The anatomy of a great song for community choirs

I am constantly struck by how varied the community singing sector is. No two choirs are the same and the “best song ever” for one choir might not even get a paltry look in at another’s rehearsal. This is a great thing and something to celebrate. Choirs express their singing personalities in entirely unique ways. Like all communities the culture of a choir evolves through shared experience and common interests and these develop over time so it’s no surprise that the music we choose to sing is so rich in variety and style. Techies would have a hard time writing the algorithm that predicts the perfect song and writes the perfect arrangement for community singers – a creative challenge to any programmers out there!

Given the breadth of our interests, tastes, ages, wider cultural experience and expectations, it’s impossible to devise the perfect set of ingredients that will lead to surefire singing success. But it is interesting to expand on some of the intuitive decisions we make as song leaders, arrangers and composers when we’re developing repertoire for our singers, especially with regard to accessibility and singability.

There’s another caveat that relates to the leadership styles and teaching strategies of choir leaders. There’s no shortage of ambition here; in the hands of a confident and skilled song leader and teacher, community choirs often tackle hugely complex material. We love to feel like we have achieved something ambitious and get a proper buzz from that. The greater challenge though, is for a song leader to be able to balance the learning and singing experiences throughout, so that the music is never the master, it’s the quality of engagement and participation that speaks loudest. That’s why we come back every week. We sing together for fun, for inspiration, and to be uplifted, not to be defeated by something that feels just out of reach.

So, what’s going on intuitively when we choose and arrange music for our choirs to sing?

Vocal range

There will always be variations but in the main I rarely take voices beyond an octave in terms of range. For me, the interval of a 9th is a good comfortable marker. This accommodates most singers’ capacities. It also helps establish the key songs should be sung in and knocks out a whole bunch of songs where the tune requires a more athletic ability in terms of vocal range.

My go to reference for this is the Burns song My love is like a red, red rose. It is itself so well loved and lures you into a false sense of security of being an easy song to sing because of its familiarity. But right from the off, the opening line teases you with that stretch of a 9th alluding to the vocal elasticity that’s coming towards the end of the verse – a full octave and a 5th is in the comfort zone of a professional soprano, especially when the style of the song also demands grace, balance and a lightness of touch.

Melodic quality

This is so hard to define: the mystery of a good tune. If we knew the secret, we’d be millionaires. One of the pitfalls of song choices is our residual musical memory for iconic songs. The associations we carry for songs and how good they are is often buoyed up by the artist who sings it well. There are singers whose voices have such quality they could sing a shopping list and still melt hearts! It’s this vocal quality that often carries the song, rather than the beauty of the melody itself, and so a forensic analysis of how good the tune actually is and how well it sings is important, especially when put into our own voices. There’s another problem: it’s not just the melody, it’s also the lyric. The simplest tune can be elevated by a great lyric and be hugely satisfying to sing because of it, and vice versa. And yet another problem: we also carry the arrangements of the original tracks in our musical memories; the energy and quality of the performance and the production, the feelings it evokes when we heard it performed live, and the voice of the singer. Think of Guy Garvey from Elbow performing One Day Like This – when you strip it back to its essential parts, without the voice, the driving arrangement, the soaring strings, the touching lyric and then put them in front of us mere mortals, it offers a very tricky challenge.

The construction of the arrangement

The great joy of singing together is harmony singing, but unlike in a Bach chorale where the tune very defiantly sits in the soprano part, supported by beautifully crafted harmonic accompaniments in the other parts, I tend to take a more democratic approach to arrangements in a community choir setting. Poor old basses – why can’t they sing the tune? And why not swap over in the middle of a verse and put the harmony on the top so the altos get a shot at the tune too? If all your singers are interested, engaged, and have a moment to shine, the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

Where Bach definitely leads by example is in the quality of voice leading – how each part moves in linear fashion from chord to chord, from harmony to harmony. The dream arrangement is when each vocal part sounds like it is going on its own melodic journey, that it has its own melodic integrity, not just a backing vocal supporting the tune.

When you start to balance these concerns together, vocal range and singability, melodic and lyric quality, how the arrangement is constructed, this is when the word anatomy is useful: “the foot bone’s connected to the leg bone”, ie. take one bit away and you haven’t got a leg to stand on – they all connect to each other and rely on each other. And we can extend this metaphor further because even when it’s all well worked out, you’ve still only got a skeleton. None of it matters without the beating heart of your singers. That’s when it comes to life.

I try to apply this need to find balance when choosing and arranging songs or when I’m programming a term or concert. Some songs will be more achievable, easier to teach, quick wins, some will take more time and effort, and some will be familiar like a comfortable old jumper; we know it feels good when we slip it on, it fits well.

Our Love Singing songwriters have a proper job to do then! To write something that fits well, sings well, offers challenge and opportunity to progress, balances complexity with accessibility, inspires and engages, uplifts, brings word and melody together in an entirely original way that means something, that moves us and brings us together. You’ll never find this written in a commission brief – it would be too daunting – but that’s the aspiration.