Ron’s view of music was truly panoramic. Not only was he intimately familiar with the entire wealth of musical conventions and traditions, but he was fully qualified to speak on any type of music. By way of example, in reply to a young musician grappling with a blues arrangement, Ron drafted the following letter to help clear up confusions. Although focused on the blues, it contains principles and basics essential to a successful understanding of all forms of music.
lues is a form of music expressing despair which comes from a type of tribal chant in Africa and was imported into the cane and cotton fields as a worker’s chant alongside of spirituals. This musical form then reached New Orleans and went up the Mississippi and became the basis of what was called blues. It ceased to be mainly choral and became a solo song sung by a person often called a blues singer.
A music type is not an instrumentalization. The instruments that play it become identified with it in some cases, but do not make the music form.
Blues is not something that is only played on a piano even if the modern generation believes so and no matter how many blues tunes you have played on a piano.
A piano is an instrument and blues is a musical form.
You have to separate musical forms and musical instrumentation in order to do successful arranging. A musical form is not established by its instrument. It is established by its melody, its met count and its note-time value and sometimes by its chording.
Arranging is the act of expressing a musical form and instrumentation is part of arranging.
A form is not an arrangement and an arrangement is not solely instrumentation.
To arrange successfully, one has to have a grip on the musical form one is trying to communicate to an audience. He does an arrangement that will further the form. He chooses instruments in the arrangement to further the arrangement and the form.
To choose a form, one must understand the message one is seeking to convey. A musical message is usually the emotional portion of a concept. All messages are concepts, they are not descriptions of pictures. Concepts quite ordinarily have an emotional tone in musical communication. It is this which causes one to choose the musical form and the musical form dictates the arrangement and the arrangement dictates the instruments. And all of them add up to a communication of the emotional concept.
