Music for Four

A collection of my song arrangements for (usually) four parts

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Was on a bus to work one day. Looked out the window, Realized something about the car. Hesitant to take a picture, but the lights stayed red. So eventually, I did.

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Visit Original Link

So last Friday was my birthday, and the next day I heard it first from a friend that Stephen Sondheim passed away. Took me awhile for the news to hit me hard, and I’m sure all of us musical theatre lovers will need time to move on from this. For now, I’ve just been remembering the times I was discovering musical theatre, and discovering the brilliance of Sondheim and his shows. I wished I had done an arrangement of a Sondheim song as a tribute, maybe I’ll do one soon, but instead I have a lazy recording from way back when of me singing Being Alive with an accompaniment track from Youtube.

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Story of My Life, circa 2020

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Entreat Me Not to Leave You, a One Man Choir Cover Adapted from Ruth 1:16-17 Music by Dan Forrest Well, I was getting bored and mildly desperate to get back to singing in a choir. But given the prevailing circumstances, it’ll still have to wait for God knows how long. So I was finally quite out of my mind and decided to sing with myself an 8-part choir song. So this song Entreat Me Not to Leave You, I once sang in my university choir. I was already an alumnus, but usually for every annual concert we join in with the main choir to sing a few songs. It’s an achingly beautiful song, and I wished we had sung it better in that concert. Idk, that night was not a particularly good night for all of us somehow, so I guess my mind automatically chose this song when it got the idea to do a one man choir cover. I had tried singing and recording my own arrangement to try out if it’s feasible. I still can sing the Bass part if it’s not too low. I used pitch and formant shifting after singing the Alto and Soprano parts because I sang their parts an octave lower. They didn’t sound too bad, but it got rather dodgy when the notes got too high. The problem of which became glaringly apparent when I sang for this one man choir cover. The Alto part still sounded okay, but the Soprano part was so hopeless that I decided to double it with my original recording an octave lower. The Tenor part was okay (I’m a Tenor, duh) and the First Bass was manageable, but the Second Bass was near impossible. I had to bring the microphone on my laptop screen close to me, so that my low notes were still somewhat audible in the midst of all the other parts. So that’s for the sound recording for the video. In addition, I had the idea of showing the story that became the basis for the song. So I read through Ruth in the bible, chose some verses, and leave out some of the longer dialogues and technical parts. I also wanted to show what came out of the story of Ruth, who eventually had King David as her great grandson, and long long way down the family line there was Jesus Christ. I remembered a priest in my church talking about the family line in the first chapter of Matthew, and he pointed out that all the females that were mentioned there had their story written in the bible. So in conclusion, I thought it’s kinda cool to finally be able to share this song and the story of Ruth to anyone out there who might listen. 

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The Monkey and the Onion, arranged for SATB Music by Graham Gouldman (10cc) Lyrics by Tim Rice I’m trying to remember how I first knew about Tim Rice. It’s probably from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musicals. I think when I first discovered Musical Theatre, I started with the very big and well known ones, so Lloyd Webber musicals came in quite early on. But I probably found out about Tim Rice when I’m way more deep into Musical Theatre when I started to figure out who were the people behind these musicals that wrote the music, the lyrics, and the book.

I find that Tim Rice is a unique figure in the world of Musical Theatre. He didn’t really start out with a background in Musical Theatre, unlike Andrew Lloyd Webber who was obsessed with the art form from the get go. In fact Tim was more into the pop records (rock and roll even, dare I say) and the current popular music scene. So he had been writing pop songs on his own before he met Andrew to start writing musicals with him. 

Besides their first musical which never really got put on until many many years later, they went on to create these classic sung through musicals like Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Evita. Tim continued to write other musicals after the two went their separate ways. He wrote Blondel with Stephen Oliver, Chess (God I love Chess) with Benny Andresson and Björn Ulvaeus of ABBA (yes, The ABBA), some Disney musicals with Elton John and Alan Menken, and most recently From Here to Eternity with Stuart Brayson.

I think that Tim is unique in Musical Theatre in at least two ways. First is that he came up with these unlikely ideas for musicals, and they may seem odd at first, but he has a way to build a story and a way with words to actually make these weird ideas for musicals work. He is probably the only writer of musicals that is known for writing musicals about biblical stories. He even wrote one with Alan Menken about King David, which I hope it gets produced more often so maybe one day I can watch it in full. One more thing about Tim’s musicals is that he brought back the sung through musicals, like opera but with cooler music. It’s kinda funny that this happened only because he tried to keep the musicals short, like Joseph was first performed in a school concert or Jesus Christ Superstar was first recorded to fit the vinyl album. So yeah, I’ve spent the last four paragraphs explaining why I’m kinda obsessed with Tim Rice, just so I can say that I’ve been listening to his podcast “Get Onto My Cloud”. He started the podcast when the world stopped due to the pandemic in 2020, and he featured so many good background stories about his musicals and/or his songs for the episodes. So there’s this one episode about some one-off pop songs that he wrote, and he featured one of his songs titled The Monkey and the Onion for the English band 10cc. I think when I first heard the title, I wasn’t sure that I heard it right so I rewind it, but I did hear it right. And it was quite a cool song with, dare I say, philosophical lyrics that got to me.

So this song stayed in the back of my mind for awhile, and I have been looking for another song to arrange. I had wanted to do a song by Tim Rice, but I wanted to do something of his that wasn’t so obvious. I had thought maybe I was gonna do something from King David, but I had arranged Alan Menken’s music so I wasn’t really feeling it. So when I remembered about The Monkey and the Onion, I thought it’s now or never and I set out to arrange it.

The original recording of the song has this build up using instruments added on top of other instruments, so when I was arranging I realized I could never match what the original recording was doing ‘cause I was just using four voices. So I had to come up with other kinds of variations to keep the song going. Sometimes I used inversions of the chords for similar passages of music. I gave the melody to different sections (but not the Bass, sorry Basses). At one point I made the sections sing unison, and another point almost at the end I had just one section sing alone.

