A Cappella

Inspirational songs present some specific and peculiar challenges for the close-harmony/a cappella arranger. But they’re challenges we have to meet, since the genre is popular with both singers and audiences, and people are going to keep asking for them. The basic problem is this: it is very easy to turn them into rather boring arrangements. So today I am going to try and figure out why this is, and how we can achieve the harder but more desirable end of turning them into interesting arrangements that live up to the passion people invest in the songs.

Magenta & guestsThe monsoon season arrived in Moseley on Monday night: just before 7 pm the skies opened and rain fell so hard that the drops bounced halfway back up to the sky. Nonetheless, intrepid souls from around the city paddled their way over to the Community Development Trust building for the close-harmony workshop Magenta were presenting as part of the Moseley Festival.

Our goal was to learn a brand new arrangement together. It’s a fun dynamic, because while Magenta’s regular singers have the confidence in their skill from singing together regularly, they are no further ahead on the specific song than the visitors, so they offer moral support at the same time as having to rise to the challenge themselves.

And it is an interesting challenge for me too.

Last weekend saw a dozen or so arrangers from the three barbershop organisations in the UK gathered together at a hotel in Manchester to spend two days studying with David Wright. Anyone involved in barbershop music will know his work well: he is one of the most successful and creative arrangers currently active, having worked with many of the world’s champion quartets of the last two decades.

If you don’t know his work, have a listen to these, just to set the picture:

Cruella de Vil, sung by Vocal Spectrum
Yes Sir, That's My Baby, sung by Ringmasters
I Have Dreamed, sung by the Ambassadors of Harmony

The invitation to come and work with experienced British arrangers arose from the Barbershop in Harmony collaborations that also produced the workshop for less experienced arrangers in Birmingham in April, and the seminar was structured around the study of a number of classic arrangements.

I came home with a notebook full of ideas, many of which I’ll need to think about at greater length before I’m ready to write about them, so this post is a collection of initial impressions – the things that rise to the top in the first instance.

On Thursday night I went with my friends from Magenta to see Naturally 7 on their Wall of Sound Tour at Birmingham Town Hall. They’ve been pretty well promoted in recent weeks and months, but if you’ve not come across them, here's a clip of the title track of their album and tour. It was, as you can imagine, a fun night out – they are skilled performers with a well-crafted show, and, moreover, come over as really nice guys.

I came home with a collection of Things To Think About Later:

Having spent the last decade producing close-harmony arrangements for 4-part, single-sex ensembles, I’m starting to get interested in how to arrange for 8-part, mixed groups. Part of this is driven by demand – I’ve seen female and male quartets sing together often enough to notice that there’s a need for repertoire. Moreover, when I hear those performances, my response is almost always either (a) oh wow, that sounds great, I want to do that too! or (b) OMG that’s such a hokey chart, surely there must be better music out there!

Both of those are the kind of response to make me want to play this game.

So I’ve been looking at the various approaches other arrangers take, and here is my preliminary list of how you might go about this.

Old SchoolOne of the highlights of the BABS Convention in Llandudno last weekend was the masterclass by International bronze quartet medallists, Old School. This is a quartet made up of singers who have been highly successful in previous quartets - I lose count of how many previous medals they have collected between them over the last twenty years. Their current mission is not merely to be successful in contest, however, but to be successful in contest with really traditional barbershop songs and arrangements. And it would be hard to find four voices better suited to remind the world of the sheer sonic pleasure available from this kind of purist approach.

There were two particular things from the masterclass that I put by for later mulling-over:

I spent last weekend at the British Association of Barbershop Singers annual Convention, which this year was held in Llandudno. It was a rich and stimulating weekend with much both to learn from and to warm the heart – both musically and socially. And the setting was gorgeous – it would be easy to have a very pleasant weekend there even without a couple of thousand of your friends to sing with!

I came out of the quartet semi-finals on Friday night with some interesting observations about the relationship between stage presence and vocal resonance.

Jonathan Rathbone working with Serenata
One of the things I discovered when sorting through my notes from the Sing A Cappella day at the end of March was a whole collection of comments by Jonathan Rathbone on the subject of breath-points. It seemed appropriate to bring them all together into a themed post, since, while each is interesting in its own right, when piled up together they give a more developed sense of his musical perspective.