Creating arrangements

Before I had to quit my lessons due to scheduling issues, my teacher was concentrating on teaching me to come up with my own arrangements. In her words, "I can teach you tunes until the cows come home, but this is going to help you more in the long run." While I don't know much, I agree that it's a useful skill, so I thought I'd pass on what I do know in hopes that it might help someone else. (Bear in mind that I learn by ear. I know absolutely nothing about music theory or transcribing sheet music.)

Before you pick a song to arrange: does it have any key changes in it? This is a matter of some concern to me, but probably not so much to those who play pedal. If it does have key changes and you play lever, it doesn't necessarily mean you can't play it, but you might need to do some lever flipping.

Have you picked the song? Good. You'd better really, really like it. Because before you play anything, you're going to listen to it as many times as it takes to get it into your head. The one I'm working on right now is a tune by Scottish harper Catriona McKay, rather mysteriously named "The Swan Lk243." You can hear part of it here.

I usually focus on trying to pick out the melody with my right hand before I think about chords. As for settling on a fingering for a certain phrase, I've discovered the most obvious fingering isn't necessarily the one that will work best. While I like to have the right hand down pretty solid before I figure out what to do with my left, sometimes it's easier to do both at once. For instance, with this song, I'd made a fair amount of progress on the right hand before realizing that it would actually make more sense to have the left hand play part of the melody in certain places--in other words, they overlap a little. So hooray for trial-and-error. Sometimes I think it's easier to translate songs that weren't originally done on harp.

As for the left hand... I haven't much advice to offer. I feel like I never do anything very creative with it, except for throwing in syncopation whenever possible, just because it's fun. Usually I just end up going with variations on whatever chord "sounds right." I should also note that I'm not trying to reproduce exactly what McKay does. For one thing, it wouldn't be an arrangement if I did. And for another, at least for me, it's downright impossible to do. No matter how many times I listen, I just can't quite hear exactly what she's doing, especially with her left hand. The most I can do is make an educated guess. I figure the first time through the tune I'll stick pretty close to how she plays it and maybe figure out some variations for the second run-through.

I probably don't even need to say this, but once you have the basic structure figured out... repetition. Lots of it.

Some things you should know about Gillian Grassie

1. Her Myspace is named Harp Power - gotta love it.
2. Her music's more contemporary folk/pop than traditional, but she manages to make the harp sound completely natural in that setting.
3. She has a really lovely voice. Reminds me a little of Regina Spektor, a little of Thea Gilmore.
4. She's not only a skilled musician, but a great songwriter. Her song "Silken String" (which you can hear in full on her Myspace) took second place in this year's New York Songwriters Circle Contest.

I'm rather excited to have found out about her music. I'm a decent player, but I've never been able to compose melodies or write lyrics, and I suspect I never will. Maybe I'm wrong, but it strikes me as something you either have or you don't - you can't learn. The Philadelphia Inquirer did a feature story on her a few weeks ago, and she described the melody to "Silken String" has having actually come to her in a dream. I'm always ridiculously jealous of people who talk about songs "just sort of coming into their heads." The only songs that ever show up in my head are usually somebody else's, so seeing another harper close to my age playing and singing original compositions is pretty amazing.

If any of this sounds intriguing, check out her CD, Serpentine. If you like musicians like Vienna Teng, Tori Amos, Charlotte Martin... you'll probably like this.

A reminder

To all those in the US...

GET OUT THERE AND VOTE.

(Sorry to shout, but hey, it's important.)