Three Essential Tools for Arranging Music  Basic Principles in Arranging   Arranging comes down to controlling three aspects of music: melody, harmony and rhythm. Think of the arranger as the mission controller who is responsible for the safe journey of a vehicle headed home. The vehicle is packed with our ears and emotions. Through thoughtful use of melody, harmony, and rhythm, the arranger delivers us to an emotional resting place. The skill of the arranger will determine whether the trip is dull or memorable, pleasant or jarring, fulfilling or pointless. Most of our work will be with homophony – one dominant melodic voice supported by harmony. Our task is to guide that aural vector through some relaxed and some tense moments and bring it to rest. A good arrangement or composition creates and relieves tension. This is done by manipulating melody, harmony, rhythm and the timbre of the ensemble or orchestra. Because this course is about a solo instrument, little will be said about timbre. We’ll focus on the big three: melody, harmony and rhythm.

Melody A melody is a logical progression of tones within a rhythmic structure  The problem with this definition is the word “logical”. What is logical to me may not be logical to you. The logic of Mozart’s music is quite different from the logic of Stravinsky’s music. The logic of a fiddle tune seems different from the logic of a Broadway show tune.   If you have ever listened to free jazz, compositions by John Cage, or New Age music, you may wonder if there was logic of any sort in such music.    But underneath these apparent differences lie a set of principles that guide how melody is written.   The arranger must understand these principles in order to create the most effective expression of a melody. Contour – pleasing melodies tend to have a shape that rises and falls in some organized and often repetitive way. Some composers draw graphs of melodic content before they write down a melody or score. This technique is often used to create polyphonic music in which many different instruments play different melodies. The contour of a melody is an important consideration for an arranger trying to create the best harmonic setting for a melody. Movement - This characteristic is easy to feel and hard to describe in words. A good melody feels like it carries the listener along. That does not mean a good melody has to be fast. Rather a good melody creates a psycho-acoustic journey for the listener. The nature of that journey is very much dependent upon the contour of the music. Musical movement is the expression of contour. Another way to think about movement is to consider a melody as a sentence with a subject, verb and object. Without a verb, there is no movement and, of course, no sentence. The same is true for melody. No movement means no melody.  Home Place for the Ear – The technical term for a “home place for the ear” is musical key. It is the musical place at which the listener’s ear seeks to come to rest when the melody ends. More often than not, the first and final melody tones will be members of the chord named by the key of the musical piece.   This grounds the music, makes it easier to remember and allows the composer and arranger to develop and release tension.  Most all popular tunes, fiddle tunes, Celtic tunes, show tunes, ragtime tunes, and just about anything played on a hammer dulcimer will create this “home place for the ear.” Some jazz forms and contemporary concert music do not seek to establish a “home place for the ear.”. That why, in part, some listeners find these styles of music hard listening.  Structure - Modern listeners are used to structure in music. The form of most pop tunes is A B A or lyric-chorus structure. Some pop tunes make use of a three part structure A B A C A in which C is a lyrical bridge, often in a different key, or an instrumental break related to the A part but not a repetition of it.   Fiddle tunes are usually in the form of A A B B. Sometimes, they will have a C part too. Structure helps listeners remember the melody and find their place in the music. Something Old, Something New - Memorable melodies will always have something that sounds new and something that sounds familiar. Many melodies of pop tunes and ballads are simply manipulations of the pentatonic scale. That’s a set of five tones  - DO RE ME SO LA -  out of the full diatonic scale we all know as DO RE ME FA SO LA TI DO.  The pentatonic scales leaves out the tone of FA and TI.  Melodies often use simple scale patterns to hook together new phrases. The familiar helps to accentuate the new parts of a melody.  Sometimes composers intentionally mis-apply these principles for shock value.

