Arranging

It’s time to start the 2012-13 cycle of the Mutual Mentoring Scheme for Arrangers. For those who haven’t participated before (and indeed those who have but who want to refresh their memories of how it works) there’s an overview here.

The timescale for launching this year's cycle is as follows:

Please let me know by 30 September if you’d like to participate this year. I will then be in touch to introduce you to your partner by 14 October.

I've heard from several people during the year that they'd like to participate in the next cycle - please confirm, though, that you're definitely in. I wouldn't wish to assume either way! And likewise, for people who have participated in any of the previous cycles, let me know whether you're in or out for 2012-13.

I've also heard from several people that they have friends who might be interested - now is the moment to send this link to those friends!

I look forward to hearing from you over the next couple of weeks.

Last weekend saw BABS heading to Southport for their 38th annual Convention under gloriously sunny skies.

The big story of the weekend was the presence of International silver medallists, the Musical Island Boys not only as visiting performers, but also as competitors. They had been unable to participate as planned in the Pan-Pacific convention earlier this year, and so the BHS had agreed to let them use the BABS contest as the occasion at which to compete for a qualifying score for the International Convention in Portland in July.

One of the things I love about coaching is the way that other musicians help you see things you already thought you knew in a new light. A lovely example of this happened when I was up in Edinburgh with MacFour at the end of March. We were talking about the relationship between the manager and the communicator, and how I’d originally started using these terms when thinking about the nature of the task the arranger sets up for the performer. We somehow also managed to divert into one of my favourite rants about the nature of the baritone line.

It was at this point that Elaine Hamilton, the quartet’s baritone, came out with the remark:

Yes, and if the baritone line is illogical, you find that you start to sing a bit behind everyone else as it takes you longer to process it.

The Communicator and the Manager are two characters who have popped up in several previous posts, and who are making increasingly frequent visits to my coaching sessions. So I felt it was time they deserved a post of their own.

I think I first met these two characters in the guise of the Writer and the Editor. When I was on the final leg of my PhD a lecturer friend advised me that the only way to get anything done is to send the Editor off for a cup of tea while the Writer gets on with things. Yes, it will need a good deal of editing in due course, but if the Editor gets on the case while the Writer’s still trying to write, you’ll never get anything done.

I always imagined these two as sitting on either shoulder, like a devil and an angel. Which is slightly strange imagery, since the Writer-Editor (and indeed Manager-Communicator) pair have much more of yin-yang than a good-evil one. You do actually need both, but they need to get involved in different stages of the process.

Saturday saw me back with my friends Fascinating Rhythm to work with them on David Wright’s arrangement of ‘South Rampart Street Parade’. It is a classic chart for reasons that I came away with a renewed appreciation for, and it is a good choice for them at their current stage of development: they have to raise their game to sing it, but it is a challenge within their reach. And it has that wonderful characteristic that, tricky as it is, it lifts performers – it actually helps them out-perform what they previously thought they were capable of.

In my previous post on this subject, we looked at the basic building block of comedy, the set-up/punchline dyad. (Dyad is such a poncy music-theory kind of word, isn’t it? Possibly ‘combo’ is more appropriate here.) Our tutor, James Cook, quite sensibly started us off on the purest, simplest form of joke – the one-liner – in order to make this fundamental structure clear. You know, like when you’re teaching harmony, you build a lot of phrases using I-V-I before you start doing fancy stuff like substitute chords and modulations.

Now, one-liners are great as instant pay-off. They require the absolute minimum from the audience in terms of cognitive engagement over time, as the punchline comes hard on the heels of the set-up. No need for deferred gratification at all. It’s a spend-all-your-pocket-money-at-once style of comedy.

I wrote some years back about how I don’t really hold with jiggering with other people’s arrangements – not least because of seeing some rather inept changes to mine over the years. And I still hold this view: if an arrangement isn’t working in some way, it’s much better to refer back to the original arranger in the first instance for a solution, as they will have spent a lot of time thinking about how the thing works already, and need to be told if and when things don’t sing as well as they planned.

A somewhat different experience is when the arranger whose work you’re messing with is your own past self.

As of 13 January 2012 I am available for new arranging projects again! So, for all of you who have been asking me while I was all booked up, thank you for your patience.

With this new intake, I am changing the procedures for accepting commissions and seeking copyright permissions, such that you get the agreement in principle before making the commission. There are guidelines for how to do this (for UK customers) on the Bespoke Arrangements page of this site.

This may seem like an extra fuss, but the reason I have decided to try doing it this way is to avoid a number of difficulties ensembles and I have encountered in leaving the requests until after the arrangements are done. These include: