Harmonic Choices and Expressive Range

One of my stock phrases when coaching expressive performance is: The lyrics tell us what is going on, the music tells us how to feel about it. Like most stock phrases it lacks nuance in some contexts, but is a safe and useful generalisation that focuses our attention on the role that of aspects of a song that can sometimes seem quite intangible play in its communicative impact.

All musical elements play a part in shaping the sense of characterisation and emotional narrative - melody, rhythm, texture, voicing – but today I am thinking particularly about harmony. For there is a particular challenge that faces the arranger when working within the defined harmonic vocabulary of contest barbershop: how do you shop a song without making it sound just like every other barbershop song you’ve ever heard?

Of course, to an extent, the whole point of the style definition is to generate a sense of the familiar, to affirm a contest audience that this is their music, that they share a world with the performers who are singing to them. And there is the pragmatic advantage too that if you use the standard barbershop chord vocabulary in standard voicings with a primarily homophonic texture, then the techniques and habits barbershop singers bring to the task of learning it will be fit for purpose.

But still, even barbershoppers cannot live on stylistic consistency alone. If we want our music to move beyond the kitsch, we need to bring a sense of creativity to the process, a sense that this song says things that are in some way distinctive, that it tells a story other songs couldn’t tell.

There is an argument (I have made it!) that the very existence of stylistic boundaries encourages creativity, as they make people work within the system to subvert it. And conversely the considerable loosening of constraints in the BHS system over recent years does quite often produce music that struggles to hang together: without the built-in consistency driven by harmonic rules, the traditional and the innovative don’t always figure out how effectively to interact.

So, how to navigate all this as an arranger? One thing I have been thinking about quite a lot in some recent contest charts is thematising certain subsets of the barbershop soundworld to bring out a particular vibe. The style guidelines are open to a sense that a particular stylistic strength in a song (say, lots and lots of ringy major triads) can to an extent compensate for a relative paucity of another stylistic element (say, relatively fewer secondary dominant progressions).

One can leverage this principle to feature a particular harmonic colour as a song’s characteristic thumbprint. In effect, you are using chord choice in much the same way 19th-century symphonists used motifs: as a means to bind the piece into a coherent whole. As I remarked some years back, the point of this was often framed in my undergraduate education in terms of creating a sense of unity, though I have come to realise over the years that just as significant is the creation of a sense of individuality for the piece.

In some ways it feels like a counter-intuitive solution to the problem of the potential samey-ness of music that uses a standard delimited chord vocabulary to focus on an even smaller subset of that harmonic palette. But it’s not excluding any of the available chords, just manipulating their relative statistical occurrence, along with their placement and voicing, relative to other musical elements that define a song’s hook.

Think of it like creating a harmonic colour-scheme for the piece. We’re all limited to the colours available in the visible spectrum (or at least, if we use any others, nobody in our species gets the benefit), but we still choose to limit ourselves further to create a particular effect. Paradoxically, we can thereby become less generic in impact, and thus increase our expressive range.