Arranging

The Communicator and the Manager are two characters who have popped up in several previous posts, and who are making increasingly frequent visits to my coaching sessions. So I felt it was time they deserved a post of their own.

I think I first met these two characters in the guise of the Writer and the Editor. When I was on the final leg of my PhD a lecturer friend advised me that the only way to get anything done is to send the Editor off for a cup of tea while the Writer gets on with things. Yes, it will need a good deal of editing in due course, but if the Editor gets on the case while the Writer’s still trying to write, you’ll never get anything done.

I always imagined these two as sitting on either shoulder, like a devil and an angel. Which is slightly strange imagery, since the Writer-Editor (and indeed Manager-Communicator) pair have much more of yin-yang than a good-evil one. You do actually need both, but they need to get involved in different stages of the process.

Saturday saw me back with my friends Fascinating Rhythm to work with them on David Wright’s arrangement of ‘South Rampart Street Parade’. It is a classic chart for reasons that I came away with a renewed appreciation for, and it is a good choice for them at their current stage of development: they have to raise their game to sing it, but it is a challenge within their reach. And it has that wonderful characteristic that, tricky as it is, it lifts performers – it actually helps them out-perform what they previously thought they were capable of.

In my previous post on this subject, we looked at the basic building block of comedy, the set-up/punchline dyad. (Dyad is such a poncy music-theory kind of word, isn’t it? Possibly ‘combo’ is more appropriate here.) Our tutor, James Cook, quite sensibly started us off on the purest, simplest form of joke – the one-liner – in order to make this fundamental structure clear. You know, like when you’re teaching harmony, you build a lot of phrases using I-V-I before you start doing fancy stuff like substitute chords and modulations.

Now, one-liners are great as instant pay-off. They require the absolute minimum from the audience in terms of cognitive engagement over time, as the punchline comes hard on the heels of the set-up. No need for deferred gratification at all. It’s a spend-all-your-pocket-money-at-once style of comedy.

I wrote some years back about how I don’t really hold with jiggering with other people’s arrangements – not least because of seeing some rather inept changes to mine over the years. And I still hold this view: if an arrangement isn’t working in some way, it’s much better to refer back to the original arranger in the first instance for a solution, as they will have spent a lot of time thinking about how the thing works already, and need to be told if and when things don’t sing as well as they planned.

A somewhat different experience is when the arranger whose work you’re messing with is your own past self.

As of 13 January 2012 I am available for new arranging projects again! So, for all of you who have been asking me while I was all booked up, thank you for your patience.

With this new intake, I am changing the procedures for accepting commissions and seeking copyright permissions, such that you get the agreement in principle before making the commission. There are guidelines for how to do this (for UK customers) on the Bespoke Arrangements page of this site.

This may seem like an extra fuss, but the reason I have decided to try doing it this way is to avoid a number of difficulties ensembles and I have encountered in leaving the requests until after the arrangements are done. These include:

I have commented before in passing on the way that popular melodies from the 1960s onwards look - on paper – more rhythmically complex than tunes from the earlier parts of the 20th century. They appear to have a lot more syncopation, and they seem rarely to cadence exactly on the beat – instead either anticipating or delaying over the barline.

The reason for this is not, however, because popular music has particularly become more complex over time (you get examples of both simple and complex melodies throughout the 20th century), but because the processes of musical production have changed.

It’s time to start the 3rd annual cycle of the Mutual Mentoring Scheme for Arrangers. For those who haven’t participated before (and indeed those who have but who want to refresh their memories of how it works) there’s an overview here.

For now, I just need to say two things.

I spent Sunday up in Manchester working with Crystal Chords chorus, who are preparing for their second LABBS Convention under the direction of Monica Funnell. Their first contest together last autumn presented an ensemble that was developing fast, but still felt a little like work-in-progress. In the intervening months they have clearly settled into their new level of skills, although they still have that capacity to pick up new ideas quickly that characterises chorus that are undergoing rapid improvement.

The result was a most productive session. As a chorus, they were very open to coaching, and took evident pleasure in their discoveries and achievements. And we really got the benefit of the work on good vocal habits they have undertaken over the last year: at no point were our musical intentions held back by limitations in vocal technique.