I also found this plug-in for Musescore that checks for parallel fifths and octaves, so I started to use this to check my arrangement. I knew from the start that writing parallel fifths and octaves is not quite acceptable for four part writing, but I only recently started to see why it’s bad. (Warning, mansplaining ahead) Basically writing parallels fifth and octaves make the parts sound unified, such that the four parts aren’t really four parts since one part is unified with another part when they have parallel fifths or octaves. 

I quite like the sound of two notes that are fifth apart, and I’m sure I’ve written a lot of parallel fifths without me knowing. It has this strong solid sound, and I remembered hearing it and really feeling it when I arranged for the first time. But now that I think about it, that time when I tried to arrange Sondheim, I think I wrote way too many parallel fifths that eventually it sounded too full and I couldn’t really go on with the same sound for the next verses. It’s kinda like eating a dessert cake that is way too rich and heavy, that you probably have enough before you finish a slice.    

So yeah, besides some parts where the sections sing in unison, I made sure that the four parts for my arrangement this time didn’t have any parallel fifths or octaves. I think each part sounded more clear and I intentionally had some parallel octaves like I bolded some words or underlined a phrase that I wanted to highlight. I like some of the chords that I found for this arrangement, and all in all I’m pretty happy to have found out about this song and to have shared this song by arranging it.  Tim Rice’s Podcast “Get Onto My Cloud”, Episode 25 “One-Offs”: https://cms.megaphone.fm/channel/getontomycloud?selected=BPNET1445446315 Link to score: https://musescore.com/user/4177086/scores/6771052

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Megalovania, (unkindly) arranged for SATB As Heard from the RPG Game "Undertale" Music by Toby Fox

I knew the game Undertale from watching Dan and Phil playing it on their gaming channel. I think I finished watching their Undertale series in one day, maybe two, but I remember binge watching it one episode after the other even though each video in the series was around one hour. It was just that good of a game. And I also finished playing the game twice, but with the Pacifist route both times. I don’t think I have the heart and the skills to be able to play the Genocide route, but maybe I’ll try it when I’m really bored to try something new and hard.

While I may have never played the Genocide route, the music Megalovania from Undertale is just so iconic and, dare I say, an integral part of the internet culture. I was struggling arranging a Sondheim song and I only managed to arrange one verse of the song when I realized that I’d done all that I wanted to do in that one verse. I still had two more verses to go through, but I just couldn’t think of a way to continue. So in the midst of this, I don’t know what came over me, but I might have been watching some Undertale videos on Youtube when I found this one-man acapella version of Megalovania.

I’m sure it’s very hard to sing cause it has very fast, syncopated, and chromatic passages, but the guy pulled it off. It was really impressive, and then I thought maybe some people might be crazy enough to want to sing Megalovania cause it’s actually doable, if homicidally difficult. So I gave up arranging the Sondheim song (Sorry Steve, maybe next year), and I started arranging Megalovania.

It was actually pretty straightforward, cause I just needed to listen out for the lines that were in the music in each part. Once I got the line, then I gave it to a section to sing. But because the song is so fast, I had to listen at 0.75x speed and I remember rewinding it so many times cause I couldn’t get the line from the first go. Originally the song uses many different instrumentations, so even a few lines is enough for the music to be interesting cause there was also the change of colour, timbre, and sound in the music. So when I didn’t hear enough lines from the music that I could translate for SATB, I took some liberties and put in extra notes here and there to fill up a chord, cause otherwise it’ll be too empty with just two notes for the same voices in some parts.

It was one of those stupid crazy song ideas to arrange for SATB, but I usually end up being amused and pretty happy with the results just because it’s kinda wild to hear it in another form, and how much wilder would it be if some people actually took the trouble to learn and sing them for real.

One-man Megalovania: https://youtu.be/t4W12k0MYC0 Link to score: https://musescore.com/user/4177086/scores/6686985

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I Never Want to See You Again, arranged for SATB From the musical “Dance A Little Closer” Music by Charles Strouse Lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner

As a musical geek, I find that musical flops are as interesting as musical hits, especially when they are written by musical theatre legends. Dance A Little Closer has music by Charles Strouse (who wrote the hits Annie, Bye Bye Birdie, Applause, Golden Boy), and lyrics and book by Alan Jay Lerner (who wrote Brigadoon, My Fair Lady, Camelot, Gigi). What’s interesting about these two men is that even with their stature and their place in musical theatre history, they had their fair share of flops. 

Charles Strouse also wrote, among many:

Rags (lyrics by Wicked’s Stephen Schwartz and book by Fiddler on the Roof’s Joseph Stein)

Nick and Nora (lyrics by Miss Saigon’s Richard Maltby Jr. and book by West Side Story’s Arthur Laurents)

A Broadway Musical (yes, that’s the musical’s title, lyrics by his frequent lyricist Lee Adams and book by The Wiz’s William F. Brown)

Alan Jay Lerner also wrote, among other things: 

Carmelina (music by Finian’s Rainbow’s Burton Lane)

Lolita, My Love (music by James Bond composer John Barry)

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (music by West Side Story’s Leonard Bernstein)

So you see, these are big names in the musical theatre who, for one reason or another, couldn’t make a musical work even with their know-how, and I find that very interesting and very telling of what it actually takes to be successful, and what it means when you do succeed.

Okay, enough with me geeking out and flexing my trivial knowledge on everything musicals. So, Charles Strouse and Alan Jay Lerner shared this one flop on Broadway where it opened and closed on the same day, and when it was running in previews people would call the show “Close A Little Faster”. The story is basically a love triangle between this crooner, a lady who might have a past with the crooner, and the shady guy who might be involved in the imminent war just outside the resort where they are staying. When I read the synopsis, I thought it didn’t look too bad, but when you had the same guy who wrote the lyrics AND the book TO direct AND have his wife playing the leading lady, that should be way too much for one guy to handle when making a musical.

But boy, can Charles Strouse write music. His music from one flop to the next is simply gorgeous, and dare I say more interesting than his usual well-known musicals Annie and Bye Bye Birdie. Not to belittle the two musicals in any way, but I don’t think he gets enough credit for what beautiful music he can write other than simply the guy who wrote the two family friendly musicals. 

So why did I decide to arrange this song, of all the songs in the world? Well, I’ve had the cast recording of Dance A Little Closer for a long time and I’ve listened to it many many times. Meanwhile, I recently joined this group for barbershop singing (well, virtual barbershop singing for now, lol), so I’ve been listening to quite a lot of barbershop singing, especially performances uploaded by Barbershop Harmony Society on YouTube, and often they actually take songs from musicals and give it a barbershop arrangement. So when I listened to I Never Want to See You Again, I thought the song structure was similar to the barbershop songs that I listen to, and that gave me the idea to try to arrange the song in the barbershop style.

Trouble is, barbershop singing usually have Tenor, Lead, Baritone and Bass parts, and they usually criss-cross to have the barbershop sound. (I haven’t actually studied a lot of barbershop scores, so I’m guilty of mansplaining the whole thing here since I only know the littlest bit.) But I’m still not used to writing parts that criss-cross, so when I started writing, I thought I’d give the melody to the Lead, but it was too low for the the Baritone and the Bass to sing below the Lead. Then it occurred to me to write the melody an octave higher, which eventually sit in the Alto range so I brought in the girls in to the mix instead of having a male barbershop quartet.

In the end, with the strict non-crossing lines and the SATB parts, I just ended up with a normal homophonic SATB arrangement of the song, instead of the barbershop style that first inspired me. But hey, another song arranged, another post for this quiet Tumblr of mine.

“If It Only Runs A Minute” at Joe’s Pub: https://youtu.be/Liu9WzY8eMg Link to score: https://musescore.com/user/4177086/scores/6412072

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You Are What You Wear, arranged for SAATB From “American Psycho - The Musical” Song by Duncan Sheik

Usually when I arrange a song from a musical, I just do it once and I move on to the next song from a different musical. But, someone commented with a request on my Selling Out score on YouTube. How can I possibly refuse?

Aside from the inevitable reduction of the electronic sounds, I think I didn’t try to arrange this song the first time around because there was simply too much talking during the song. There was the ‘Bitch Rap’ (that’s what it’s called in the vocal score, lol) in the first middle part, and then a whole scene in the second middle part, and I just didn’t want to figure out a way to handle them. 

But when I finally tried to arrange, I just cut out the scene in the second middle part, and made up some instrumentals for the ‘Bitch Rap’. I’m not sure I translated the artificial sound from the electronic music for the instrumentals that well, but, eh, I tried. I started out with repeating Bass notes (again, me with my boring Bass part) and I have the other parts coming in to harmonize. 

Then by the end of the ‘Bitch Rap’ (I wonder if it’s actually a reference to the ‘Witch’s Rap’ from Into the Woods?), there is these gasping sounds in the original, so I also have the singers gasping in turns, which gave me the opportunity to make the singers gasp at different timing by fixing up certain rhythms to each section.

Also, this is the first time I write in 5 parts with 2 Alto parts, ‘cause I think the melody is kinda low for Sopranos, and the harmony line in the refrain is a third lower than the melody, so that’s for the 2nd Altos. Since the the lowest girl part is pretty low, probably a high Tenor can actually sing the Alto 2 part if there’s no girls to sing it. So yeah, when I saw that YouTube comment with a request to try this song, I jumped at it and I arranged it pretty quickly. Not my best arrangement probably, but it was fun for me to try. When else can I type out fashion brand names as lyrics for my song arrangements?

Live Performance at Feinstein’s/54 Below: https://youtu.be/wSurqH-9R-c Link to score: https://musescore.com/user/4177086/scores/6322146

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Banana Dance (The Guacamole Song), arranged for SATB Song by Jean Rosenberg Feldman (Dr. Jean) and Dr. Holly Karapetkova Originally Arranged by Mark Dye

Last New Year’s Eve, I was at my friend’s place for the countdown together with a few other friends, and we were expecting one more to join us. However, after calling her up, apparently she got busy that night and she suddenly didn’t seem to be in the mood for the festivities. We became quite concerned after the phone call, but I realized that the New Year was close at hand as I looked at the time on my phone. We didn’t have the TV on to watch the countdown and things just felt heavy and somber because we were so worried for our friend. Nevertheless, I saw the arms on the Clock app was moving closer and closer to the twelfth hour, and I just started counting down and eventually prompting the others to follow suit. And with that, the year 2020 began with all the shitstorm that was in store. 

How are y’all being stuck indoors? I am not singing so much these days since my choir practices and performances are all cancelled, and I have resorted to have my own solo choir singalong in my room every Sunday afternoon just so I don’t stop singing completely. I miss going outside, although now that the country is starting to ease up on the restrictions, I probably will go for a night stroll sometime soon. 

And I managed to arrange another song, I’m lucky that I still have my life and hobby largely unaffected with work this time around. Now, how and why did I start arranging the Banana Dance, or the Guacamole Song? I keep a list of songs that I probably will want to arrange, and this is one of them. I’m not sure what exactly that made me put this song in the list tho. Maybe it’s the iconic Guacamole part in the end? Maybe it’s the sort-of catchy, if repetitive, tune? 

I do know that I wanted to do a song that has repetition, like Christmas Carol songs where you sing God-knows-how-many different verses for the same tune, and I had always wondered if I could put in some variations to workaround the repetitiveness. Then at some point, I realized the lyrics suggest the different kinds of music that can be used for every fruit and vegetable in the song. I would have some hyper upbeat music to go bananas, tango music for the mango (I’m not sure how legit it sounds, but I tried to emulate the tango music and I referenced the choral arrangement of Astor Piazzolla’s Adios Nonino that I’d sung years ago), jaunty hopping music for the carrot-eating bunny, and so forth. 

It’s kinda fun to figure out the variations for each verse and putting them together, and I hope this little silly arrangement can bring a smile in this crazy trying times. 

Dr. Jean’s Banana Dance MV: https://youtu.be/MFmr_TZLpS0 Link to score: https://musescore.com/user/4177086/scores/6079677

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Father of Fathers, arranged for TTBB From the musical revue “Closer Than Ever” Music: David Shire Lyrics: Richard Maltby, Jr.

I actually finished this arrangement a few weeks back, but I wasn’t sure when to share and write this post until I went for an afternoon Sunday church service and I found out there that today was actually Father’s day, so I thought I had to share this today.

All my arrangements so far have been for SATB and I haven’t tried arranging for the male or female chorus until this one. When I chose the possible songs to arrange for the male or female chorus, I felt I would need songs with themes that are more gender-oriented so that I kinda had a good reason to arrange specifically for the male or female chorus, not to be sexist or anything. Then I also had the idea of writing something for my family. I first thought of writing one for my cousin with whom I used to be close with but I never got around to do that, then I had the other idea of writing for my parents, so I thought I would arrange one for the female chorus for my mother and another song for the male chorus for my father.

At first, I thought of another song for the male chorus, also focusing on fathers, before I settled on Father of Fathers from Maltby and Shire’s Closer Than Ever. I was listening to the album and I was just so moved with this song, especially with that glorious harmony at the end of the song, that I thought I had to try arranging this song instead of my initial choice of song.

This song has the verse-chorus structure which made it rather easy to arrange, in that the only problem for me to solve was how I needed to vary the three iterations of the verse-chorus. I decided that for the first verse and chorus, the Bass 1 would sing the melody, for the second verse the Tenor 2 sing the melody, then for the second chorus the Tenor 1 sing the melody although everyone else’s parts are pretty much homophonic, then the Tenor 2 sing the melody for the third verse and chorus with the Tenor 1 becoming kind of singing a descant part in the third chorus. 

Arranging this was made easier even more cause I actually had the vocal score for this song, so I didn’t actually have to figure out what chords to use and try putting notes together. Although the chords have a lot of notes because the score is to be played with 10 fingers on the piano for accompaniment, I just needed to read the notes from the score and chose some of those notes and gave them to different parts. 

My only concern with this arrangement is that the notes are very high for Tenor 1 and very low for Bass 2. Maybe because I was used to writing big expansive chords when I arranged for SATB, and also maybe I was used to hearing those higher and brighter notes, but the thing is if one part sings high, everyone else is singing high, and this happens in the first and third verse-chorus. If one part is singing low, everyone is singing low, this happens in the second verse-chorus. 

The different verses-choruses come from different characters coming from different stages of life. The first one is a father with a newborn baby, the second is another father who misses his children, and the third is yet another father who is taking care of his father. At first, I thought I should give the younger first father the higher (Tenor) voice and the older second father the lower (Bass) voice, but since the other parts go together with the melody, if I had stuck to this plan, the first father would have sounded lower and the second father would have sounded higher chordwise.

I felt somewhat inclined to write an arrangement for my father instead of my mother first. My relationship with my mother is quite close and personal but I can’t really say the same of that with my father, so I felt like it’s important for me to show that I still appreciate my father despite our distance and differences. Although I don’t think I would show this to him ‘cause I’m not sure how he would feel about it, but I just need to put something out there, something concrete to record my appreciation for my father.

Tyler Oakley and friends singing “Fathers of Fathers”: https://youtu.be/_7YXebvJLV8 Link to score: https://musescore.com/user/4177086/scores/5587519

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Un Béso, Béso, arranged for SATB From the musical “Giant” Song by Michael John LaChiusa Michael John LaChiusa is one of the very few writers for musical theater that is able to write the music, the lyrics, and the book, all those three all by himself. His choices of sources to turn into musicals are also unusual, including Greek mythology, Japanese short stories, and fantasies about First Ladies and Daughters of the United States. Christi Esterle (Diva from Musical Hell) puts it in regards to the man, “The composer of choice for people who thinks Stephen Sondheim is too mainstream.” I often read and heard that many find his scores too complex and cerebral with no hummable tunes to hook them, and his shows left them cold with no visceral, emotional reaction. (It took too long for me to remember the word ‘visceral’ when I was writing this, oh dear....)

I think his difficult scores are his natural response to the difficult subject matters for his musicals. It’s not like he writes complex and difficult music for the sake of being complex and difficult because he still writes music that is appropriate and true within the setting and period of the stories. Once I got used to the strangeness of his musicals and I got warm within his musical realms, his scores and his shows are really satisfying and rewarding to listen to.

Listening to the many shows that he wrote, LaChiusa seemed to have an affinity to Latin America and Spanish culture. He wrote rhythmic flamenco music when he musicalized the play “Bernarda Alba”, the story of which takes place in Spain, and he wrote the songs for the musical “Giant” which takes place in Texas and has Mexican characters and culture that come into play. I also liked the sounds and the rhythms of such music especially when the songs are lively, and “Un Béso, Béso” from “Giant” sounded so joyous and so much fun that I thought of arranging it.

So I was working on an arrangement for “Un Béso, Béso” before the request for “Brielle” came to me. I had to put “Un Béso, Béso” aside for the longest time as I was going through a lot of things in real life. But after I had finished arranging “Brielle”, and I miraculously met up a friend of a friend who helped me set up an interview for a job and, thank God, I finally got an offer for that, I felt like coming back to finish “Un Béso, Béso,” except I kinda lost steam and I was wondering whether to start from scratch or continue with I had written. I gave a listen to what I had at that point and tried changing a few notes here and there, and for a while, I wasn’t feeling it and I thought it wasn’t good enough. I thought maybe I would have to rewrite the whole thing, but I just let it sit for some time before I came back to it and gave it another listen. I don’t know why or how, but I felt different and I thought it was kind of okay, so I kept it, continued writing and finished the arrangement.

The thing about the song “Un Béso, Béso” is that in the show, there is other stuff that is happening on stage. The song is for a wedding party scene where a White boy kisses a Mexican girl after catching the bride’s bouquet, and the boy’s father sees him so we have this sub-scene in his mind before we come back to the party scene, which is then transitioned to another scene as tragedy befalls to one of the characters after he goes off to fight The War. So the folk song itself has these interruptions with no resolute ending, and at one point I finished an arrangement where there was only the folk song without other material from the scene, and it ended up being very short. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to leave it as it was or to add a little bit more to it. In the end, I decided to include a little section after the sub-scene into the arrangement, not only to lengthen the arrangement but also to avoid the awkward transitioning I had written into the final part of the song as there are several key changes happening through the course of the song.

Other than the key, the thing that changes in the song is the language. The folk song portion of “Un Béso, Béso” has Spanish lyrics with some English translations set as lyrics at the near-end of the song, but since the song doesn’t really finish in the show, there are no English lyrics to end the arrangement with. In the booklet for the musical’s cast album, there are literal translations given for the Spanish lyrics and I thought perhaps I could use them to complete the English lyrics for the song, but then I thought I probably couldn’t come up with good enough lyrics to match the other lyrics from LaChiusa, so I just kept it in Spanish for the ending.

When I finished arranging it and I gave it a listen, it went so fast, especially in the section after the sub-scene before the final part, that it was kinda giving me anxiety, so I set the tempo from the initial 160 BPM to 155 BPM. It might not have been the tempo used in the show, but without the other sections from the show that interrupt the song, I think the arrangement could be more chill and go a little slower. “Un Béso, Béso” is really joyous and fun to listen to, and I hope the arrangement captures the rhythm, the sounds, and the happier mood of the song, and in the end spreads a little sunshine for both the singers and the listeners.

Scenes from “Giant”: https://youtu.be/zbVIDRKIkA0 Link to score: https://musescore.com/user/4177086/scores/5552153

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Brielle, arranged for SATB Song by Adam Young (Sky Sailing)

When I uploaded my first arrangement on MuseScore, I was flattered that it got any views at all. I never thought that there would be any possibility of other people discovering my song arrangements ‘cause I always thought that the songs I listen to are out of the mainstream. I mean, I mostly listen to songs from musicals and I don’t really listen to the pop songs of today. If anything, I listen to pop songs from artists/bands that I found, if I look for them in the first place rather than just go with whoever is hot today.

So whenever I check out the statistics page for my scores on MuseScore, it’s rather nice to see my songs arrangements get some views day by day, and it’s a pleasant surprise whenever someone puts my arrangement in the favorites list. I can see why some arrangements are put in people’s favorites because the songs are ‘popular’ like Shots from the band Imagine Dragons or the epic Internet joke Shia LaBeouf. 

But I’m rather bewildered when songs like If Mountains Were Easy to Climb and This Isn’t the End managed to get as many views as the ‘popular’ songs. The former is from a musical that only played in the West End and never on Broadway, and the latter is not the iconic song from Owl City, so I never thought people would actually be looking for scores for those songs on MuseScore. Furthermore, I don’t think I did the greatest arrangements for those two songs, so that adds to my curiosity.

Nonetheless, someone commented for my arrangement of This Isn’t the End, and I thanked her in reply, to which she responded with a request for a score for the song Brielle by Sky Sailing (who is actually the same Adam Young of Owl City). I had been working on another song at that point, but I was just so thrilled to have my first ever request that I put the other song on the shelf and started arranging Brielle.

However, I also replied to her that it would take quite a while to finish. I actually had gotten an offer for a job and I was waiting for my first day when I got this request, so I knew I wouldn’t have as much time to arrange and finish it as quickly as I could when I started working for my job. Sure enough, I didn’t have any time to arrange afterward. In fact, I barely had the time and energy to do anything outside of work. 

I didn’t anticipate how much strength I needed to put in for my job. It didn’t help that my hands weren’t good at handling with tools, and all that I had studied in university were never used and I had to learn everything from scratch. It’s a long story, but suffice to say that I struggled there. I felt stuck and hopeless with being incompetent, so much so that I decided to leave before I made anymore mess and damage there, much to my father’s distress and disappointment.

So yeah, glasses of beer, a scar, angry shoutings, tears and breakdowns later, I got back to where I started. Not a better place to be, but at least I’m more relaxed and I don’t feel as tired and down as I had been before. It was around this time when I finally got around to finish what I started with Brielle. I finished the arrangement, uploaded it on MuseScore, and messaged the one who requested about the finished score. I haven’t heard anything from her, but I did receive a comment from another fan of the song, so I got that goin’ for me, which is nice.

Now, about the song, it begins with the picking of the guitar strings and some piano playing to end the phrases. I decided to use the lower three voices to capture this sound which ultimately left me with no choice but to give the Sopranos the melody line while the Basses, Tenors and Altos became the accompaniment, each with their own rhythms and lines. Even some lines for the Sopranos are actually a part from the piano accompaniment because the other three parts are already so busy with their own rhythms from the guitar accompaniment and I don’t want them to change the notes too fast from one phrase to the next without stopping.

As the song progresses, there are beats from the drums and chords from the guitar strumming that drive the song later on. I feel the drum beats in the song are rather strong and got in the way of the song’s bittersweet feels while the song had its moment whenever it comes to a quieter part, so I hope that having a more intimate setting with only voices helps in bringing out the feels more from the song. 

The arrangement begins with the three accompanying parts having different rhythms to drive the song, so similarly in the chorus, I gave the three accompanying parts different rhythms, forming a chord only every now and then to continue driving the song. Once the guitar picking pattern from the beginning was broken, I could finally give the melody line to the Tenors for the second verse. 

But for the second chorus, I gave the melody line back to the Sopranos with a harmony part for the Altos. Perhaps because of an image of a ship sailing on the sea from the music video, somehow I got the notion of having the melody line riding over the busy currents underneath. So for the second chorus, I have the Sopranos sing the melody with the Altos harmonizing along, while the Basses give a steady beat and the Tenors sing the wavy lines going up and down and become the busy currents. 

There is always a harmony to the melody in the chorus even in the first one, but I wanted to establish how I wanted to drive the song with the three accompanying part in the first chorus, so I kept the harmony line for the second chorus for the Altos, leaving the Tenors all alone to drive the song and make all the waves and currents to drive the song during the second chorus. I didn’t really think of having wavy lines for the Basses. I’m not sure if it’s because I needed them to be a stable foundation for the other three parts, or because I didn’t think they could pull off singing up and down the scale faster than in crochets. (I’m sorry Basses, I hope I can write better parts for y’all in other songs.)

MV: https://youtu.be/_PkzsMak6P8 Link to score: https://musescore.com/user/4177086/scores/5431848

[musicforfour]

The Internet Is Here, arranged for SATB with Spoken Part Music: Jimmy Jewell Lyrics: Daniel Howell, Philip Lester

One kind of the videos that I always watch when I’m on Youtube is Vine compilations. To have rapid-fire shots of humor in a single video is just great fun, and I’ve watched them so often that I think I have a lot of them memorized by now.

One day, when I was watching a Vine compilation video, there’s this Vine where it was playing a clip from Meghan Trainor’s All About That Bass, and when it came to the part where it goes ‘Cause every inch of you is perfect from the bottom to the top,’ the Vine suddenly showed different video clip of a guy on the word ‘bottom’, and another guy on the word ‘top’ while the song played on. 

When I discovered that Vine, firstly I was shocked at the thought that someone could just easily assume which person taking which role. Then I became curious about who these two guys were cause I had no idea whatsoever and the joke of the Vine probably depended on knowing their identity. As I watched other Vine compilations, I kept on finding this Vine and seeing these two guys, so I became even more curious, but I couldn’t really search on Google ‘two random guys who make videos and are probably gay’ to find the answer, could I?

So I was left clueless for a long while, before one fateful day, Youtube decided to recommend me a video of Dan and Phil playing The Sims 4 on their gaming channel. They always have their faces on the thumbnail of their videos, so when I saw that video thumbnail, I realized that I might have seen their faces before, and after a little search on Google with this newfound lead, I finally found the answer and discovered AmazingPhil and Daniel Howell (Rest in Peace danisnotonfire).

I’ve been watching their videos ever since, and fast forward to the present, in honor of the world tour of their newest stage show “Interactive Introverts” this year, I decided that it was finally time to pay tribute to these two guys who have made me laugh with their videos and made the past few difficult months more bearable for me, by arranging the song Dan and Phil once wrote titled “The Internet Is Here” for the end of their first stage show, “The Amazing Tour Is Not On Fire”.

At first hearing, it’s a cute and fun little ditty so I didn’t anticipate the trouble I had to go through in arranging this song. I’ve always pointed out for my arrangements that I had to reduce the song from its full original presentation with the stage sets, the performers in costumes, and the orchestra down to only singers with 4 singing parts. But this time the arrangement wouldn’t have Dan and Phil singing (that is unless they do join in for a performance), the very persons that probably made the song work in the first place. I fear that with other people singing the song out of the context of the original show, the song wouldn’t have the charm it may require to stir up an uninformed audience.

Speaking of requirements, the song in the stage show originally involved a dance break and *spoilers alert* a person wearing a Dil head (Dil is a Sim character in The Sims 4 that Dan and Phil play in their gaming channel). I kept the song in its entirety, but I decided instead of a dance break, I made the interlude in the middle became a montage where some people would perhaps remake some of Dan and Phil videos. There are two or three parts of the song where the lyrics were spoken instead of sung, so there have to be some people that would have to speak the lines, while others sing in the background. Since they are already doing the speaking duties, I thought I could also have them do stuff for the montage segment as well.

I wrote in the score some questions and answers from various “Phil is not on fire” videos for the montage, but having intended the song to be performed live, I couldn’t include jokes from Pinof that had video editing in it, and a lot of the funny ones had some editing to it. I also had to make sure they were ‘performable’ on stage. Unless some people are daring enough to go all the way, we really can’t have a remake of Anaconda MV or someone putting on a cheese costume on stage now, can we?

Then about the appearance of Dil in the song, since I can’t expect the arrangement to be performed with someone entering downstage left as Dil, I thought I could make it up by randomly and suddenly featuring some music from The Sims 4, composed by Ilan Eshkeri. The whole thing with the song is just ridiculous (in a good way, that is), so I thought ‘What is the most random and weirdest thing to happen at this point, even for a Sim?’, and I just remembered the time Dil was abducted by aliens in the game, so I decided to include the Alien Abduction theme from the game into the arrangement.

Now down to writing the music. For the start of the song, I decided to include the explosion sound effect that Dan used to put in at the end of his videos, back when he was still danisnotonfire. In the stage show, the story goes that Phil wanted to sing the song despite Dan’s objections, so I thought the song was a Phil kind of thing, so I wanted to put in a Dan kind of thing to restore the balance of the universe make sure both sides are represented. However, when I rewatched the documentary about the making of the stage show, turns out that having a song-and-dance number was Dan’s idea, while *spoilers alert* Phil’s idea for the show was to have Phil performing magic tricks. So I guess it is just perfect that the arrangement begins with Dan’s signature explosion sound, which turns out to be at its essence an A minor chord.

At first, the song may be pleasant when I just hear it casually, but when I had to listen much closer to arrange, I then realized that there could be no easy chords for the arrangement since the music is actually rather jazz-y. The tenors and basses sing in parallel sevenths for a few bars at the start, then parallel ninth for a brief moment. A lot of the times different sections would have clashing notes, but without them the arrangement would lose the jazz feel from the original, and I always try to preserve as much of the original as I could for all my arrangements.

I’m afraid that the music would be actually too difficult to sing in a casual situation. Firstly the funny chords, the key changes, tempo changes, and then also the range of the notes. Not that there are crazy high notes for Sopranos, Altos, and Tenors, but I feel the notes that I give them are always in the higher part of their range. (Well, okay, there are some G5s for the Soprano in one part, then some F#5s in another part). I wanted to make sure the arrangement could have sustained excitement even without everything from the stage show, especially Dan and Phil. But the Basses, my poor dear Basses, I had to make them sing as low as Eb2, cause having them singing an octave higher simply doesn’t sound right. I always hoped that I could sing both the Tenor and the Bass parts of my song arrangements, but this one will need a real Bass singer to pull off an Eb2.

Lastly, the tempo in the last part of the song. It is fairly slower than the similar parts before it because for this part originally Dan and Phil do a kickline in their golden blazer and golden top hat. When I came to writing this part for the arrangement, I thought I had lost it. After trying so hard to keep everything bright and exciting, I had to settle with the Tenors singing the melody line and the Sopranos and Altos sing the trumpets riff in their lower range, whereas in the previous faster part the Altos sing the melody and the Tenors sing their notes offbeat. It’s like a firework about to blast off and light up the sky, but then the rain falls and puts out the fire. But after writing more into it and setting the tempo a tiny bit, I then felt it somehow got its legs and it finally came together at the end. 

Arranging this song is kind of like arranging Shia LaBeouf. The whole thing is just bizarre and ridiculous, but once everything is done and I give it a listen, I can’t help but smile, the same reaction I had for Shia LaBeouf. I think “The Internet Is Here” can only be truly fully, unironically appreciated by those who follow Dan and Phil, and I hope this arrangement does the song justice and also brings Phans together to remember and celebrate the good things that we have, like music and the internet to name a few.  

MV: https://youtu.be/fW47QpWTgIE Link to score: https://musescore.com/user/4177086/scores/5159850

[musicforfour]

A Bronx Tale Medley, arranged for SATB Featuring songs: Belmont Avenue, I Like It, Out of Your Head Music: Alan Menken Lyrics: Glenn Slater

Alan Menken is the composer of numerous Disney animated musicals. From The Little Mermaid to Tangled, he did most of everything Disney, but he did start out from writing for the musical theatre. A Bronx Tale is his latest musical for the theatre that is not originally a Disney animation, and generally, I like his musicals better when they are not adapted from a Disney movie, probably because I like it better when the whole score is brand new for a new musical.

Aside from my slight indifference towards the Disney musicals adaptation for the stage, A Bronx Tale has a number of great tunes and I like them all, so much so that I had the idea of doing a medley of 3 songs from it, and that’s why it took the longest time to arrange this one because technically I’m arranging 3 songs instead of just one. Of course, since I’m doing a medley of 3 songs, I would have to cut out some verses (and a dance break) from the songs, just so the medley doesn’t take forever and a day to arrange and to sing.

The first song in the medley, Belmont Avenue, is the opening number from the musical sung by the whole company. Since I assume that performing this medley wouldn’t have the luxury of having set pieces behind the non-dancing singers (of which there might be only 4, for 4 parts) and instruments to accompany them, I needed to make sure that everything is always happening in the arrangement. A part where there were only claps in the original, I fill it in with changing chords before the next line. And speaking of chords, there are parts where the melody don’t follow the usual major scale, so I just went mental with the chords there. 

There is also one part where the lyric goes ‘The romance, the laughs, the fights’, and I had been using the usual chords for other parts before that. I wanted to use something else for ’the fights’, and I tried finding a chord with the notes next to each other if they were to be played in the same octave. I kinda liked how a note and its major second sounded together, but I couldn’t really stand minor seconds, so I just stacked major seconds in the same octave, then I spread the notes to different octaves to suit the 4 parts.

The second song in the medley is I Like It. With its swinging rhythm and having written the previous part in 4/4 time signature, I had to write everything in triplets here. It doesn’t help that Musescore incorrectly imported the connected triplets from the Midi file, and I had to go through the trouble of fixing the score and writing a lot of the whole thing in triplets again. Nevertheless, one thing that amuses me for this second song is that the young character in the musical singing this song is called ‘C’, and I had the luck to be able to write the Alto, Tenor, and Bass parts, for a moment singing in unison the nickname ‘C’ on a C note.

The third song in the medley is Out of Your Head. Before I started arranging the last part, I had wanted to give Altos and Basses the chance to shine here, but once I started tackling this song, I found the melody would be too high for them if they tried. However, I like the bassline in the original song and there was no use for me trying to come up with anything better, so I listened for the bassline from the original and wrote it with little changes for the Bass part in the arrangement. The song, in essence, is sung three times, with an extra chorus before the slower third time. I kept most of everything and cut out the front part of the third time so it goes straight into the slow chorus after the extra chorus, but then I couldn’t really follow the original since it was written in such a way to go into the front part first, and I had to figure out another way to transition to the slow chorus, before the medley finally comes to an end.

Belmont Avenue MV: https://youtu.be/1AgHIhlNY5A Joshua Colley performing I Like It: https://youtu.be/uc75vTrzPnU Out of Your Head MV: https://youtu.be/jMSzSVMOB7E Link to score: (Wew, apparently this score on MuseScore is ‘infringing on someone else’s author’s rights,’ so the score is no longer public on MuseScore. Luckily, I do have a YouTube account where I upload a rolling score video for this medley. Hopefully, this one won’t get any report :/ https://youtu.be/-x3bcFuiTW0)

Update: Omg, the people from Musescore really did it and my score is now available again!! Although, I’m not sure why there’s a ‘Disney’ tag on the score, pretty sure I didn’t put it there. But fuck it, it’s back bitches, hahaha!! I almost can’t believe it!!  https://musescore.com/user/4177086/scores/5132722

[musicforfour]

This Isn’t the End, arranged for SATB Song by Adam Young (Owl City)

One of the things I had to do when I was a concert director for the choir was to plan the repertoire for the concert, so I searched and went through a lot of possible songs that were relevant to the theme of the upcoming concert, most of them I had never heard before. This Isn’t the End by Owl City was one of them and the song with its sad story stuck with me ever since.  This song is particularly interesting, in that even with such a sad story to tell (granted it does give a hopeful message in the end), the music to me is very much light-hearted and jaunty, especially with the 18/8 and 12/8 rhythms. Perhaps this way, the music would sweeten the bitter part of the story and adds more to the hopefulness of the song. However, when I was arranging, I thought I would take the liberty of playing around with the chords and I tried adding some ‘sadness’ to them so that the sadness of the story is not forgotten and I hope with that the arrangement would come out less ironic and more sincere, with all due respect to the original rendition. Another interesting thing about this song is how the story in it can be seen as three parts, with the first two parts focusing on two different characters, a daughter and her father. I thought it would be interesting to give the part about the daughter and the first refrain to the Tenors, then the part about the father and the second refrain to the Altos and Sopranos respectively. (I’m sorry Basses, but I need y’all to keep the rhythm for everyone else.) In this way, it seems to me the singers are outside the story and commenting on it which goes along with the lyrics telling of the characters in third person, rather than making believe that the singers really did live through the story and telling it straight off.

