"But Olimar!" you say whilst you load your text-wall retort guns with words like "hypocrisy" and "Dissimulation"
I feel like this was directed at somebody, but I'm not quite sure who
Oh well
Not that I'm particularly eager to get into a discussion on a topic on which your mind seems to be made up, but I do have a few questions/comments:
1. Does this mean that "fuller" arrangements would be favored over simpler ones, and if so, wouldn't that approach be sort of skewed toward higher level pianists that we have no reason to believe make up the majority of our users?
2. If we're leaving it up to the users to create more simplified versions for themselves, essentially making the transcription our sole contribution to their experience, wouldn't it make more sense to just do a full transcription involving every voice and call it a day? I mean, yeah, that's an exaggeration, of course, but what the "leave it to them" approach seems to do is put the burden of actually
arranging onto the player, and I think that's a bit much to expect of people that are, by definition, less musically experienced. You, yourself, have had me take out technically playable passages (consecutive sixteenth notes in Vegetable Valley, for example) for being too difficult, and I agree with those decisions, because we can't expect every person who comes to our site to be a prodigy. If they were, they'd probably be doing this themselves. (And yes, I understand that we could adhere to, and have generally been adhering to, a standard of a "reasonable level of difficulty", but to me this seems just as ambiguous as what we're proposing.)
3. I don't really think that this compares to the two other discussions you mentioned; difficulty ratings would be extremely difficult to implement, and ultimately wouldn't help anybody wanting to play a specific piece. And orchestral arrangements, aside from the practical concerns (exact imitation = more dangerous in terms of copyright, much more difficult to evaluate, etc.), would really warrant a whole other site of their own, and benefit far fewer people (how many people would happen to have the exact instrumentation we'd specified at their disposal?). Simplified arrangements, however, would A: be a welcome addition for many visitors of our site, and B: be much easier to implement than either.
4.
People can just do what they've been doing, either simplifying it themselves or picking something easier to play. That or use the more difficult arrangements as a sort of goal to aim for when practicing (lord knows I wouldn't have become nearly as proficient on the keyboard as I am today if it weren't for arrangements I wanted to play being slightly too difficult for where I usually was).
As a musician, I can appreciate this approach, as some of my proudest experiences have been working with pieces that were initially way beyond my reach (Arban's variations on a carnival of venice comes to mind). My first piece I ever played on piano (just a few years ago actually) was Deku's arrangement of Song of Healing, and I felt very rewarded after struggling for days with the second half. However, again, I think it's a bit much to expect everyone coming to the site to have this mindset. However, as a gamer, as a listener, as someone who's still taken aback by the magic that occurs when a piece really touches me, I have to ask:
what do you think the goal of our site should be? It's not a rhetorical question, and I personally don't have a single, definite answer for it. But I think that at least part of it should be to keep that magic alive, to let people of all backgrounds enjoy the extremely personal connection that comes with playing a piece of music that one has come to love. And "all backgrounds" includes more than just adults planning on entering music-related professions such as us. Younger people, people who've yet to have any dreams of musical greatness, people who simply heard a piece that they liked and wanted to play it, I truly hope will not feel alienated on this site, and I believe that these simplified arrangements could be a great way to achieve that.
When I was learning Deku's "Song of Healing" arrangement, as I mentioned, I was about 16. I'd been playing brass for six years, been in various honor bands, [insert various anecdotal evidence for reasonable level of musical discipline], etc. So I knew how to practice, and I knew how to sit down and struggle with a piece. And luckily, it was summer, and this was before I spent all summer working, so I had quite a bit of free time to work on it. But even still, that "magic" I was talking about earlier was never achieved until I was actually able to play the piece in tempo, which took more time than I like to admit.
Now, put yourself in the shoes of a 10-year-old who's been studying piano for two or three years. They've just played super mario galaxy, and fell in love with the Gusty Garden Galaxy theme (honest to god I'd never looked at our arrangement of that before, so it was pure luck that I picked one of yours). They're a novice, they've no experience arranging, transcribing, or even understanding at a basic level what's going on in a piece. Perhaps some octave transpositions will be apparent to them, perhaps not, but with each hour they spend struggling with a piece they haven't nearly enough experience to play, their motivation will wane, and with each change they blindly make themselves, they face the potential of losing the essence of the piece, be it an important line, an important harmony, or anything else; they face the potential of losing the "magic" that should be there by the end. The goal of these simplified arrangements should be to maintain that essence for these players, and the goal of evaluating these submissions should be to make sure that this essence is there. Is that not what we already do for all submissions?
I understand that this was a really extensive, "philosophical" way to treat this, but hey, we're discussing music, here. Sometimes considering music from a technocratic perspective isn't the best way to deal with it.
Oh wait ninjad:
On the flip side, what's saying we can't submit virtuoso arrangements, or other odd custom arrangements? Uniformity.
Not to immediately dismiss your argument, or to sully this topic with another controversial (yet decreasingly so) one, but by similar (though admittedly more extreme) logic, gay marriage should remain illegal because it would open the door to bestial and polygamous marriage.
We are not such a large operation that we are above considering these things on a case by case basis.
