Saturday night I got to introduce about 28 high school students to Gene Puerling.
Mandy asked me to help introduce “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square,” arranged by Gene for The Manhattan Transfer, during the Rockford High School Chamber Singers retreat.
I told them that, just as Alice Parker is my metaphorical mother as an arranger and composer, Gene Puerling is my father. His approach to writing profoundly influenced me as a young writer, and I still visualize vocal music through the lens of his harmonic language.
Listening to Gene’s “London By Night” through the ears of two dozen uninitiated singers, I was struck by how fresh his music still sounds. And pointing out an accented Soprano/Alto half-step dissonance in “Nightingale” that closely parallels a cadence in Eric Whitacre’s “Sleep” reminded me of how wide his influence is.
Some concepts covered in 30 minutes and 2 pages:
- Musical quotes as jazz vernacular [*]
- Tertiary vs. quartal harmonic voicings
- Strict parallelism to create harmonic ambiguity
- Unison as a necessary balance to rich harmony
- Vernacular pronunciation in contemporary music
- Elimination of the traditional bass line as
- A tool for harmonic sophistication
- A potential pitfall for basses used to traditional tonic-dominant singing.
- The idea of vertical vs. horizontal vocal writing (driven home immediately when they next looked at the 6-part polyphony of Byrd’s “Haec Dies.”
Now, here’s the sublime original, winner of the Grammy for Best Vocal Arrangement in 1982.
[*] A favorite moment: I played “London By Night” so I could point out the musical reference a little later. When I played the soprano line in the intro and asked the choir to place it, all recognized it as familiar, but couldn’t quite place it!