Saint Phalle/Tinguely fountain under construction
I am battling a deadline to get Fidgety Fairy Tales #4 written. We’re doing a presentation of it at Rough Cuts on the 23rd/24th of January and I need to get the score completed by Friday the 13th. It’s Tuesday, so I have a fighting chance, assuming I don’t run out of ideas.
I spent a lot of time fooling around with vocal harmonies on one particular song tonight. The song is a little wordy, a quasi-list song. List songs are fun to write and fun to listen to when they’re done well but they have some inherent challenges. They’re fun to write because one can be released from the tyranny of making sense, and just have fun with rhymes and odd juxtapositions. But it’s easy for the writer to become carried away with her own cleverness and create something difficult to memorize and perform. I’m hoping this song will be successful because I’ve devoted many hours to it.
My second challenge is to write a harmony for four voices for this song. It’s a finale, and it needs all voices in it. But of course, with all the words it’s very tough to make a harmony work. Some of the trickiest things are the smallest: for example conjunctions, which usually fall on the pickups or weak beats. It’s pretty easy to find a place for four voices on the strong beats. It’s the getting-between-them that presents difficulty. Similarly, any transition presents problems: passing tones and harmonies; everything needs to be accounted for and executed gracefully with good voice-leading in each individual part. It’s like working a four dimensional puzzle.
Often my vocal harmonies start out complex and simplify as I work on the arrangement. This might not be the best strategy but it works for me. After I’ve spent hours banging my head against the wall I finally find a solution, and I wonder why I didn’t think of it in the first place. But really, I know why. I have objectives in mind: for example I may want to create a psychological or dramatic effect that requires a certain vocal texture. If I’m working in a well-defined genre like gospel or doo-wop it’s no problem; I just use the traditional style and things work out nicely. But if I’m plowing new ground then I have to experiment with every possibility until I’m satisfied.
The mainstream contemporary “legit” approach to writing choral music is to use a lot of suspensions, which I don’t do much, as a matter of personal taste. In tonal music, I hear a suspension as leading, and I’d rather deal with gnarly harmonic matters straight on, landing solidly on sevenths and ninths and tri-tones and seconds. Nothing against choral music, but I suspect that’s why I’ll always be a theatre composer who plays with pop and jazz, rather than a choral composer. It’s kind of a shame, since I love voices so much…
A final note, for anyone who’s read this far. Check out this wonderful article about child singers. I’ll have more to say about it later.
