Arranging

Last weekend saw a dozen or so arrangers from the three barbershop organisations in the UK gathered together at a hotel in Manchester to spend two days studying with David Wright. Anyone involved in barbershop music will know his work well: he is one of the most successful and creative arrangers currently active, having worked with many of the world’s champion quartets of the last two decades.

If you don’t know his work, have a listen to these, just to set the picture:

Cruella de Vil, sung by Vocal Spectrum
Yes Sir, That's My Baby, sung by Ringmasters
I Have Dreamed, sung by the Ambassadors of Harmony

The invitation to come and work with experienced British arrangers arose from the Barbershop in Harmony collaborations that also produced the workshop for less experienced arrangers in Birmingham in April, and the seminar was structured around the study of a number of classic arrangements.

I came home with a notebook full of ideas, many of which I’ll need to think about at greater length before I’m ready to write about them, so this post is a collection of initial impressions – the things that rise to the top in the first instance.

On Saturday night, Magenta had the pleasure of performing in a concert featuring five early-career opera singers. (Two of them, as it happens, were ex-students of mine from Birmingham Conservatoire, though the invitation to participate arose from a suggestion by the Director of Music at the church that hosted the concert – one of those nice ‘small world’ moments.)

The second half featured some arrangements of spirituals for solo singer and piano by Moses Hogan and Peter Daley, and the comparison of the arranging styles of the two had me thinking about the relationship between arranging and performing styles again.

Having spent the last decade producing close-harmony arrangements for 4-part, single-sex ensembles, I’m starting to get interested in how to arrange for 8-part, mixed groups. Part of this is driven by demand – I’ve seen female and male quartets sing together often enough to notice that there’s a need for repertoire. Moreover, when I hear those performances, my response is almost always either (a) oh wow, that sounds great, I want to do that too! or (b) OMG that’s such a hokey chart, surely there must be better music out there!

Both of those are the kind of response to make me want to play this game.

So I’ve been looking at the various approaches other arrangers take, and here is my preliminary list of how you might go about this.

The standard method for arranging in the barbershop style sees three of the four parts constrained by particular rules. The lead has the tune, the bass goes below the lead and takes the root or the fifth of the chord, and the tenor should sit on top and move by small intervals, never greater than a fourth.

This means that the baritone part gets, as the cliché has it, all the left-over notes. It hops above and below the lead line to fill in the chord, and is constrained neither by rules of pitch content (it can take any note in the chord) nor type of movement (it can move by any interval). So it is defined entirely in negative terms – it is what all the other parts are not.

Arrangers deep in discussionWell, I’ve been collating the notes taken during the morning’s breakout sessions at last Sunday’s arrangers’ day (attached at the bottom of this post), and mulling on a number of miscellaneous other things that struck me during the day. Thanks to Katherine, David and Anne for taking the notes, by the way – it’s made a nice reminder for those who were there to participate, and something useful to share with those who couldn’t make it.

The following miscellany draws mostly on the afternoon’s workshop singing through people’s work-in-progess:

Yesterday saw just over 30 barbershop arrangers gathered together in Birmingham to exchange ideas and learn from each other. The day was designed for those who were beyond the beginner stage, but not yet entirely confident or established – and thus to provide a community for people who may be working with some sense of isolation. There were delegates from all three British barbershop organisations, plus one from Holland Harmony, and we were joined by about half of my Conservatoire class who are studying close-harmony arranging this semester.

Our keynote presentation came from Paul Davies, the UK’s most successful barbershop arranger. Paul took the chorus he founded, Cambridge Chord Company, to several gold medals in British and European contests, and picked up the Pavarotti Choir of the World trophy at Llangollen with a medley of parodies that mocked the Welsh (he’s brave as well as talented). CCC have also been more successful in International barbershop contests than any other British chorus by some considerable margin. They’ve done all this on Paul’s arrangements, so he is clearly someone worth inviting along to share his insights.

Okay, so it’s ultimately in the hands of singers whether they produce in-tune performances, but arrangers can have more of an influence on how well they achieve this than you might think. Here are three factors that can affect how well singers tune:

What is the fascination with producing medleys or theme & variations pieces that trace a tune through a series of historical styles? I’ve seen a couple of barbershop quartets do this, construing ‘music history’ as either popular song styles since the emergence of barbershop in the late 19th century or as the standard grand narrative of classical music periods. Ward Swingle also did a chart called ‘Music History 101’ that starts with Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, then launches into a series of pastiches. (Never mind that this tune actually post-dates the first style he arranges it as….) It’s also something that I’ve seen Conservatoire students propose for musicianship projects.

Some of these medleys are done very well (Michigan Jake could be pretty impressive singing anything, in my view, and they always worked with great arrangers), while others are less successful (some of the student projects I’ve witnessed haven’t lived up to their aspirations, alas). But I always find them a bit odd, and I’m trying to work out why.