Beyond the Score: Arranging and Contemporary A Cappella

A cappella has certainly taken the collegiate and popular music worlds by storm recently. It’s on TV (the Sing-Off, Glee); it’s in the movies (Pitch Perfect); it’s topping the charts (Pentatonix cracks Billboard’s Top 10); it’s producing top recording artists (Sara Bareilles and John Legend were both in college groups at UCLA and Penn) and selling out concerts across the country (ICCA Finals in NYC sold out in 11 hours).

Most strikingly though, a cappella is attracting more and more talented and diverse singers that probably would have not joined a choir otherwise. Considering the 6-8 hour time commitment per-week that most groups require to hold rehearsal, arrange new music, pursue gigs, perform and socialize, a cappella is an enormous commitment in an already packed college schedule. Yet students are rushing to join one of the thousands of groups across the country, entering into a quirky community that is hundreds of thousands strong.

How did this happen??

A cappella singing has actually been around as long as there has been music. For one, the first musical sounds were most likely vocal, and the voice is the only instrument that is intrinsically and physically embedded into our bodies. Most of music history is a tale of singing, from Gregorian Chant to Renaissance madrigals to Opera, as instruments appeared relatively late in the story and for a long time served simply an accompaniment role.

A cappella is the child of two musical lineages: the classically inspired singing societies at universities and the popularly cultivated performance tradition of rock music. The framework for the contemporary movement started in the 19th century with the spread of institutional music societies in Ivy League universities. Groups like the Handel Society at Dartmouth and Beethoven Society at Yale provided students with a structured singing experience. The combination of artistic expression and a social space proved immensely popular and these first groups established the historical precedent for glee clubs and pops orchestras that sprang up in years to come.

At the same time, vocal influence was becoming more prominent in commercial and popular music. From the vocal foundations of blues and jazz, the voice can be traced notably through the 50’s and 60’s with doo-wop and the Mills Brothers, to Billy Joel (who doesn’t know For The Longest Time?) and Boys II Men, all the way up to the rich harmonies of pop’s greatest super-stars like Michael Jackson and Justin Timberlake. Singing plays an important role in the identity of a rock performer, but in addition to the musical characteristics of vocal harmony was the attitude of a rock performance. Singing in a rock group was cool and singing in harmony could be cooler. Rock music is bursting with extra-musical considerations, which are essential components of a musical style that don’t have to do explicitly with music, that help to define the genre and perpetuate its notoriety.

Both of these stories collide extraordinarily in the 1990’s with the a cappella boom, and I suppose if you’re reading this blog then you are at least somewhat familiar with the story from this point on (I’ll probably talk about it more in a later post sometime). I’m not here to talk about history though - I want to understand a cappella as it is right now - as contemporary a cappella. What draws people in and keeps them coming? How are people engaging with each other and the music? And how can we take this knowledge and use it to make a cappella singing more accessible, less frustrating, and rewarding for performer and listener alike.

Beyond The Score

That’s exactly the goal of my senior project, which right now I am calling Beyond The Score. A cappella is full of idiosyncrasies and contradictions. Is an arrangement an original musical work (the result of the identity of its group/arranger) or a copy of the referenced song (identified by the original artist)? How can an all-vocal genre perform music originally written for instruments? How does a group maintain an identity when its entire membership will completely turn over after four years?

But what I’m most interested in is this question: what role does the written score play in a musical tradition that does not even use a score in performance?

I guess a place to start would be how we classify a cappella music. But it’s hard to classify a cappella - is it classical or is it popular? As the abbreviated history of the genre described above shows, both certainly play an influential role in today’s institutional structure. The idea of meeting for rehearsals, learning from music, and having a director to guide an interpretation of the work points to classical and academic tendencies. But the individuality of each group, the showmanship in performance and the campus notoriety many groups enjoy seem to equate a cappella singers with rock stars. Classical or popular each treat the written score in very different ways and the mixture of influence is not clear-cut.

In order to answer this question, this project focuses on arranging and notation within a cappella music. Examining the musical, social, and performative elements of a cappella singing will help to clarify which elements are the most important to singers. That, in turn, can inform arranging and directing habits to focus on the most relevant concepts. The ultimate hope is that through a better understanding of the musical process, a cappella singing can become more natural and genuine with a concise and clarified score, allowing for both musical and extra-musical elements to coexist and build upon each other.

The next couple of posts will focus on these pillars:

The Role of Notation in Music. Why do we need it? What does it do? How can it be limiting?

The Anatomy of an Arrangement. What is an arrangement? What does it represent? What are the parts? Arranging techniques and tips?

The A Cappella Group as a Social Institution. What social benefits are there? Limitations to a student run group? Extra-Musicality?

Role of the Score in Rehearsal/Performance. How do we use arrangements? How do they relate to the performance goals? What about memorizing? How often should you check to see if you’re performing it ‘right’?

Recommendations for Arranging. Given all of this, what can be changed to make arrangements better?

Recommendations for Directors and Singers. Given all of this, what can be changed about the way we learn, direct, rehearse and perform?

Thanks so much! I hope you keep reading - always feel free to drop me a message if you have any comments or further reading!