The art and craft of arranging is more and more under-appreciated.
Brilliant and effective choral arrangers like Roger Emerson, Kirby Shaw, Steve Zegree, Greg Jasperse, and Paul Langford are too little appreciated for their effective and clear writing. Their published arrangements – pop, jazz, rock, and more – sing so well and consistently.
Compare that to much of the unpublished or semi-published pop a cappella (to pick a genre) that is just ineffective.
There’s a place for non-professional arranging. These can be important for niche ensemble types, for students learning theocrat, and for ensembles that want to use their own members as arrangers. But it’s essential to strive for the standard set for us by the professionals for several reasons.
- Bad arrangements take longer to learn.
- Bad arrangements don’t sing as intuitively.
- Bad arrangements never sound as good.
- Bad arrangements make ensembles members think they’re the problem.
Bad arrangements hurt people, for these and more reasons. And as the publishing world gets more and more democratized, we see an increase in published music that does not live up to the standards of the gold stars of the published arranging world.
Arrangers: what can you do to strive for the standards of excellence and clarity?
Conductors: how do you, sight unseen, ensure that the music you put in front of your ensembles won’t undermine the very goals you’ve set?