Harmony Harmony is two or more tones played simultaneously Technically any two tones played together form harmony. But not all harmonies sound “good” or correct at the moment.  Consonant harmonies may sound good by themselves but within the context of the melody and its setting, these consonant harmonies may not sound right. Dissonant harmonies may, by themselves, sound bad. But, within the context of a melody and where it is headed, dissonant harmonies may add tension; and that often enhances the listening experience.   Both consonant and dissonant harmonies are used intentionally by arrangers.  Harmony refers to the vertical aspect of music. Harmony is what happens on any single beat.  When three tones are played simultaneously a chord is produced. Much of arranging is about selecting the chords that work best to highlight the melody and to move it along. Harmonic progression is the term given to the sequence of chords that support a melody. There are guidelines for creating good chord progressions. Most dulcimer music makes use of only six chords in two or three keys. Harmonic progression, or chord progression, is about the horizontal aspect of music. When we speak of chord progression, we implicitly speak about time and the direction of music. Jazz musicians will often call chord progressions, changes. When two consonant tones are played simultaneously, a chord is implied. Which chord is implied is seldom clear. That gives the arranger another tool with which to manipulate the listening experience. For example, a bagpipe has drone pipes. These are usually tuned to the interval of a musical 5th. Does their sound imply a major or minor chord? No one knows for certain until the melody line sets the mood and key of the tune.

Rhythm “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing”  This famous line from a jazz standard conveys a very important point. Music loses its power if the arranger, performers and conductors fail to get the rhythm right.  A technical definition of rhythm will report that it is the variation of the length and accentuation of a series of musical tones or non-tonal musical events.   Many concepts fall under the umbrella of rhythm: flow, beat, phrasing, tempo, pulse, the groove, beat-window, and meter. All of these are tools an arranger and a performer can use to create unique musical experiences.   Beat has at two meanings in music. It may describe the specific place within a measure of music. It may also describe the underlying pulse of music.  Tempo tells how fast a tune is to be played and is usually given in beats per minute. Tempo is NOT the beat. A beat, when used to describe the pulse of music, is organic. Tempo is mechanical.    Beat has an emotional quality about it. Tempo has a metronomic quality about it.  Meter tells how to count the beats within a tune – four beats or three beats or two beats or maybe twelve beats before the counter is reset. Each resetting of the counter means that we enter a new measure or bar of music. If the meter counts in multiples of two it is called duple meter or sometimes, simple meter. If the meter counts in multiples of thee it is called triple.   If the meter counts in a combination of two and three beats, say five or seven, the meter is called compound meter. Pulse and Groove are interchangeable terms that describe the rhythmic feeling of music. Generally this feeling is established by percussion, bass, chordal and other accompanying instruments. Melodic and harmony voices respond to and play off the pulse of music. Laymen speak of beat. Musicians speak of “the groove” or “the pulse.” Beat Window describes how a player manipulates the location of the musical beat away from the expected metronomic position in time. Skilled players can lead or lag the “beat” and yet never loose or confuse the beat. Beat Window is a tool that creates tension. Beat window is a performance technique. It cannot be written using standard musical notation.   Syncopation describes rhythms that accent parts of the beat that are not already stressed by the metric count. For example, a waltz is a triple meter tune with the first beat stressed in each measure. If in addition, the arrangement calls for the performers to accent the back beat between beats two and three, syncopation is created. Polyrhythm is the simultaneous use of more than one time signature. A tune or a passage within a tune, may have BOTH a duple and a triple meter at the same time. Polyrhythm is a commonly used tool in dulcimer playing. It is extremely difficult to write polyrhythm and virtually impossible for players to read polyrhythms accurately.  Application of polyrhythm is usually reserved as part of a performer’s interpretation of a musical piece. Western music is often considered to be rhythmically impoverished. It’s filled with two beat and three beat tunes played without much attention to rhythmical complexities. Western music tends to make careful use of harmony.  African, Middle Eastern, Southeast Asian, Latin and other musical forms are rich in rhythmic nuances. Many of these musical genres use rhythm in much the same way that western music uses harmony.

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