Arranging

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?

Saturday took me back to work with my friends in Bristol A Cappella on the set they are preparing for both the European Barbershop Convention in early May, and the BABS national Convention at the end of the month. As I mentioned after my last visit, whilst we have been working together for many years now, this is the first time I have arranged for them, and it brings a whole new level of intimacy to the relationship. One of the singers remarked to me about how much they wanted to do me proud, to which I replied that that was how I felt about them.

Quite a lot of the things I get interested in have applicability across choral genres and beyond, but today’s subject is pretty specific in focus and will likely hold little interest beyond people arranging for barbershop ensembles, and rather fewer than a quarter of the people singing it.

I had an email recently from a singer who after a good many years’ experience as a first soprano has joined a female barbershop chorus and been placed as a tenor. She had considered herself hitherto pretty confident with high notes, but is really struggling with one particular arrangement they’re currently singing, and wondered, having read a post of mine about arranging barbershop for female voices, whether the problem was the male arranger (and male chorus director in turn) not understanding the female voice.

As anyone who has been involved in sourcing arrangements for vocal ensembles over a period of years knows, the introduction of Sheet Music Plus’s ArrangeMe programme has been a game-changer. A huge proportion of in-copyright popular songs can now be arranged and published without all the time-consuming and expensive sourcing of bespoke licenses for each ensemble who wants to sing it.

Amersham A Cappella and SpecsAppeal: the afterglows were also excellent

The last weekend in October typically takes me to the annual convention of the Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers. This year we were back in Bournemouth, which once again seemed to hang on to the tail end of summer for us.

Looking back on my reflections from last year, I see I was full of thoughts about how hearing fresh music keeps your listeners fresh throughout a long contest day – and also about some strategies to help make that happen. I was having similar thoughts this year, particularly in the quartet contests. Of course now we have the mixed quartet contest alongside the upper voices one, both semifinal and final rounds are significantly longer than they used to be, giving more opportunity for repeated songs to show up.

It is apparently over a decade since I last worked with Heartbeat (where did all that time go?!), and I see that back then I was remarking on the number of new faces that had arrived since my previous visit. This time I was struck by how many faces I recognised even after all this time; I don’t know how much of a chorus’s story you can infer from just two snapshots, but it does feel like there’s something in there.

Anyway, I remembered the chorus as being a lot of fun to work with, and that remains true. You can tell there’s a fundamental sense of up-for-it-ness in the room if on the first song you start work on you ask them, ‘Shall I be a complete bitch right from the get-go?’ and they all nod cheerfully. Accordingly we started out with an exercise that mercilessly reveals any and all flaws in rhythmic precision and found ourselves 10 minutes later with a much tighter execution.

I’m on record for feeling somewhat critical of the practice of choral breathing – that is, of singers in a choir managing their breathing points by breathing whenever they feel like, so long as it’s at a different time from their neighbours, and they do it in the middle of a vowel rather than shortening a syllable.

I have heard people promoting the idea in terms of vocal freedom, and actually this argument is a compelling one its favour. People are most likely to tense up and get anxious while singing when running out of breath, so if you remove that as something to worry about, they’ll sing with both greater emotional and physical freedom. I do like this rationale, though I am still concerned about the dissociation of technique from musical narrative, and the way that it actively prevents choral singing being a good training ground for solo singing and single-voice-per-part ensembles.

I’ve had several conversations recently with people involved in writing comedic parodies and/or needing to update references in existing comedy songs. And in the process a few themes have emerged that I thought it worth pulling together a bit so I’ve got something useful to link to if I find myself having more such conversations.

Have enough jokes

Like the concept of Retroactive Inevitability, this is something that Roger Payne used to talk about. It’s very easy to get a brilliant idea for a parody, but end up with essentially just the one joke. For sure, having one major concept you build around is a good strategy for a coherent whole, but you also need regular laugh-points along the way.

On the stand-up comedy course I did way back when, the guide-line we were given was to make sure you never went more than 30 seconds without a punchline. Given that songs tend to be a more compact and less wordy form than stand-up, I wouldn’t be surprised if you need them more often than that in music. I tend to measure musical time in bars rather than seconds, and my feeling is at least every 16 bars, but with some at 8-bar intervals., is what you’re aiming for.