Arranging

Funnily enough, picking songs to arrange is something I no longer have much difficulty with, since I’m mostly arranging to order songs that other people have picked. But the people I’m arranging for sometimes have trouble with this, as do many arrangers – it was something that came up in conversation several times at our arrangers’ day back in April 2009. And even though I don’t have to do this so much these days, I’m interested in it, as it is something that didn’t come naturally to me at first, so I had to learn how to get better at it.

Like many skills, a good start is looking at people who are already good at it and see what they do.

One of the things that happens when you are a barbershop judge is that you get to hear multiple performances of the same arrangement. (You get it as an audience member too, but you get it more as a judge as you can’t pop out for a beer and a sandwich during the early afternoon session.) And sometimes you notice over repeated hearings that certain arrangements seem consistently to elicit sub-optimal performances.

These are arrangements that, on the face of it look fine. If there were obvious technical or artistic flaws with them, they wouldn’t get picked up by lots of groups. So it takes quite a few hearings to notice that whenever ensembles sing them, they always perform better in the other song – they’re more synchronised, better in tune and more naturally expressive. I’m not going to name specific arrangements, as I don’t think that would be polite. Rather I’ll just invite you to compile your own lists from your own listening experiences.

I have written before about how I use the baritone line as a performance indicator for arrangement decisions. This is the part that is most likely to become counter-intuitive in shape as its role is to fill out the chord above and below the lead. Thus, if this line makes sense, it is a very good indication that the chord choices and voicings are good. If the line sounds illogical or bi-polar, it tells you that you need to rethink what you’re trying to do there.

I have been thinking a lot of late about the singability of all the harmony parts. This is something that all arrangers grapple with of course – both Paul Davies and David Wright have talked about it in their training sessions. But as I’ve been singing through the parts I write, I’ve been analysing both what it is that makes a part more or less singable, and the nature of the effect it will have on both singer and listener.

In a comment on my last post, Chris Rowbury made the following point:

Re: listening to other people's work. I agree up to a point. An analogy: when play writers want to get stuff onto Radio 4, they are encouraged to listen A LOT to the afternoon play. What then happens is they end up writing stuff that sounds just like all the other stuff in that slot. You can spot a Radio 4 afternoon play a mile off. I can spot a barbershop arrangement a mile off. But I sit up and notice when something is REALLY original.

I started to reply to him there, but his point is so interesting that I decided to focus on it for a whole post in its own right.

Last year, over on the Facebook group for Barbershop Arrangement and Composition, Jim Emery raised the following question:

I do actually have several arrangements that are OK but not stellar. One was performed in contest by my international competitor level quartet. Several others found their way to our quartet CD. But they seem kind of vanilla. Short of just "getting more creative", I'd love to exchange ideas for how to approach sprucing them up.

(Actually, while I’m at it I’ll make this implicit plug for the FB group more explicit. It’s not maybe as active as it might be, but it has some really good people involved in it, and has a wonderful range of experience, from relative beginners to some of the biggest names out there. If you’ve not been over there, do go check it out.)

Anyway, Jim’s was one of those questions that has stayed with me. He’s really put his finger on a particular dilemma: it’s all very well to recognise that you want your arrangements to be more creative, but how do you go about making that happen?

The thing that makes cat’s cradle work is the balance of opposing forces. The threads can form a structure because they are held in tension by the separated hands. Bring your hands together and this tension is released, and the three-dimensional form collapses.

I find this a useful image for juggling the competing demands a song makes on the arranger. There’s a network of opposing forces in somewhat different dimensions, both technical and artistic, pulling on the arrangement as it develops. Depending on the song and the group who’s commissioned it, the demands will vary, but there will always be this sense of simultaneous, but conflicting imperatives.

I had an email over the weekend from Leah, who had been interested in my arrangement of Michael Bublé’s Everything, in which she pointed out:

It's kind of hard for us to try it without knowing what ranges the song will have in a women's key. Can you give me an idea of that? thanks!

And I thought – I bet she’s not the only person in the world who would look at ranges for an arrangement in the other gender's key and ask that question. So, rather than just sending her a quick email, I thought I’d take a bit longer and write a whole blog post in the hope it will be helpful for other people too.

The Romantic idealOne of the aesthetic truisms that I absorbed during my undergraduate education, and have spent the subsequent years questioning,* is that great music has the quality of unity. This was purported to arrive in the music as the unconscious result of the composer’s genius, but could be uncovered via technical analysis. There were different dimensions in which you could identify this unity, Schenkerian tonal coherence and more or less hidden motivic connection in the manner of Réti being chief among them.

Even as a student, I was faintly perplexed by the equation of a spiritual attribute with concrete, technical details. I had a composer friend who was deeply taken by this aesthetic, and I used to ask him why, if the point about unity in great music was that it was created unconsciously, did he spend so much conscious effort constructing the motivic structure of his music? (He, on the other hand, felt I wasn’t taking our art sufficiently seriously when I upheld a valid role for whim in the compositional process.)