Arranging

Barbershop arranging benefits from a very clear-cut sense of method. There are well-defined procedures you go through that, operated with a modicum of intelligence and musicianship, will result in competent arrangements.

However, they only really work well on the kind of songs that barbershoppers traditionally sing: those with well-defined melodies and varied, functional harmonies – songs whose original form was written down. Songs whose original form was in recorded form – i.e. most pop music since the 1960s - don’t respond nearly so well to the barbershop method. But barbershoppers still want to sing them, so we have to figure out ways to make this work for them.

There are two sides to this: first, how to arrange in a way that works for the song, and second, making sure this still fits the expectations and performance habits of the singers.

Some of the issues we encounter include:

One of the students on my Vocal Close Harmony course this semester, Amy, made the observation that you don’t see a lot of performance instructions such as dynamic markings on close-harmony arrangements. It takes somebody new to a style to point out things that you had forgotten were note-worthy - and in doing so, Amy made me think afresh about the hidden expressive codes that note-smiths (whether composers or arrangers) and performers share.

Having inveighed at length about people spelling notes wrong in my last post, it seemed helpful to say a few words to help people get it right. This post is particularly for Matthew, who stayed after class on Monday quizzing me about spelling, but I figured if he wanted to know about it, other people might too.

Anecdote:
When I was a student, we had an old piano in our student house. One day I was playing through a rather chromatic Elgar part song, and discovered with some annoyance that the B flat below middle C had stopped sounding. Later in the piece I was briefly even more annoyed to discover that the A sharp in that register was also out of action. Then I remembered that actually they’re the same key on the piano.

Singers and string players are used to the idea that enharmonic ‘equivalents’ aren’t necessarily the same notes, but players of keyed instruments don’t always grasp this in the same way. I have been somewhat bemused to find myself – a first-study pianist – as pedantic as I am over chromatic spellings, but I really do experience B flats as having different meanings from A sharps, even on the piano.

It wasn’t until I did an interview about synaesthesia for Radio 4 back in May 2008 that I really grasped what’s going on here.

Over on Smartermusic, Dan Newman makes a passing comment in his quick ‘n’ dirty guide to a cappella arranging that I think deserves a little more attention than its brief mention there:

Entertained singers sing better

This is something that all arrangers should have engraved on their partner’s foreheads, so that they contemplate it whenever they are gazing at the person they love most in the world. It lies at the heart of my point here that elegant arrangements make groups sound better than they usually do.

But how can arrangers make singers happy? There are, I think, three dimensions to this:

When I was playing about with the ideas that produced my posts on Harmonic Charge and Harmonic Charge and Voicing, I noticed something about the words I was using to describe parameters of musical energy:

High-low (tessitura)
Bright-soft (harmonic quality)
Tight-loose (voicing)

Do you see what I mean? All the high-energy words have an I sound in them, while the low-energy words are built around the letter O.

Now think about how those vowels sit in the mouth when we sing them.

This coming semester I will be teaching a class on arranging and performing vocal close harmony. The students are all specialist performers or composers in the 3rd year of a 4-year BMus degree, but most will have had little or no contact with close-harmony styles beforehand. So it’s a real challenge to take a bunch of intelligent musicians and see how far they can get in an unfamiliar style in just eleven weeks of teaching. It’s a small class this year, which will make it possible to give students more individual attention, so I’m looking forward to it even more than usual.

I’ve been over-hauling the course materials in anticipation, and thought I’d share the marking guidelines I’ll be using to assess them.

In this post I suggested a model to think about harmonic charge – the degree and quality of a chord’s inherent energy. This is useful for making arrangement decisions at the primary harmony/big-picture planning stage. It can also help with concrete questions of voicing.