Arranging

Arrangers deep in discussionWell, I’ve been collating the notes taken during the morning’s breakout sessions at last Sunday’s arrangers’ day (attached at the bottom of this post), and mulling on a number of miscellaneous other things that struck me during the day. Thanks to Katherine, David and Anne for taking the notes, by the way – it’s made a nice reminder for those who were there to participate, and something useful to share with those who couldn’t make it.

The following miscellany draws mostly on the afternoon’s workshop singing through people’s work-in-progess:

Yesterday saw just over 30 barbershop arrangers gathered together in Birmingham to exchange ideas and learn from each other. The day was designed for those who were beyond the beginner stage, but not yet entirely confident or established – and thus to provide a community for people who may be working with some sense of isolation. There were delegates from all three British barbershop organisations, plus one from Holland Harmony, and we were joined by about half of my Conservatoire class who are studying close-harmony arranging this semester.

Our keynote presentation came from Paul Davies, the UK’s most successful barbershop arranger. Paul took the chorus he founded, Cambridge Chord Company, to several gold medals in British and European contests, and picked up the Pavarotti Choir of the World trophy at Llangollen with a medley of parodies that mocked the Welsh (he’s brave as well as talented). CCC have also been more successful in International barbershop contests than any other British chorus by some considerable margin. They’ve done all this on Paul’s arrangements, so he is clearly someone worth inviting along to share his insights.

Okay, so it’s ultimately in the hands of singers whether they produce in-tune performances, but arrangers can have more of an influence on how well they achieve this than you might think. Here are three factors that can affect how well singers tune:

What is the fascination with producing medleys or theme & variations pieces that trace a tune through a series of historical styles? I’ve seen a couple of barbershop quartets do this, construing ‘music history’ as either popular song styles since the emergence of barbershop in the late 19th century or as the standard grand narrative of classical music periods. Ward Swingle also did a chart called ‘Music History 101’ that starts with Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, then launches into a series of pastiches. (Never mind that this tune actually post-dates the first style he arranges it as….) It’s also something that I’ve seen Conservatoire students propose for musicianship projects.

Some of these medleys are done very well (Michigan Jake could be pretty impressive singing anything, in my view, and they always worked with great arrangers), while others are less successful (some of the student projects I’ve witnessed haven’t lived up to their aspirations, alas). But I always find them a bit odd, and I’m trying to work out why.

Imagine you are a pianist preparing a performance of Beethoven’s Op. 2 no. 3 sonata in C major. You find the parallel triads in the right hand at the start of the finale a bit tricky, so you decide to omit the lower notes and just play a scale. On the other hand, you decide that the II7 chord in bar 4 is a bit bland, and change it to a 3rd inversion flatVI7 instead. When you get to the end, you think that the last two chords, V7-I don’t really make the point about how exciting this movement has been, so you add another V7-I after them, taking the right hand back up into the higher registers of the instrument.

With these changes, you feel that the piece suits your performing style and personality much better. But what does the audience think?

This my third post about the recent a cappella extravaganza I attended in Hounslow, and since I’ve used up all my well-developed conclusions from the event, but still have a note-book full of things I found interesting, this one is taking the form of a miscellany. I may come back to think about some of these in more depth when I’ve lived with them for a while.

Close harmony styles are traditionally harmonically rich. The earliest accounts of what came to be known as barbershop harmonies in late-nineteenth-century America tell of the participants’ pleasures in discovering ever more rich and outré chords. Jazz styles later extended the harmonic vocabulary: while barbershop officially resisted the encroachment of ‘modern’ (i.e. swing) chords, barbershoppers unofficially found that the prohibition made the new dirty chords even more enticing.

But these days, ‘modern’ no longer means tunes from the 1930s, and groups that want to sing music their audiences recognise find that more recent pop is generally less harmonically rich than older popular traditions, shifting its focus much more onto rhythm and timbre as central points of interest. Richness of chording is no longer an index of hipness.

F.W.J. Schelling (1775-1854)When I was doing my PhD I came across the ideas Schelling developed in his early-19th-century philosophy of art. At the time I found them interesting for the purposes of the obsessions I had at the time (to do with gender and discourse and suchlike), but largely dismissed the ideas as waffly romantic claptrap typical of their day.

Like good ideas tend to do, though, they stuck around in my head over the years that followed until one day I suddenly realised how relevant they were to something I was currently obsessed with.