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EPISODES

YOUR HOST:
JOURNALIST AND MUSICIAN
LAWRENCE LANAHAN

REARRANGED considers the meaning we take from songs by examining an underappreciated aspect of their creation: the arrangement.

Produced and distributed by Osiris Media.

season 2, episode 6

Eblis Álvarez

Eblis Álvarez's music under the Meridian Brothers banner mines cumbia, salsa, and other traditions, but his outlandishly creative imagination and skill with electronics produces music that exists beyond any particular genre.

season 2, episode 5

Judah Adashi

Baltimore-based Judah Adashi brings the community into his compositions and into his classroom at the Peabody institute. We talk about his music, his city, and why marimbas sound like rain.

season 2, episode 4

Clare and Olivier Manchon

The couple share the stories and strategies behind their rich arrangements, both in their band Clare and the Reasons, and on arrangements and film scores.

season 2, episode 3

Gabriel Kahane

Gabriel Kahane discusses his arranging approach for his own vast and varied catalog as well as for other artists, writing orchestrally for piano accompaniment, and what it's like to hear a jazz musician interpret one of his songs.

season 2, episode 2

Brandon Ross and Georgia Anne Muldrow

Georgia Anne Muldrow and Brandon Ross talk about their collaboration on the new Harriet Tubman album Electrical Field of Love and how their bandmates create in the moment by supporting each other through their musical "it's alright, go ahead" moments.

season 2, episode 1

Sean O'Hagan

The High Llamas founder and in-demand arranger talks about the evolution of the High Llamas' sound, arranging for other artists, and learning from the younger version of himself while arranging old tunes with Cathal Coughlan for a Microdisney reunion.

Sean O'Hagan. Photo: Simon Russell

episode 5

Listen to What's Not There

A music arranger’s job, at heart, is adding sounds to a song. Today we’ll discover the power of removing sounds—making space for listeners to dwell inside the song.

episode 4

"Mere Mechanics"

Copyright law is supposed to incentivize creative expression, but court rulings on arrangements have had the opposite effect. In Episode 4, we learn why the courts have called arrangers "mere mechanics," stifling creativity from the 19th century right up through songwriter Ed Sheeran's recent trial.

episode 3

The Sound and the Song

Studio technology has evolved from Edison's massive and unwieldy acoustic horn to an infinite array of possibilities that fit on the smartphone in your hand. In Episode 3 of Rearranged, we explore the revolutions in the sound of the popular song that accompanied revolutions in how we record sound.

episode 2

"So Much for Originality"

In Episode 2 of Rearranged, a classical music scholar and a pianist look under the hood of Franz Liszt’s solo piano transcriptions of Beethoven’s nine symphonies to discover the vast originality possible in derivative music.

episode 1

GIL EVANS

"Listen to what's there"

Arranger Gil Evans helped Miles Davis create new sonic worlds. With the help of Evans biographer Larry Hickok, Lawrence searches Evans's life and music for the source of his mesmerizing arrangements and tries to answer the question, "What is a song?"

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