July 2009

Well, of course singing is special and wonderful and a good way to spend your life. That’s not quite what I mean with the question. What I’m wondering is whether singing has particular attributes that makes it inherently different from other forms of musical participation such as playing instruments, or – I suppose – dancing.

Now if you get a bunch of voice specialists together (such as at the Phenomenon of Singing Symposium I recently attended in Canada), you will hear the following kind of assertions:

SignatureEnigma


I spent a happy couple of days at the weekend working with Signature, LABBS chorus champions from 2006, and Enigma, a quartet from within their ranks who won the quartet contest the previous year. Something I found very interesting with both groups was being invited to work on music that was in a very early stage of the rehearsal process, and I think this is something that many groups would benefit from too.

Inspirational songs present some specific and peculiar challenges for the close-harmony/a cappella arranger. But they’re challenges we have to meet, since the genre is popular with both singers and audiences, and people are going to keep asking for them. The basic problem is this: it is very easy to turn them into rather boring arrangements. So today I am going to try and figure out why this is, and how we can achieve the harder but more desirable end of turning them into interesting arrangements that live up to the passion people invest in the songs.