P.S. Every Christmas, I would join the choir for caroling and we would always be in our full black attire. Recently, I thought of something and I wished for someone to come up to me and ask me why I am clothed in all black, just so I can answer ‘I’m going to a funeral, ‘cause I dug the grave where later half of 2016 and all of 2017 can die and rot in it.’ Dark jokes aside, Merry Christmas and wishing for a Happy New Year.

MV: https://youtu.be/MP6VjY4nOfI Link to score: https://musescore.com/user/4177086/scores/4854953

[musicforfour]

If Mountains Were Easy to Climb, from the musical “Mrs Henderson Presents” Music: George Fenton, Simon Chamberlain Lyrics: Don Black

Every now and then, I would check on the internet for the newest musicals written by musical theatre writers, and Don Black is one of the people I follow. He wrote the lyrics to a number of musicals with Lord Lloyd Webber, and also with Frank Wildhorn for the musical Bonnie & Clyde, one of my favorite musicals. Mrs Henderson Presents is his latest musical to hit the West End, and I believe the first time I heard the musical was when I watched the cast performing If Mountains Were Easy to Climb at the Olivier Awards on YouTube. I particularly liked the melody for the chorus part, so much so that the song became the next one for me to arrange.

This was the song where I thought I was able to give the solo line for the bass, as I thought the melody in the original key, which I kept, goes to low notes that not all tenors would be able to reach easily. However, this is, in turn, caused some problems. Firstly, I had no solid foundation to support the other voices, resulting in (to me) a light, floating feeling to the middle part of the song. I didn’t want to keep that feeling for the rest of the song, so I had to give the melody line back to the alto once the song reaches the bridge. Another thing is that I had to be careful on building the chords when I had the bass as the melody. Some chords I used the first time around didn’t quite work when I just simply take the inversions or I give the same notes of the chord to any other voices. Finally, since there wasn’t quite a solid supporting part with the bass singing the melody, I thought the way I could keep it together was by having more tighter chords with the notes being close with one another, instead of having expansive chords with the notes being miles away from one another.

I also kinda restructured the song for the arrangement, in that I cut out the bars in between the second chorus and the bridge, as I thought it disrupted the song’s momentum, although I did add a bar after the bridge to make a bolder statement before the last chorus. I didn’t put the pauses in the last chorus leading to the end as per the original song, partly out of negligence and partly to keep the song moving to a major ending instead of stopping in the middle of a sentence. Also, I didn’t bother doing the lowering of the key for the duet and the original end of the song, ‘cause I thought it was more fitting without them if I wanted to treat the song as a stand-alone song instead of strictly following the song as it was originally done in the theatre.

But outside the musical struggles in arranging the song, I wasn’t going through the best of times in real life as well, and I’m still at that same point right now. I wish I could just move on with a proper work to do, but it doesn’t come as easily I thought it would and I’ve started to doubt my worth and wonder if I could be doing well on my own. At times it is upsetting to see where I am now and how I am stuck in this situation, and whenever anyone asks me how I am doing, I will always have a meltdown on the inside as I try to put on a happy face about it. Arranging this song became more difficult as it challenged me to see through the struggles I’m dealing with, to believe that through struggles that life becomes meaningful and worth living, while at the same time I am growing more tired of being where I am and not able to advance in life itself. So in the meantime, while I continue to wait for something good to turn up, I’m distracting myself by doing other things, and song arranging being one of them.

Olivier Performance: https://youtu.be/55-qzasjIrs Link to score: https://musescore.com/user/4177086/scores/4793477

[musicforfour]

Shia LaBeouf, arranged for SATB with Narrator Song by Rob Cantor Live Arrangement by Greg Nicolett

A friend of mine was planning for an upcoming concert for the choir we were in, and I had planned the choir’s the latest concert, so I kinda helped her during the early stages and I got the chance to look at her notes of ideas for the concert. One of the songs written in that note was the Shia LaBeouf song, the true story of an actual cannibal. I had heard the song before, and I thought it would be great fun, but impossible ‘cause we couldn’t afford to go for full out theatrical extravaganza for the concert.

But the idea settled in the back of my head ever since, and once I finished arranging If I Had My Way, I thought I wanted to do something more fun and less serious, so Shia LaBeouf seemed like just the right song to arrange next.

While the song itself is great fun, arranging it is not as much. For one thing, there’s an additional speaking part for the Narrator, making it necessary for the song to be performed by at least 5 people instead of 4 and thus contradicting the whole premise of this Tumblr. I also decided to write out the spoken part as a percussion (Woodblock) part with the rhythm and the pitch following closely to the way the narration is spoken in the original live performance. I dreaded the process every time I came to the parts with narration. But when I finished it and imported the midi into MuseScore, the percussion part didn’t play out the same way. Instead of playing just Woodblock in different pitches, the percussion part played any percussion depending on the note I wrote for the midi. I had wanted to have a percussion part playing as the Narrator for the demo, so I muted the percussion part in the Mixer and there wasn’t a sound for the Narrator part if you listened to the song on the MuseScore site for the longest time, until recently I discovered a way to fix this by setting the sound for the Narrator in the Mixer and now the updated the score has the Woodblock sound.

The next thing is that I had to arrange for four singers and a narrator, where originally there were a small band/orchestra, a children’s choir, a male chorus, and a narrator. Previously, I had only arranged songs with solo singers, so this time I had to downsize the cast even further and I probably lost a lot more of the original music as I adapt it for four singing parts. I thought one way to make up for it and keep the song as exciting with four parts is by playing around with the chords and making it change more often in the arrangement. The song also allows a ‘call and response’, if you will (It probably isn’t called that but bear with me), wherein the early choruses, for instance, the girls sing half of the line and the guys sing in response and finish the line. And to top it all off, it’s the first time I had to deal with key changes, and I never really came up with a way to do it, except to just write the usual parts in a different key and hope that the singers can catch the next note.

But all in all, it still is a crazy fun song, and every time I listen to the arrangement, I smile at the ridiculousness of the whole thing and I hope the arrangement captures a great deal of the zaniness of the song.

MV: https://youtu.be/o0u4M6vppCI Link to score: https://musescore.com/user/4177086/scores/4719121