Here are two citations (with comment) to literature relevant to the recomposition posts (see "recomposition" in the Label sidebar). Both concern that intersection between arrangement (in this case) and analysis to which Kofi Agawu argues (post).
Nicholas Cook,"Arrangement as Analysis," Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy 1/1 (1987): 77-90. Writing when the Society for Music Theory was barely a decade old, Cook laments the growing gap between the abstract nature of music analysis and the practical activities linked to composition and performance. He argues that for certain kinds of basic analytical insights, at least, arrangement is as good a tool as analytical notation: the arranger is required to make analytical decisions in order to decide among textural and timbral options.
Cook illustrates this particularly well by comparing Beethoven's string quartet version of the Piano Sonata, Op. 14n1. In one case, the quartet medium allows Beethoven to add instruments one by one and thus "write out" a crescendo missing in the piano version. In another case, recasting a pianistic arpeggio passage gives a good sense of what elements Beethoven regarded as "basic" and which could be varied:
The two versions share the same bass, and consequently the same harmonic outline; also the downbeats of the melody usually coincide, though the register is not always the same. But that is all. This represents Beethoven's conception of the work's underlying structure. . . . The piano and quartet versions are different elaborations of the same underlying structure--elaborations appropriate to the specific medium in which they are realized (84).
If Cook says, later, that "one might reasonably describe arrangement as analysis made audible," one can also say that improvisation under the constrained circumstances of playing for social dancing also fosters a kind of audible analysis -- indeed, requires it for the practice of varied repetition that was still a firmly embedded element in performance practice in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Thomas Christensen, "Four-Hand Piano Transcription and Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Musical Reception," Journal of the American Musicological Society 52/2 (1999): 255 -298. This comes at arrangement from the opposite direction: Christensen is mainly concerned with transcriptions of symphonic compositions for piano four-hands.
The reduction of the trio texture to the solo piano is related, to be sure, but the effect was very different in the 1820s from those that Christensen describes for much of the rest of the century. One example: the four-hand versions of symphonies played in the home resulted in a "dislocation of musical genre from performing geography" (290) and "is implicated in the process of etherialization that became such a cornerstone of Romantic formalist music aesthetics." "Dislocation" is much too strong for the difference between the tavern or restaurant and the domestic setting of eating, drinking, music making, and dancing. Indeed, the two venues were very closely related to one another. I would also argue that for Schubert's friends, the piano was an alternative timbral resource as rich in its own possibilities as the trio (or larger group) for which it substituted. This would especially have been true where original music was being created on the spot -- and where expressive keys of many sharps or flats, and expressive key relations such as the mediants, were being explored.
It was such congenial environments that were displaced later in the century by the sacralization of the concert.
