Barbershop Arranging — Introduction
This is the introduction of a 10-part series on barbershop arranging. The full guide is here.
My name is Chris Lewis. I’m a software engineer in Silicon Valley by day and a choral musician in San Francisco by night. For the past 10 years, I’ve immersed myself in the world of barbershop harmony — first as a singer, then as a chorus director — as well as the world of choral gigging — first as an amateur, then as a “semi-pro” (for some loose definition of that term).
During that time, I’ve also dabbled in barbershop arranging as a doubly peripheral, hobby-adjacent side hustle. I’ve read the antiquated 1.1-pound Barbershop Arranging Manual compiled and published by barbershop legends of the day in 1980. I’ve sent rogue emails to the preeminent barbershop arrangers of the modern era, asking for their guidance on tricky phrases. And more recently, I’ve scheduled video chats with generous agents of the art form who are as happy to help the next generation as they are thrilled to continue forging ahead on their own.
Yet for all this time investment, I’ve found barbershop arranging an extremely difficult discipline in which to gain any kind of competence, let alone confidence or mastery. Learning barbershop’s rules and constraints takes focused study, but there’s an unfortunate dearth of literature that can truly guide you to proficiency. The few materials that do exist are disappointingly outmoded and difficult to access. Barbershop has evolved since the Arranging Manual was published, but the materials largely have not. Becoming a barbershop arranger today requires stubborn persistence: persistence to study existing arrangements and devise one’s own framework to explain them, persistence to arrange new works oneself and convince groups of singers to try them, and persistence to seek constructive feedback from veterans of the craft.
As a result, I developed my own sense of the style through some combination of trial, error, derivation, and play. Eventually, I broke out of my holding pattern of confusion and started to understand how barbershop harmony actually works. Turns out — it’s a fascinating balance between the right brain and the left. It’s an art as much as a science. It’s a logic puzzle as much as it is a vehicle for emotional connection (to listeners as well as to the music being sung). It demands bravery as much as it demands restraint.
I’d like to finally crystalize my learnings in a series of posts here on Medium. My goals for the reader are threefold:
- Understand the science. I’ll review the science of acoustics and the singing voice, as a framework for how and why harmony comes to be.
- Understand the theory. I’ll demonstrate how this science motivates barbershop as a style, and I’ll explain how and why chords in barbershop are spelled the way they are and move the way they do.
- Understand the art. I’ll take this newfound synthesis of barbershop and its scientific underpinnings, and show you how to arrange properly for the barbershop style by analyzing iconic arrangements—from the 1950s all the way through the 2019 International Chorus Contest.
This series expanded far beyond the single-article scope I originally intended, but I believe this content will be engaging for barbershop singers, choral musicians, and casual readers alike. My hope is that all who read it walk away with a new appreciation for why harmony moves us and, perhaps, how we can harness it to contribute music into a world that, as always, needs it now more than ever.
But…what is barbershop?
As a point of basic calibration, let’s define what we mean by “barbershop.”
Barbershop is a 2002 American comedy film featuring Ice Cube and Cedric the Entertainer. It is a good movie, but it is not the subject of this series. A barbershop is also a local establishment that provides hair-styling services (when there isn’t a pandemic ravaging society). That, too, is a good thing, but it, too, is not the subject of this series. No, for our purposes, we need to skip to Page 2 of Google’s search results.
Barbershop is an approximately hundred-year-old American a cappella style sung by four voices, with all parts singing the same words at the same time (mostly) on four-part chords (mostly) with the melody predominantly in the second-highest part. Like a cafeteria kid straddling the social divide between the hazed nerds and the lazed rockers, barbershop intellectualizes almost to a fault about clarity, tuning, and synchronization, but only because those are the skills necessary to achieve the holiest of ends: not of rock-and-roll, but of lock-and-ring.
Barbershop is synergy in its purest form. With three singers complementing a lone voice, four-part chords suddenly explode into a visceral experience in which each singer’s contribution osmoses into an ambience of participatory sound far greater than the sum of the parts. A perfectly tuned and balanced chord will cause disembodied voices to pierce through the clouds from on high. Whether due to a heavenly presence or to something merely of this world, people from all walks of life have howled in awe at the experience.
Barbershop can be old-fashioned:
Contemporary:
Exciting:
Heart-breaking:
Playful:
Welcoming:
And it can even be sung with full choirs of voices!
Barbershop began with casual friends singing together by ear, and it thus developed far more through practice than theory. To arrange in the barbershop style—that is, to harmonize a melody in a manner befitting barbershop’s stylistic character—one must understand concretely the experiential intuitions that motivated the art form in the first place.
Thereafter, one must accept that barbershop is evolving just like every other style of music has done and continues to do, with arrangers making daring and brilliant new choices every year. Eventually, an arranger can learn how to thoughtfully break with tradition and leave their own stamp on the style.
This series will navigate all of those topics and more. Let’s begin!
Next: Part 1: The Science of Sound
Full guide: Barbershop Arranging: A Modern Guide
