Last week I finished my setting of “Once More A-Lumbering Go”, a Michigan lumberjack song, for the Michigan Educators Male Ensemble. They’ll be premiering it in March at the Intercollegiate Men’s Choruses Centennial Seminar.
In light of my recent work reading and studying with Alice Parker, I decided to incorporate some of her compositional approach into my preparation. As an experiment.
For me that meant transcribing the text from an Alan Lomax field recording provided by the Library of Congress, taping it to a kitchen cabinet, and singing while doing dishes for several months. I intently didn’t make conscious musical choices or do anything other than to learn the song by heart.
When I finally couldn’t delay any longer, I sat down and the piece came out of me in just a few intense sessions. I knew what the piece wanted, and how to express it. The skills I have made it easy to transcribe and develop my ideas, always following a text and melody I owned.
I was delighted with the piece and the process. In the wake of finishing, there are two particularly strong things I’ve noticed.
- This isn’t actually a new process for me. Starting out as a jazz arranger, All of the arrangements I made for the first several years I wrote were of songs I knew intimately from recordings. Before I ever sat down to arrange “Some Other Time” or “Thou Swell”, I had digested recordings by Tony Bennett, Ella Fitzgerald, Joe Williams, Frank Sinatra. I knew the songs I was arranging by heart.
- When I finished the fifth verse and went on to the sixth and final verse from the recording, I was temporarily stymied. “Mandy,” I said, “I don’t know where the sixth verse wants to go.” It took her only a minute (plus a career of enhancing her discernment) to say, “that’s because it’s done.” She was, of course, right. As I reconsidered the lyrics, and my arrangement so far, I realized the sixth verse didn’t belong with the temperament of my arrangement. The reason I didn’t know what to write is because those lyrics didn’t want me to write them.
I loved this experiment and the results, and hope to continue experimenting with my process and seeing what happens.