For some ensembles, the printed score of a composition is merely a stimulus to new creative activity. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with this, and massive revision of a work in the process of remaking it for new forces has a long list of historical precedents. The Transcriptions disc by the French a cappella chamber chorus Accentus features diverse treatments of music originally written for ensembles other than a chorus. Many are adapted from songs (of Ravel, Wolf, Berg, Mahler, and Debussy) by transcriber Clytus ...
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For some ensembles, the printed score of a composition is merely a stimulus to new creative activity. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with this, and massive revision of a work in the process of remaking it for new forces has a long list of historical precedents. The Transcriptions disc by the French a cappella chamber chorus Accentus features diverse treatments of music originally written for ensembles other than a chorus. Many are adapted from songs (of Ravel, Wolf, Berg, Mahler, and Debussy) by transcriber Clytus Gottwald, but others range farther afield; there are arrangements of two Chopin piano pieces, a radical reworking of Bach's aria Komm süsser Tod, Samuel Barber's own fitting of the Agnus Dei text to his Adagio for Strings, and, most unusually of all, a texting of the Adagietto movement from Mahler's Symphony No. 5 by Gérard Pesson, with a pastiche of August von Platen stanzas about Vienna evoking the music's use in the famous 1971 film Death in Venice. The Gottwald transcriptions apply...
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