A Cappella

Last Friday, I went with my friends from Magenta to see Ladysmith Black Mambazo at Birmingham’s Symphony Hall. Having heard their sound, both from their own albums and from their collaborations with Paul Simon, I found it something of a revelation to see how they perform too.

I mentioned in my post a few months ago on arranging for 8 parts that I’d need to come back to the question of what makes an arrangement suitable for a choral ensemble versus a quartet/octet – and indeed, what makes an arrangement suitable for either.

In a comment on my post last week about getting known* as an arranger, Mark queried why I seemed more interested in arranging for commissions rather than for ‘the mass market’. I made a brief reply there, but his question stayed with me, and made me articulate some things to myself about the process of arranging that I thought might be interesting to share.

This is the third and final post in a series that looks at the consequences for the close-harmony arranger of Cooper & Meyer’s theory of rhythm. By looking at the way that musical structures create patterns of accent, we can draw a number of practical conclusions about how we control musical elements so as to make a coherent sense of rhythm without undue distractions.

In some ways, melody and accompaniment textures provide fewer challenges than homophonic textures, because they have more built-in contrast. The parts singing the accompaniment patterns can set up a regular metrical framework to drape the tune over, in much the way that a band’s rhythm section frees a soloist up to play with and pull against the basic rhythmic structure.

It’s a loud voice,
And though it’s not exactly flat,
She’ll need a little more than that
To earn a living wage
Noel Coward, ‘Don’t Put You Daughter on the Stage’

There is sometimes some cultural discomfort with women singing loudly. It can be seen as over-assertive, sonically pushy, ballsy. In times past this was tangled up with questions about public versus private utterance. Early Romantic writers like ETA Hoffmann and Carl Maria von Weber wrote very rude vignettes of female amateurs who sang operatic repertoire in the home, and idealised instead the perfect femininity of an untrained voice that wouldn’t travel beyond an intimate setting.

Those stereotypes have – thankfully – loosened their stranglehold to the point that they seem almost entirely historical.

In my first post on this theme, I looked at Cooper & Meyer’s theory of rhythm, and in particular the way that it frames the idea of accent as any musical event that draws attention to itself. Of the types of accent discussed in that post, by far the most important for homophonic a cappella styles is the harmonic accent. Where all voices are singing the same words at the same time, and the number of notes sounding simultaneously is largely constant, the primary means to alert the ear to a song’s metrical shape is the changing of the harmony.

And indeed, both the arranging styles and performance styles of close-harmony traditions have particularly focused on relishing the harmonic content: it not only regulates the rhythmic flow of the music, but colours its entire emotional shape.

On Sunday night I had a trip up to Yorkshire to work with the combined voices of Pennine Chimes from Bradford and Main Street Sound from York. They have been rehearsing together once a month for the last few months, as well as coordinating their plans and approaches for each group’s weekly rehearsals, and as a result are operating very much as a single ensemble. Indeed, my only clue as to who originated with which chorus were their name badges!

During the second half of the coaching session we addressed an issue that besets so many barbershop groups: the way that introducing choreography seems to undo months of careful work on vocal production.

Working in a timbrally-uniform medium such as unaccompanied voices has deepened my appreciation over the years for the insights that Grosvenor Cooper and Leonard B. Meyer provided into how rhythm works.

To ruthlessly summarise their key ideas:

• Our experience of rhythm results from the perceptual organisation of relatively accented and unaccented sounds into coherent patterns.
• An accent is created by any ‘stimulus marked for consciousness’ – that is, a thing that makes us notice it.
• Consequently, any and all elements of a musical texture can participate in the creation of accent (and, thereby, rhythm).