Arranging

I mentioned in my post about last week's Arrangers’ Workshop that we’d talked about the relationship between the circle of fifths and the sense of a song’s form, and that it probably needed a post in its own right to cover. So, here is that post.

I’ve written before about Harmonic Charge as a measure of the inherent energy a chord has within the context of a particular key. Here, we’re just talking about dimension of harmonic charge that involves the potential energy of distance round the circle of fifths. The other dimensions (major/minor and presence/absence of a tritone) seem to me more about flavour than structure – important considerations for a song’s expressive feel, but perhaps secondary when thinking about mapping out its shape.

So, the point about the circle of fifths is that it is measure of tonal distance. Chord III is further away from ‘home’ than chord V (as it is V of VI, which is V of II, which is V of V, and then you’re nearly home). So, chords further out round the circle inherently feel more active, as you’re going to have travel further harmonically to get back home to where the music feels at rest.

NoteOrious in action
On Sunday, a collection of arrangers from BABS, LABBS and Sweet Adelines Region 31 gathered in Birmingham for a day of honing their craft. This one of the events under the mantle of Barbershop In Harmony, and is exactly the kind of thing it’s worth collaborating over – arranging is something of a minority interest in each organisation, but between us we have a viable community of people to exchange ideas.

For this occasion, we had kind permission from Joe Liles to use a song he wrote for the Woodshedder’s Folio as a set piece for everyone to work on in advance. We had eight versions submitted in advance for workshopping, and working through these took up the bulk of the day’s activities.

Celebrating the back-to-school season with two opportunities for barbershop arrangers:

Funnily enough, picking songs to arrange is something I no longer have much difficulty with, since I’m mostly arranging to order songs that other people have picked. But the people I’m arranging for sometimes have trouble with this, as do many arrangers – it was something that came up in conversation several times at our arrangers’ day back in April 2009. And even though I don’t have to do this so much these days, I’m interested in it, as it is something that didn’t come naturally to me at first, so I had to learn how to get better at it.

Like many skills, a good start is looking at people who are already good at it and see what they do.

One of the things that happens when you are a barbershop judge is that you get to hear multiple performances of the same arrangement. (You get it as an audience member too, but you get it more as a judge as you can’t pop out for a beer and a sandwich during the early afternoon session.) And sometimes you notice over repeated hearings that certain arrangements seem consistently to elicit sub-optimal performances.

These are arrangements that, on the face of it look fine. If there were obvious technical or artistic flaws with them, they wouldn’t get picked up by lots of groups. So it takes quite a few hearings to notice that whenever ensembles sing them, they always perform better in the other song – they’re more synchronised, better in tune and more naturally expressive. I’m not going to name specific arrangements, as I don’t think that would be polite. Rather I’ll just invite you to compile your own lists from your own listening experiences.

I have written before about how I use the baritone line as a performance indicator for arrangement decisions. This is the part that is most likely to become counter-intuitive in shape as its role is to fill out the chord above and below the lead. Thus, if this line makes sense, it is a very good indication that the chord choices and voicings are good. If the line sounds illogical or bi-polar, it tells you that you need to rethink what you’re trying to do there.

I have been thinking a lot of late about the singability of all the harmony parts. This is something that all arrangers grapple with of course – both Paul Davies and David Wright have talked about it in their training sessions. But as I’ve been singing through the parts I write, I’ve been analysing both what it is that makes a part more or less singable, and the nature of the effect it will have on both singer and listener.

In a comment on my last post, Chris Rowbury made the following point:

Re: listening to other people's work. I agree up to a point. An analogy: when play writers want to get stuff onto Radio 4, they are encouraged to listen A LOT to the afternoon play. What then happens is they end up writing stuff that sounds just like all the other stuff in that slot. You can spot a Radio 4 afternoon play a mile off. I can spot a barbershop arrangement a mile off. But I sit up and notice when something is REALLY original.

I started to reply to him there, but his point is so interesting that I decided to focus on it for a whole post in its own right.

Last year, over on the Facebook group for Barbershop Arrangement and Composition, Jim Emery raised the following question:

I do actually have several arrangements that are OK but not stellar. One was performed in contest by my international competitor level quartet. Several others found their way to our quartet CD. But they seem kind of vanilla. Short of just "getting more creative", I'd love to exchange ideas for how to approach sprucing them up.

(Actually, while I’m at it I’ll make this implicit plug for the FB group more explicit. It’s not maybe as active as it might be, but it has some really good people involved in it, and has a wonderful range of experience, from relative beginners to some of the biggest names out there. If you’ve not been over there, do go check it out.)

Anyway, Jim’s was one of those questions that has stayed with me. He’s really put his finger on a particular dilemma: it’s all very well to recognise that you want your arrangements to be more creative, but how do you go about making that happen?