Arranging

In my recent post on the arranger's super-ego, I had a nice self-indulgent time trying to work out where that intuitive sense comes from that tells you whether or not an arrangement is good enough to release. At the end of that post, I was just happening across the logical next question - what are the urges of the arranger's Id that the super-ego needs to keep in check?

The thing about the Id in Freudian theory (which I have already said I am dubious about, but if we're using his terms, we should probably pay at least some attention to his definitions) is that it is a source of creativity as well as chaos. It's not just a matter of rampant appetite and sexual voracity held back by the thin veneer of civilisation. Human culture has long seen the forces of creation as in many ways akin to those of destruction, and both in some ways at odds with principles of order. The Id's pleasure-seeking energies are primary motivators for everything we do.

I don't know quite why I started thinking in Freudian terms recently about arranging. I am sceptical in all kind of ways about Freud's theories - so many of them are so phallocentric, after all, which may feel normal for men, but just looks weird from a female perspective. But there are also ways in which he was quite humane and you can't accuse him of having not spent enough time thinking about this stuff.

Anyway, the experience that brought all this to mind was the stage of arranging I think of as 'combing' - getting all the lines lying smoothly so there aren't any tangles in the music to bump the listener, or knots in the lines to impede the singers. And I got to reflecting on how I know when an arrangement is finished.

I'm writing this post while in the middle of arranging a song destined to be part of a barbershop contest package. So I am thinking very specifically about the craft of producing contest-grade barbershop, though I suspect I may find myself ranging more widely by the time I'm done. It is very much writing-to-figure-out-exactly-what-this-thought-I-am-trying-to-have mode, so I may ramble. You have been warned.

(Of course, if the thought ends up being especially trite, I have the option of never posting it. Though I might enjoy the irony of engaging in deep thought to come up with a truism. That in itself might say something about the subject.)

So, 'hack' is the phrase used in stand-up comedy for material on themes that are over-used. It is an insult that includes both lack of creativity (you couldn't think of anything original to say) and laziness (you came up with the most obvious joke, then stopped working). The term is, I imagine, derived from 'hackneyed' in the more general sense, as tired and clichéd, but there is a specificity to its usage in comedy that I find interesting.

A recent negotiation about a bespoke arrangement got me thinking about what we mean when we talk about a 'big' piece of music. I'm not going to tell you what the song was, as it is intended for a grand unveiling in due course, but if I tell you the original song was about 8 1/2 minutes long, you'll get the idea that it's a substantial piece. I had cut it down to under 5 minutes in arranging it, mostly by cutting out large-scale repetition such as multiple verses, but had retained the overall trajectory and order of sections.

The negotiation was about whether further cuts were possible in order to make the song quicker to learn. The chorus had identified several places where they felt that cuts were possible in terms of key and phrase structure and were asking my opinion on their viability.

I've written before (here and, more tangentially, here)about the inherent energy implied in different chord voicings. I particularly like the way the Sweet Adelines manual recommends alternating tight and wider voicings. This feels to me like the voicings are being used to propel the music forward, like the pulsing of a jellyfish, or the pumping of bellows. Or indeed the beating of a heart.

Whichever your preferred metaphor, the pattern alternately allows more musical space into the texture, then squeezes it out again. When it happens suddenly, we get a 'dammit chord', as discovered with Silver Lining recently.

I was recently chatting to a writer friend about our respective experiences during the creative process. One of the themes we explored was how we handle it when we're at the stage when we look at our work-in-progress and think, 'Oh, that's terrible'. This is an inevitable part of the process, because creative work never comes out perfect first time, however good the underlying concept. And if we never saw the flaws in our work, we'd never make the changes that are needed to make it into a finished product.

But how can we manage our own emotions meanwhile? Clearly, if we take these self-criticisms too much to heart, we will falter and stop at the first hurdle. You only get any good at something by learning to listen to the inner voice that says more work is needed without taking its critique personally.

Wednesday evening took me down to work with my friends in West London, Capital Connection. Our task was to work on two new contest songs which are quite well sung in, and thus ripe for enhancement - adding colour, nuance and emotional depth to an already well-shaped delivery.

Although it is 6 months since I last worked with the chorus, the intensive period back in the autumn of several visits in quick succession had left its mark with our working methods. It felt like we were able to cover a considerable range of musical issues in a short time: melodic flow, harmonic colour, texture and expressive register, rhythmic feel, tension and release. Actually, now I write it out, I am even more impressed by the rate at which the singers were absorbing and applying ideas to their performance.

A topic that came up with both songs was embellishment.

One of those penny-drop moments came to me when, as an undergraduate playing through some music I had written as a younger teenager (and finding it both better and worse than I remembered - does this happen to everyone when revisiting the efforts of their younger selves?), I came across a bit I'd always had to play quite carefully to make it sound okay. It could work all right, but if you didn't place it just so, it could sound a bit naff.

In the time between writing this music and revisiting it, I had been taught the concept of consecutive 5ths and 8ves, and the importance of avoiding them. This concept now revealed to me what the problem had been with my piece of juvenilia, and simultaneously made me grasp, emotionally, why I should care about this bit of theory.

There are other schools of thought on consecutives of course. Take Noel Coward: