Barbershop Arranging — Epilogue
This is the final post of a 10-part series on barbershop arranging. The full guide is here.
This has been a home-grown introduction to the peculiar art of barbershop arranging. The project started as a single post, but it quickly spiraled out of control and morphed ultimately into the nine-volume series that you see today. All views are my own and are in no way endorsed by anyone of particular import, but I hope you found the explanations and walkthroughs helpful nonetheless. Thank you for reading!
Developing your own skills
As you continue to develop your arranging skills after reading this series, there are three primary habits that will help you improve most quickly.
The first is to analyze existing arrangements with fervor, using all of the tools we’ve cultivated herein. Find the charts you love, whether simple and stock or complex and contemporary, and analyze to pieces the choices that the arranger made within them. This will help you build your toolkit of reusable patterns, and more importantly, it will help you hone your ear for what barbershop sounds like. If you don’t have access to barbershop charts, analyze just the preview page of charts available at shop.barbershop.org, or search for barber pole cat book filetype:pdf on Google to find the twelve charts given to all new members.
Second, you simply have to arrange on your own. Over and over. Challenge yourself to harmonize a simple melody. Challenge yourself to come up with alternate harmonizations that give different treatments to the lyric. Challenge yourself to map chords to strong chord spellings in a four-part texture. Then challenge yourself to break the rules and make deliberate choices for the sake of creation, rather than tradition. If possible, sing through your arrangements—either by recording yourself or by asking for help from some friends.
Finally, ask for feedback from people better than you. At best, you’ll get a slew of wonderful ideas that will help you perfect your craft. At worst, you’ll get to rubber-duck your way through the choices you made when you were in the zone arranging on your own. Either way, asking for feedback is a concrete investment in the process of improvement, and it is to be commended.
Cutting-edge arrangements
As a parting thought, here is a short list of contestable arrangements that push the envelope of barbershop style as of 2020.
Zero8: “If You Go Away”
This arrangement by David Wright, sung by Swedish chorus Zero8, features open fifths, blatant unisons, predominantly minor modality, harmony parts that accompany with “ooh,” “oh,” and “ah” rather than singing the Lead lyric, and more.
Westminster: “From Now On/Come Alive Medley”
This arrangement by Aaron Dale, sung by the Westminster Chorus from Los Angeles, is unquestionably progressive, but its most beautiful quality is that it achieves this impression without actually straying much from traditional barbershop. That said, it does feature some syllabic textures reminiscent of contemporary a cappella, a sneaking 4–3 suspension or two, near broadway-caliber choreography, clever patter sections, and a revving stomp-clap section.
Midtown: “Never Give All the Heart”
This arrangement by Brent Graham helped newcomer quartet Midtown place in the Top 5 in their first international contest in 2019. Originally from the TV show Smash, this song is unabashedly jazzy, and Graham’s rendition does not shy away from that identity. Like Aaron Dale’s arrangement above, this chart is masterful because it sounds progressive despite mostly relying on traditional barbershop-arranging techniques. It features add9 chords, Major 7 chords, momentary unisons, “ooh” accompaniments, and interesting inversions. The silver jackets and professional-caliber performance help, too.
Acknowledgments
Barbershop arranging is a difficult skill in which to develop competence, let alone to master. I’d like to extend special thanks to the following people who helped me on my own arranging journey, either through direct interactions or by inspiring, unbeknownst, from afar:
- Greg Lyne and Chris Hebert, each directors of Voices in Harmony, my first barbershop chorus.
- Paul Engel, longtime barbershopper from Palo Alto, California, who answered my first questions about arranging when I started dabbling back in 2013.
- The members of Voices in Harmony, for giving me my sea legs as an aspiring assistant director.
- David Wright and Aaron Dale, for producing a corpus of iconic arrangements that I continue to study to this day.
- Justin Miller, for showing my early collegiate self that barbershop can be a first-class and malleable art form, taking inspiration from both choral and contemporary a cappella music.
- Kevin Keller, for answering my idiosyncratic questions via email as I worked on my first barbershop ballad, Santa Fe, for the Fog City Singers.
- Adam Scott, for countless hours of Skype sessions offering feedback on my in-progress arrangements, and for always challenging me to be better.
- Mike Louque, for planting the seed that sprouted into the Fog City Singers, and for guiding our posse of rabble-rousers with vision and grace.
- The members of the Fog City Singers, for breathing life into the arrangements I’ve produced over the last five years, for giving voice to the many a cappella art forms I’ve come to love so much, and for challenging me to continually see the beauty in barbershop when my compass strayed.
- The entire barbershop community, for being open, accepting, and encouraging of each of our respective barbershop journeys within it, including my own.
Addendum: Computer-generated harmonizations
A few months before writing this series, I built a small app to generate barbershop harmonizations for a user-inputted melody using an algorithm called recursive backtracking. Check it out here if you’d like to dabble, or click here to see the code and learn a little more about the project.
Additionally, click here to learn how Keyano was built.
Full guide: Barbershop Arranging: A Modern Guide
