My roommate Charlie was the pitchpipe (music director) of the singing group we were both in (The Duke’s Men, at Yale—formerly all male now all gender and rechristened the Doox of Yale). Every fall there was a big jamboree where all the singing groups sang and did their best to attract new members. Charlie had a plan for making a splash, a fresh arrangement of a current hit, a song from a Saturday Night Live skit celebrating an archeological discovery. And it was to be a surprise. So Charlie was slightly nonplussed when our roommate Mark asked “how’s the arrangement of King Tut coming along?” How had he figured that out? Well, Charlie was playing the record over and over so it was actually pretty obvious!
And it was a total triumph.
Charlie had delivered one of the two main styles of arrangement: he had reproduced the original song in recognizable form using the performing forces he had at his disposal. In this case a TTBB a cappella group. And since the topic of arranging came up with one of my students last week it is arranging for a cappella groups that I want to explore.
Two main styles. Reproducing the original. Or reimagining.
A previous Duke’s Men pitchpipe, Rick, had filled the group’s repertory with his arrangements. Many clever versions of many songs. Some quite far from the way they were composed. His “Proud Mary,” rendered as a ballad, was almost unrecognizable to anyone who knew the original or its renowned cover by Tina Turner. It was as if he sensed “Old Man River” underneath the lyric. It was my introduction to the tune so I took it at face value. Other people I know did not!
During my tenure with The Western Wind Vocal Ensemble I got to work closely with Yumiko, a jazz vocal arranger who sang and wrote for her own group, Vox One, and also gifted songs to us. Her arrangements are truly imaginative, transfiguring the source material.
Yet another way is to create a medley or mashup of two or more songs that complement each other. My friend Gayla’s demented (that’s a compliment!) version of America/Rte 66 careens from tune to tune with a bit of West Side Story thrown in. So much fun to sing! And the climax is so satisfying.
Songs imprint. The first way we hear a song is often the way we prefer. I know lots of people who love The Doors version of Alabama Song. It’s how it imprinted. I can’t stand it: those pungent Kurt Weill chords are all simplified. And of course what I imprinted on was Lotte Lenya.
And yet.
I knew and loved Eleanor Rigby for ages in its original form. Yumiko took it and made it so much lonelier! It is still recognizably itself but with tempo and harmony and articulations new and colorful. A balance of reproducing and imagining.
The basics: Which voice part gets the tune and when? Lay that out and add the bass line. Plan your intro and coda. Putting the tune in a middle voice allows harmonies above as well as below. Adding an ostinato or a long scale ties things together. Key changes heighten tension. Good voice leading enables better tuning. Find your harmonic language and balance it with the chords of the original song. Choose vocables for background parts that support the mood, with soft or bright vowels and consonants. Give background parts text when possible, either with the melody line or in response to it. Extra points for adding a canon! And keep vocal ranges manageable.
Listen to the classics for ideas. Manhattan Transfer, HiLos. And be aware that many modern arrangements, stunning though they be, are microphone and technology based and thus harder for amateurs to reproduce. Unless you have access to all that!
Know who you’re writing for—tailor the difficulty to their level of achievement. My friend Elliot is an absolute genius at creating arrangements that practically sing themselves. And that’s the whole point, from King Tut to Eleanor Rigby—to get the song sung, and heard.
A perfect example of an ostinato tying an arrangement together is actually a composition. Elliot wrote Lo v’chayil on a napkin at a restaurant in Brooklyn. The tune is so simple and memorable that it feels like a campfire song that has existed forever. And the rocking motion of the alto/bass ostinato anchors and underpins the whole thing.
Scales allow the arranger to add dissonance in a way that feels consonant. The tune is still there and the ear perceives it with its expected harmony even as a scale set against it generates subtle clashes that add tension. Examples, from the wider world of music: the end of Firebird; Make Our Garden Grow; and the second verse of Losing My Mind from Follies, with its aching, yearning long ascent from deep bass to soprano.
One technique from Barbershop often has a good effect: the “tag.” The tag is a coda with one high sustained note harmonized by a series of chords underneath. Any of the barbershop numbers in The Music Man show how this works. It can be led into with a phrase that elongates the melody, setting up the ending of the song.
I wrote a number of arrangements for Western Wind that I’m proud of. They were useful when we needed them. Who knows if anyone will sing one in the future? Arrangements are usually specific to a group and a time, and thus disposable. But they provide musicians and audiences with opportunities to experience a song in a new way, and that’s worth doing!
This is inspiring me to try my hand at arranging again! And -- I remember that King Tut arrangement, and the deadpan choreography.