Posted: Tue Jan 09, 2007 11:18 am
these definitions... i disagree. the gershwins and cole porter composed most of their songs knowing exactly who would be performing them (fred astaire, ethel merman, judy garland, whoever), but (imo, based on what i know of history) the circumstances of the 20th-century jazz scene, the fact that the notion of "singer-songwriter" had yet to emerge, the prevalence of stage and film musicals, singers like frank sinatra, these led to many songs pre-1950--pre-rock and roll--being called standards, the great american songbook, all this. i dunno where you've decided that the songs don't have a specific "artist" when the composer for "night and day," the composer for "in the still of the night," the composer for "god bless america" is known. with a song like "scarborough fair" or "greensleeves" we don't have a known author, but we usually use the term "cover" so loosely as to say that simon and garfunkel covered the former. or that they arranged it.Tonamel wrote: Covers stem from the artist driven culture that we have today, in which songs are written to be performed by one particular band or person (as Leaf mentioned). So when somebody performs a song that was designed for someone else, that's a cover.
For whatever reason, standards are songs that have lost, or never had, an affiliation with one performer. 'Cover' implies the song has a specific artist, which these don't, so they're considered interpretations instead.
myself, as a DJ, i use the term "arrange" when there's a likelihood that somebody did specific things to an extant song (added horns, removed strings, sped it up, added harmonies, whatever) and that same person or someone else performed it. basically i think of it in terms of that one can publish sheet music of arrangements, whereas with what i term "covers," the sheet music would be hella boring. not to say that the music is boring, just that a cover's less refined or deep than an arrangement. but then i don't stick hard and fast to these rules. i'd call lunkhead's cover of my song "stairway to the moon" an arrangement of my lyrics and melody, i'd call jb's cover of my song "look good in black" a cover. then this is bordering on the offensive and definitely arbitrary. when i think "arrangement" i think sheet music. when i think "cover" i think rock band having a good time. usually.
by the dictionary, a song has words and music, and i just use the word "piece" to describe anything else that's musical (unless it's an etude, or symphony, or concerto, etc.). or "track," if it's a rock band. i don't equate arrangement with instrumental at all, or even connote it with instrumentals. an arrangement is when someone who isn't the composer takes some part or parts of the original composition (melody, words) and adds to or changes them. if you take debussy's clair de lune and write it out for performance with sousaphone on lead melody and harmonization by a small children's chorus, you have arranged the clair de lune; if you take joni mitchell's california and write a new guitar part, with trills and rhythmic changes and a three-minute-long outro, you have arranged california. on the other hand, if you take thelonious monk's 1941 performance of "sweet georgia brown" and copy his timing and performance and write it to sheet music, you have transcribed monk's arrangement.Arrangements are also versions of 'performerless' songs, but the connotation here is weighted very heavily toward instrumentals. So much so, in fact, that my mind considers the album Acoustica: Alarm Will Sound Performs Aphex Twin to be a set of arrangements, even though it's a specific group performing their versions of songs from a specific artist.
that's a bad metaphor, but not because of the imagery. what does it matter if i performed the bassline or someone else did? not to get on a slippery slope, but what if they performed it for some other song? when i take that bit and make it my own, somehow, that's where the trick is. frontalot and baddd spellah took "can you picture that?" from the muppet movie and made it a bouncing rap track, without using the melody. if you've never heard the avalanches or dj shadow or the go! team, they use sampling extensively in their music--in the case of the avalanches and dj shadow, nearly exclusively for their respective, acclaimed albums Since I Left You and Endtroducing...--but it's hardly, hardly, hardly as if they just went to the store, bought a tin of lego blocks, and assembled them. now, what you're saying is that even though you can't assemble lego blocks like that dude on flickr can, the blocks by which he made them are available to anyone and he can only take so much compositional credit. that to me is very disingenuous. lego started out with 4 colors and, what, a half-dozen shapes of blocks? there are computer programs that let you model out with ease these 24 combinations, even to the point of creating sculpture like that one you linked to on flickr; dj shadow has an extensive collection of music, of all genres and kinds, from the pedestrian to the very obscure (single, home pressings of community college marching bands, 7-11 promotional 7"s), and even after you've bought all those records, you have to listen to them, find out what's good, find out what's bad, find out what's good in the bad, choose samples ranging from the entire vocal line to a two-second drum beat, or a one-second yell, and then record your own new composition using them. this is nontrivial. half of songfight can't even record their own new, crappy songs decently, but you act as if sampling is less than that. </tangent>Bad metaphor time: production-wise, writing a song from scratch is like sculpting a statue out of clay that you mold into shape, while building a song from samples/loops is like building a statue out of Legos. Even if it ends up looking like this, it's still just made out of preshaped blocks.
well, there's my two cents, i guess.
