Soapbox: Done-done with doo-doo intros

Today’s post presents an opinion that I have been harbouring for a while, but a combination of things has brought me to the point of taking the time to articulate it. The time invested in this blog post will hopefully save me time in writing emailswhen discussing arrangement commissions, as well as giving space to develop the ideas more fully than one usually does in correspondence.

So, the doo-doo intros that I am specifically done-done with are those appended to songs intended for barbershop contest. Back in the day of course one never heard them, as the general imperative for homophony excluded passages with vocables entirely, but as things have loosened up in the last 10-15 years, there has been a willingness to accept small doses of other textures, and a concomitant profusion of songs that begin with doo-doo introductions.

And as we hear more of them, I am getting lots of opportunities to figure out why I would rather hear fewer of them. Part of this is simply that it is becoming rather a cliché. We have freed ourselves from a world in which we repeatedly heard the same few songs over and over again during a contest day, only to create one in which we hear lots of different songs that all start the same way. I thought we were done with thinking, ‘oh no not again,’ but apparently not.

But it’s also about musical coherence. The sonic envelope of a vocable-based texture is very different from the homorhythmic world of traditional barbershop – which of course is why those textures used to be frowned upon. And whilst the barbershop contest system has loosened up to the extent that it will countenance brief appearances of features that are less ringy for the sake of a wider expressive range, that doesn’t guarantee that those features will make sense in the context of a predominantly contest-grade barbershop style.

In a show tune, you can mediate between different textures much more flexibly, and go from vocable intro, to melody + accompaniment texture, to homophonic focal point and back again, often via mixed textures that lie between these extremes. And you thereby get ways to build an expressive arc in which the changes of texture form an integral part of the narrative. Indeed, in songs that don’t have the harmonic variety required by contest barbershop, these textural arcs often become your primary way to maintain interest and longer-range shape.

But where you have a vocable-based intro tacked onto an otherwise predominantly homophonic arrangement, it feels like you’re starting out on one musical world, then abandoning it. It’s like making a promise you don’t keep. Or like having an instrumental intro and then leaving the band sit there in silence once the singers take over.

Of course, some arrangers try to mitigate this disjunction by bringing back fragments of their introductory material later in the song. Which on the face of it seems like a good strategy to bind the whole together through what David Wright once called ‘managed déjà vu’.

However, during the quartet contests at the recent BABS Convention, I noticed a problem that this strategy introduces for the performers. If you have a lead who is deeply committed to story-telling and invests the lyric of a song with a great deal of care and emotion (that is, a good lead), if you give them four ‘doos’ to sing between verses of that story, they are liable to sing those doos in the same manner as they sing a lyric. As a result, they kind of stick out from the instrumental vibe of the vocable passage; hearing a vocable sung as if it were part of the story you suddenly become aware of the artifice of the whole enterprise.

And thinking about how else the quartet might manage this, it’s not clear that there is a solution that doesn’t somehow compromise the suspension of disbelief. If all four singers treated the vocables as lyric instead of switching into ‘instrumental’ mode, the artifice would be amplified, compounding the problem. If the lead switched out of their expressively-committed delivery to integrate into the instrumental/vocable texture, we’d have a weird shifting of emotional gears as we suddenly lose the primary persona we were identifying for a bar or two, only for them to reappear when the lyrics restart.

In a context where you have more extended passages of different roles (accompanying versus story-telling), and a more gradual and crafted passage between them, singers have space to manage that journey for us, as they do successfully as a matter of course. But in a world where homophony is king, a world that prioritises the communicative and sonic impact of all singers presenting the lyric together and thereby generating the characteristic acoustic envelope of expanded sound, you have to be really careful about how you introduce material (textural or indeed harmonic) that lies outside the expressive conventions of that universe.

I’m not saying it can’t be done, but if we want to get the benefit of being allowed to use arranging devices not permitted in the rules of yesteryear, we might consider doing it a bit more creatively. We are beyond the point where we can look ‘progressive’ by doing things that were recently forbidden, and the expansion of the boundaries actually makes our job harder as we now have to figure out for ourselves how to make things work rather than just trusting the rules to deliver stylistic and expressive consistency for us.