Arranging

Last Sunday, the best of British barbershop conspired to present a show at the London Palladium as the climax to the national ‘barbershop awareness week’. I had a couple of personal highpoints, with NoteOrious and Eu4ia both singing my arrangements – the latter having commissioned theirs specifically for this show (Christine Aguilera's 'Candyman').

It was a long show – a good three hours – but it did a very good job of sustaining interest. Given that all the acts were from basically the same kind of a cappella world, this is a testament to some very effective programming – it could have become very samey, but didn’t. I’ve been finding it useful to analyse what went in to making the structure so effective.

If you came here via the front page of Helping You Harmonise, you will have seen the new notice announcing the mentoring scheme I am organising for barbershop arrangers. (If you haven’t seen it yet, more details are here.) It will work by pairing people up to give each other feedback on each other’s work, and I thought it might be useful to say a few words about the rationale for this approach.

This is the third and final post in a series that looks at the consequences for the close-harmony arranger of Cooper & Meyer’s theory of rhythm. By looking at the way that musical structures create patterns of accent, we can draw a number of practical conclusions about how we control musical elements so as to make a coherent sense of rhythm without undue distractions.

In some ways, melody and accompaniment textures provide fewer challenges than homophonic textures, because they have more built-in contrast. The parts singing the accompaniment patterns can set up a regular metrical framework to drape the tune over, in much the way that a band’s rhythm section frees a soloist up to play with and pull against the basic rhythmic structure.

In my first post on this theme, I looked at Cooper & Meyer’s theory of rhythm, and in particular the way that it frames the idea of accent as any musical event that draws attention to itself. Of the types of accent discussed in that post, by far the most important for homophonic a cappella styles is the harmonic accent. Where all voices are singing the same words at the same time, and the number of notes sounding simultaneously is largely constant, the primary means to alert the ear to a song’s metrical shape is the changing of the harmony.

And indeed, both the arranging styles and performance styles of close-harmony traditions have particularly focused on relishing the harmonic content: it not only regulates the rhythmic flow of the music, but colours its entire emotional shape.

Working in a timbrally-uniform medium such as unaccompanied voices has deepened my appreciation over the years for the insights that Grosvenor Cooper and Leonard B. Meyer provided into how rhythm works.

To ruthlessly summarise their key ideas:

• Our experience of rhythm results from the perceptual organisation of relatively accented and unaccented sounds into coherent patterns.
• An accent is created by any ‘stimulus marked for consciousness’ – that is, a thing that makes us notice it.
• Consequently, any and all elements of a musical texture can participate in the creation of accent (and, thereby, rhythm).

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.

I’ve been having the humbling experience of learning how to use a new notation program. It’s tough to go back to complete beginner status for one of your essential tools, but sometimes it needs to be done.

Some background to this change: