How to play an orchestral reduction
Orchestral reductions: the bane of a collaborative pianist’s life. Imagine if you will, the notes normally played by all members of an orchestra crammed into a piano score and you have a sense of why we dread playing these things. And yet, if we accompany individuals or groups, they can’t be avoided. Accompanying an instrumentalist playing a concerto? Playing a musical theater score? Playing a Bach chorale? All of these things mean the pianist will be performing from an orchestral reduction.
On sight, these scores can appear unworkable to classically-trained pianists who have been taught to play everything on the page. There are too many notes. The reaches are impossible for most human hands. And transitions and voicings can be clunky and awkward. Pianists soon realize that to play these scores musically they must combine classical technique and sensibility with a willingness to improvise.
More than one pianist has complained about not being taught to do this in their piano lessons. Yet, as one master teacher recently remarked, once theory, ear training, and performance repertoire is covered, there just isn’t enough time to teach this as well. That’s why I decided to write this post. I’ve played hundreds of orchestral reductions since I first encountered them in my teen years and while each one presents its own unique challenge, there are things that apply to all of them, regardless of difficulty or musical era. Here are my hints for learning an orchestral reduction. As always, use what’s useful and ignore what doesn’t apply.
Listen to a recording of the piece
Listening to a piece—even if it’s one we think we know—gives us new information when we’re focusing on the orchestra and not on the soloist(s). What instruments are used and where? What is the texture of the sound? Thick and heavy? Light and shimmery? This will inform our own playing as we delve into the score.
Analyze the chord progressions
Unless we’re playing a piece with no tonal center, analyzing the chord progression is a helpful step. Pencil chords in if necessary. Knowing the structure of the piece allows us to better improvise musical choices where needed.
Understand note hierarchy
In any score, regardless of how many notes may be present on the page, playing musically requires us to understand which notes are important and which can be dropped. Some of these choices are self-evident, such as the need to play melody lines, supporting harmony, etc. Others require a little more thought, and the thicker the texture, the more judicious we have to be regarding what we choose to play. While there’s no formula for knowing what to play and what to ignore, here are a few general guidelines:
What to keep: every standard chord needs these three things: the soprano line (usually carries the melody), the bass line (usually the root of the chord), and the 3rd of the chord (identifies whether the chord is major or minor). After that we need to include any chord extensions (7th, 9th, etc.).
What to drop: doubled notes and the 5th of the chord. Remember that the notes we keep can be shared between both hands. If the right hand, for instance, has the 3rd of the chord, there’s no need to double it in the left hand.
This sounds complicated, but once we’ve analyzed the chord progressions, we’re halfway to knowing what to keep and what to drop. The best part? Thinning the texture not only makes the music easier to play, it also makes it more musical.
Clean up clunky voicing
Thick bass clef orchestration works just fine when played by a symphony. When transferred to the piano, however, heavy left hand chords sound like mud. Sometimes sections are playable, but just not musical. This is where we learn to prune away as many unnecessary bass clef notes as possible, to listen carefully to left hand volume, and to pay special attention to pedaling and tone production.
When working on voicing, our ears and musical sensibilities are our most important guides. Listening to the soloist helps us decide how much we need to thin (or thicken) the texture. A trumpet player, for instance, will require the pianist to create a bigger orchestral sound than a flutist or vocalist. Our job is to play what best helps the soloist sound most the musical.
Improvise
If we’ve dropped notes, cleaned up poor voicing, and it still doesn’t imitate the orchestral sound, it’s time to listen yet again to the recording and use it and the score to create as close an approximation of the orchestra sound as can be captured on the piano. It may require transferring a moving line to another place on the keyboard, just to make it playable, and it will absolutely require the pianist to adjust touch, tone, pedal, and—at times—to add or subtract lines.
We can never truly mimic the effect of an orchestra, but we can create a satisfying musical arrangement of it on the piano. When we study the score we can ask ourselves how we might make it interesting if it were a piano solo. This helps us think less like pianists and more like arrangers, which is exactly the perspective we need in order to bring out the best from each orchestral score.
As with all things, playing orchestral reductions gets easier (and more musical) with time and experience. Eventually we may discover that the act of co-creating the piano score with the composer transforms the scores from something we dread to music we enjoy playing.
Photo by Lucas Alexander @ucaslexander courtesy of UpSplash