Music Arranged and Deranged: An Introduction

Arrangement is a long-standing practice common to many genres of music and music-making.It can facilitate access to repertoire, enabling its transportation into different venues, genres or languages.Yet adapting music for other forces or contexts can also radically change the way in which it is perceived.Peter Szendy writes about arrangement as a kind of écriture de l'écoute or "writing of listening", akin to the transformative process of translation.He notes how "lengthening, remix, trope, vocal redistribution … all these interventions of the arranger aim at facilitating the communication, that is to say the circulation, of the work in a foreign country."Yet Szendy also observes, via the words of two great arrangers of the nineteenth century, Franz Liszt and Hector Berlioz, that l'arrangement est derangement-arrangement is derangement.1 It is this doubleness of arrangement, its role as a (mis)translator of musical works, that is the focus of this special issue.Derangement itself is a word that can be understood and translated in many different ways.The word deranged entered the English language in the early 1700s, borrowed from the French and accruing a range of meanings.In French, the word has associations with forced migration: Le Grand Dérangement refers to the eighteenth-century deportation of thousands of Acadians from Eastern Canada. 2 However,