Arranging

I was recently chatting to a writer friend about our respective experiences during the creative process. One of the themes we explored was how we handle it when we're at the stage when we look at our work-in-progress and think, 'Oh, that's terrible'. This is an inevitable part of the process, because creative work never comes out perfect first time, however good the underlying concept. And if we never saw the flaws in our work, we'd never make the changes that are needed to make it into a finished product.

But how can we manage our own emotions meanwhile? Clearly, if we take these self-criticisms too much to heart, we will falter and stop at the first hurdle. You only get any good at something by learning to listen to the inner voice that says more work is needed without taking its critique personally.

Wednesday evening took me down to work with my friends in West London, Capital Connection. Our task was to work on two new contest songs which are quite well sung in, and thus ripe for enhancement - adding colour, nuance and emotional depth to an already well-shaped delivery.

Although it is 6 months since I last worked with the chorus, the intensive period back in the autumn of several visits in quick succession had left its mark with our working methods. It felt like we were able to cover a considerable range of musical issues in a short time: melodic flow, harmonic colour, texture and expressive register, rhythmic feel, tension and release. Actually, now I write it out, I am even more impressed by the rate at which the singers were absorbing and applying ideas to their performance.

A topic that came up with both songs was embellishment.

One of those penny-drop moments came to me when, as an undergraduate playing through some music I had written as a younger teenager (and finding it both better and worse than I remembered - does this happen to everyone when revisiting the efforts of their younger selves?), I came across a bit I'd always had to play quite carefully to make it sound okay. It could work all right, but if you didn't place it just so, it could sound a bit naff.

In the time between writing this music and revisiting it, I had been taught the concept of consecutive 5ths and 8ves, and the importance of avoiding them. This concept now revealed to me what the problem had been with my piece of juvenilia, and simultaneously made me grasp, emotionally, why I should care about this bit of theory.

There are other schools of thought on consecutives of course. Take Noel Coward:

I've been thinking about rests. As in the silent bits within a piece of music, not as in putting your feet up with a cuppa. In fact, that distinction shows why people tend to overlook them. The name makes it sound like the music is off-duty.

If you use Sibelius as a notation program, you start off with a page-full or rests and the act of writing music involves replacing rests with sounds. This makes it feel like rests are the bits that you couldn't be bothered to compose.

But rests are not merely negative, not-music moments. They have value for both performers and listeners, and their deployment by composers and arrangers can involve a great deal of careful thought. They are there to do things for you that no other musical element can do.

I have written several times on various aspects of choosing music to perform and/or to arrange. These have covered both technical and artistic criteria, and also given some ideas about process - not just what to look for but how to go about looking. I had an email conversation recently, though, with a chorus director who was looking to commission an arrangement that opened up an area right in the middle of the issues I have previously covered, but which I haven’t actually written about: which specific features should she advise her chorus members to look out for in a song that would mark it as suitable for a cappella arrangement?

Now, I used to dedicate a whole class to this question when I used to teach a course on Vocal Close Harmony at Birmingham Conservatoire. So my first instinct was just to dig out those notes and post ‘em up. But, four years on from when I last taught that course, and more years than that since I taught it in the format that included that session, I can find no trace of those notes. Deep sigh. So, we’ll have to do the thinking again from scratch.

Emotion has a funny relationship with the nature/nurture divide. We tend to think of it as purely natural, since a lot of our emotional responses are involuntary. If it just happens to us without the intervention of our own will, it can't be a learned response, we assume. We categorise it more with digestion than with language acquisition.

And indeed, there is a substrate of primary emotional states that are cross-cultural. Joy, fear, anger, grief - we can recognise these states in people with whom we have nothing in common but our shared humanity.

But when we talk about feelings evoked by the arts, we are usually not talking about these pure forms. The emotions a novel or a symphony inspire are more subtle, mixed, contextual. And for all that 18th-century guff about music being a 'universal language', not everyone makes sense of an unfamiliar musical style on first acquaintance. Primary emotions, like the need to eat, may be universal, but the way we celebrate their full possibilities in culture develop local cuisines.

The title of this post is one of those that would be reasonably opaque unless you are familiar with the argot of barbershop. For a barbershopper, a ‘polecat’ is a standard song that everybody in your world knows the parts to, and therefore suitable singing at any social occasion where you are meeting barbershoppers you don’t normally hang out with.

For people in the Barbershop Harmony Society, the repertoire is defined by the songs published in a set of books entitled the ‘Barber Pole Cat Program’ (and I imagine that’s where the abbreviation derives from). These have traditionally been ‘old songs’ – classic barbershop standards of the type that the founders of the society in the 1930s were nostalgic about from their youth.

After my day with Rhapsody in Peterborough, I had a day in Essex coaching Flame quartet in the morning and Chorus Iceni in the afternoon. Flame is a new quartet, though its members bring a considerable breadth and depth of previous experience to the party, while Chorus Iceni are fresh back from achieving their best results ever (by a considerable margin) at LABBS Convention last month. So there was a good sense of momentum in both sessions, if for different reasons.

With Flame, we spent a good deal of time using a new coaching technique I had actually devised the day before with Rhapsody. I have been advocating slow practice as a way to get into the detail and give yourself time really to hear the harmonies for a good long time. But this has usually been an analytical process with a technical focus, rather than serving artistic goals.