field again. The potential range of reinter pretation is equally vast. Moreover many of the finest pop songs have the archetypal simplicity of basic blues themes and lend themselves to as extensive claboration. If we take the songs of Bob Dylan and the Beatles as typical pop 'standards' we can sec that there exists for the pop arranger a field of possibilities which has not been open to the straight composer since the middle ages. Joshua Rifkin's arrangement of Dylan's Tom Thumb's Blues for Judy Collins illustrates how new dimensions of meaning can be added to the original by means of a subtly instrumentated, motivically relevant accompaniment, a fact which in turn shows the strength of formal types in pop. These are the envy of the straight composer, for whom, instead of formal types, there exists only a range of formal procedures.

The re-creative potential of pop arrangement can be seen in a comparison of the Beatles' With a little help from my friends with the recent highly popular version by Joe Cocker. Whoever was (or were) responsible for the arrangement transformed not just its tempo, key, metre and instrumentation but its whole mood and, more important still, its formal type. A fairly conventional, jaunty, strophic, "Beatles tune has been completely recreated in the form of a Negro 'soul' song complete with organ and female 'heavenly choir' backing. The strophic regularity of the original is replaced by a gradual build-up to a final climax.