Range appreciation.

Boys and girls, high and low, with every voice specialized like a well-run machine…ahh. Hopefully the group you’re arranging for is already balanced in terms of boys and girls, but make sure you know when you’re making a custom arrangement. It would blow if you wrote a SSAATTB part for a group that has no true sopranos. Well, it wouldn’t quite blow, but there goes your Friday night plans so you can re-arrange it before the deadline.

Let’s assume things are fine, and you have a quasi-balanced group. Let’s also assume you’re making a generic arrangement, rather than a custom one (a lot of the same principles will apply, though). How do you balance voice parts, how do you use voice registers to the best of their ability, and how do you keep things fun for the altos?

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This is haunting — only the most perfect consonances were treated as such; octaves and fifths are very common.  I am reminded of Arvo Part’s thinking in which he grants each line its own identity.  Here, the upper voices are not tied to functional harmony, so the lower melody does not implicitly bear the burden of chordal roots.

Update: It occurs to me that this type of piece would make excellent listening directly prior to any appreciation of J.S. Bach; the independence of voices and the implicit assumption of their absolute equivalence was still paramount in his day; it was only later that the movement of harmonies would truly become the predominant vehicle of music.