As a clarinetist, I have spent much of my career interpreting music rather than arranging it. My instinct when adapting music from, say, a piano solo, to an ensemble piece (such as the Danzas Tristes Españolas by Víctor Carbajo, I’m currently revising for clarinet, cello, and harp) has previously been a matter of simply assigning notes from the original to the parts and hoping each player can work out exactly how it’s going to be played on their individual instrument. That’s how I’ve always done it, and it’s worked fine. Until now. Now, working with AI has changed that dynamic.
Just as letting AI write a story for me would take all the fun and creativity out of the process, I would never dream of letting AI transcribe the music for me. But, what I found was that by letting the AI act as a companion in the arranging process, it helped me understand better how to write idiomatically for harp and cello. Together, my AI friend and I went line by line through the score, finding ways to translate a dense piano texture into a clear, idiomatic trio for clarinet, cello, and harp.
For example, midway through the arranging process, I realised that the sound I wanted was more percussive than the piano score revealed. I wanted the music to have the flair of flamenco guitar. Just transcribing the notes and markings given in the original was just not going to be good enough. That’s when I turned to my little AI friend:
- I wanted the harp to sound very dry, so I learned that adding étouffé would imitate the short, damped resonance of guitar strings.
- I also verified that changing the beaming of chords would induce the harpist to alternate hands. For safe measure, I added “LH-RH” to drive home the idea.
- To ensure an equally flamenco effect was given to the cello, I added sul tasto pizz. secco (quasi chitarra) for the cello to achieve a rounded, percussive tone closer to a mariachi guitarrón (rather than a sul ponticello effect, which is more brittle).
- For the clarinet part, I re-beamed the melody to show its rhythmic vitality implied by the hemiola in the original.
Rather than taking creativity away, AI actually expanded it. It allowed me to access levels of creativity I would not normally afford myself, short of taking an orchestration course, that is. Instead, this process let me bring in exactly the tools I needed when I needed them, and my musical background gave me the instincts to know which tools to reach for.