Arranging for a Low Lead

This is kind of a niche post, as it’s about a specific challenge that we don’t come across very often. I have been arranging recently for a barbershop quartet which has a lead who more usually sings bass, which brings the melody into a rather lower tessitura than one usually uses in TTBB barbershop. This is a distinct challenge from arranging with the bass on the melody, which we do fairly frequently, although some of the things learned doing that turn out to be relevant.

Interestingly, the singer specified reference performances of the songs in the keys he wanted to sing them in, so we’re working with an established performance history of the songs in a lower tessitura. Also interesting was that a casual listen to these recordings gave me an impression of richness and warmth, but not particularly low pitch. I found myself surprised when I actually checked what keys the songs were in – and realised that particularly in one case that I had therefore a rather more challenging task than I had first imagined!

The main challenge here is how to manage the voicings. Barbershop lead is characterised by being embedded in the middle of the texture, with the bass, and sometimes also the baritone, below it. Good voicing (i.e. voicing that sounds ringy and clear), moreover, typically wants to see larger intervals between the lower notes in the chord than between the higher ones. A low-lying lead line makes both of these trickier in its lower reaches, most often at starts and ends of phrases.

I found myself using a number of approaches to make this work:

• Bringing the bass above the lead. This is something I do every so often in SSAA arranging as a matter of course, but is relatively rare in TTBB. Though in bass melody passages, you do occasionally pop the lead or bari on the root below the melody, as a functional bass line, so there is precedent in this register. This is something to be used sparingly, as it breaks the embedded-melody texture, but is particularly effective where there is a melodic leap, as you can keep the bass in a consistent register, with lead hopping over.
• Moments of solo or unison. This is always an available solution to voicing challenges. Can’t work out how to harmonise a note? Don’t harmonise it! Again, needs using sparingly, and also strategically. Unisons and solos are feature moments so there has to be an expressive reason for them, but they can by the same token be very effective. Good problem-to-opportunity conversion moments.
• Transposing occasional low-lying notes up an octave. Again, this can feel like cheating, but it is in fact something that singers do as melodic variants, especially in repeated sections and/or when building to a climax. Where your reference performance does it, you have pretty much a carte blanche, but even if it doesn’t, you can emulate the vocal styling as an expressive feature from the general performance tradition. If it feels enjoyable to sing, and you find yourself wanting to do expressive things with the moment, it’s a valid solution.
• Being mindful of chord choices. Where the general tessitura is on the lower side, I have found myself wanting to stick to ‘cleaner’ – i.e. more directly ringy – barbershop chords. To my ears, triads and barbershop 7ths keep their clarity and integrity in lower tessituras better than the more complex, yearny chords. This makes sense, if you think about it, as they are made up of notes from lower down the harmonic series than more complex harmonies. We are accustomed to using both higher tessituras and more colourful chords to evoke more intense emotional moments, but it may that these go together for acoustic as well as expressive reasons. We can still access their expressive power at the moments the lead line peaks, but in the middle and lower reaches, it sounds better not to clutter the chords up too much with extra stuff.