IMSLP Forums

Hi guys! First-time poster here. To everyone who makes IMSLP what it is: YOU ARE THE BEE'S KNEES, THANK YOU!!

Guys, I have a thought and I don't know where the appropriate forum for it is. Also, it's a thought that might be a little, I dunno, elitist or even mean. You tell me what you think.

Many of the arrangements/orchestrations of piano pieces that are submitted by IMSLP contributors contain - either in part or in whole - considerable problems in their orchestration. This would cause them to be unhelpful were someone to try and use them in a live reading - resulting in a high-effort but ultimately unhelpful endeavor for everyone involved (unless the arranger learns from their mistakes, of course). Unfortunately I have seen many - many, many - arrangements from even the exact same user that are clearly not evolving in their craft.

Fellas, it's really not my place to say "we should do something about this," because while I've used IMSLP for many years, I only just got here on the forums; and I have never contributed more than a few extra mB of bandwidth sink to this great platform. So, I leave this comment here for your review.

<3

Hello,

I can agree with you on the quality of things that get submitted here, but as one of the people who reviews the files that get submitted, it is not our jobs to judge on the quality of an orchestration when accepting files (we only look at the copyright of the files submitted, if the files are usable/readable (high enough DPI) and if it is submitted under a correct license, anything else is left up to users using the files at their own leisure). If there are technical issues with an orchestration, that is only something to bring up between you and the user that made the files and maybe they might be able to make corrections.

It's true that not all the arrangements are very good musically. We are working on a system to better highlight the higher-quality items on each page. Indeed, though, reviewing and rating the quality of each item submitted from a musical standpoint would be beyond the job description of a reviewer on here...

If the player really cared, they can contact the arranger and indicate what are the problems privately.

kosboot wrote: ↑Thu Jun 29, 2023 11:46 pm If the player really cared, they can contact the arranger and indicate what are the problems privately.

And expect that the arranger will improve their knowledge of orchestration and upload improved versions of all of their arrangements? We both know that's never going to happen for the vast majority of the very many self-published scores on the site. So the fact of the matter is that IMSLP hosts and will continue to host a lot of low-quality self-published sheet music. There's a reasoning for allowing it, though, even besides the practicality of judging the quality; IMSLP invites works to be dedicated to free culture under a CC license, and the more music is made free that way, the better. It's probably not a good idea to put quality thresholds in place that might also dissuade worthwhile scores from being made freely available.

That said, I'm interested to hear that a system is being worked on to distinguish the arrangements on a given work page (the star system is very haphazardly used at the moment and not useful). Personally, I'd separate public domain arrangements from self-published ones for their historical value (especially composer's own arrangements). Then among the self-published ones, I can't think of a single example where there were so many orchestral arrangements from different IMSLP users that they caused the tab to be unwieldy. It's more to the effect that you see there's something in the arrangements tab for a given piece which you look at, and you find an orchestral transcription which is either a well-known arrangement by the composer themselves or another established composer, or a well-made transcription by an IMSLP user, or a poorly-made transcription by an IMSLP user. That's a very big difference in usability, but I don't see a way around that.

And yeah, poor orchestrations have limited or no usability, so I would say that IMSLP users have a duty to try to study the craft as best as they can and make sure that what they upload is not full of obvious and deleterious issues. Orchestration isn't like self-published chamber scores and the like on IMSLP where there's only subjective arguments as to whether it's worth looking at or not; orchestrations can be unplayable - or at least unplayable in the manner that's indicated as intended in the score - and therefore objectively flawed. But this is not enforceable for the aforementioned reasons.

Each work page has its corresponding discussion page. Here you can ask others if they find the same problems. Hopefully the arranger will read this.

"Then among the self-published ones..."

I think one big problem is more the sheer prolificity of arrangers who never take into consideration the fact that they are writing for very specific and characteristic instruments, not mere instrumental ranges (if they even remember those), etc., and who do so over and over again. (Forsyth's book is over a century old but - may - provide better guidance than ignoring all such books altogether, e.g.)