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Writing new music for the oldest instrument

By Dominic McGonigal, director of COMA Voices

I have been to three concerts in the last fortnight. All vocal. All contemporary. All surprising. And all different.

Why are we still surprised by the human voice? It is the oldest instrument. We should have exhausted the possibilities after however many millennia we have had for experimenting. Yet these three concerts revealed there is still much more to explore.

The voice is as unique as the individual and a combination of voices throws up a myriad of possibilities. What are voices going to do in the 21st century, now that the harmonic, rhythmic, timbral and geographical boundaries have been stretched so far?

But the first concert harked back to the 15th century. Dufay and his contemporaries were revolutionaries of their age but they could not have conceived what was to happen 500 years later when the Hilliard Ensemble met saxophonist Jan Garbarek. The four voices (with a little help from mikes and reverb) provided a bed of sound over which Garbarek wove his haunting melodies. In this, their second collaboration, they added a new dimension to the original medieval harmonies, twisting chords into the modern idiom and overlaying melodic lines to build up tone clusters.

The second concert referred only to the last 200 years of choral tradition. Thomas Adès' Fayrfax Carol had a distinctly romantic feel, although the doleful falling sixth was stretched to a major seventh and the tonality was obscured by a more contemporary harmonic language. If Gesualdo had been commissioned to write for the Holst Singers today, this is the kind of thing he might have produced.

The last was undersold by its title. The Shout is an eclectic group of singers with diversity the only common theme. The jazz, classical, pop, opera, folk (Ethiopian, Armenian and Tamil) and stage singers sang new works by Orlando Gough and Richard Chew in which improvisation played a huge part. In Praise of Pizza was just that - no notes, just a collection of tasty sounds assembled on a rhythmic platter. COMA Voices' Vegetable Soup was positively melodic in comparison.

These three concerts demonstrated that there is so much exploration still to be done in the vocal world involving composer and performer. COMA Voices has set out to be part of that exploration, avoiding the well-ploughed furrows of SATB choral settings and playing to the strengths of a group of singers with an ear for the contemporary and an enthusiasm for the new.

One of the most interesting events in COMA Voices' first eighteen months was a workshop with Deirdre Gribbin and London Composers Forum. In one day, we rehearsed and workshopped 11 pieces by 11 composers. Prior to the event, while the composers were preparing their material, I was invited to speak to them about writing for voices. Writing for voices is not dissimilar to writing for instruments. Bach in his fugal writing pointedly applies the same abstract lines to both. There are, however, some basic differences which are worth noting, particularly when writing for amateur voices.

The first and most obvious is range. Comfortable tessitura for women's voices lies between middle C and the F an eleventh above. Sopranos (typically plentiful in an amateur ensemble) can go higher, up to an A or Bb (but don't expect them to be pp). Altos can go lower, although volume is limited at the bottom of the range. The male tessitura is generally from A (tenth below middle C) to D above middle C. Tenors (who are rare) go higher. Basses go lower (bottom Es and Fs are usually available) but as with altos it is unusual to have a huge sound low in the register.

The next feature about writing for voices is voice-leading. It is important to think horizontally as well as vertically to create singable lines. If you can't hear each individual vocal line in your head, it's probably going to be hard to sing. (If you are Erik Satie, this might be the desired effect, but you may not be asked back to write for that group of singers again.) As few singers have perfect pitch, they will need to 'find' a pitched note with reference to something previously heard. That could be a prevailing 'tonality' set up much earlier or it could be a chord, harmonic sequence or line just before the entry. It does not necessarily need to be a simple relationship (it is perfectly possible to learn to come in a diminished twelfth down from a previous note) but the pitches in any chords need to be sufficiently clear to act as the reference point. Picking a specific note out of a micro-tonal chord cluster is not easy!

Notation conventions for voices are slightly different from instrumental writing. It is normal to provide singers with a vocal score which will include all the vocal parts plus, for accompanied works, a reduction of the instrumental parts (usually a piano reduction, although that convention is less relevant in contemporary music). Women expect to read from the treble clef. Men can read from the bass clef or treble clef an octave down (sometimes called the tenor clef, but not to be confused with the one used by trombonists and cellists). For clarity, the 'tenor' clef should have an 8 subscript attached to the lower loop of the clef. Another notation convention often overlooked is having each vocal line following through onto every stave or, if not, clearly marked so singers can find their line easily when moving from one stave or page to the next. (The marking does not need to follow traditional Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Bass form - it could be Women 1, Women 2, Women 3 etc, or simply Voice 1, Voice 2 etc. When writing for COMA Voices, it is usually better to leave the scoring as flexible as possible.)

Enough on the mechanics. What sounds good?

Voices are more homogenous than instruments. They blend well, hence the classic English choral sound. Chords sound good as demonstrated in Philip Cashian's Forest of Clocks (but note the points above about horizontal lines). In the contemporary idiom, some elements of chordal writing can be left to chance, for example by specifying a chord cluster within a particular range.

Another simple but effective device is building up harmonies using single melodies or melodic fragments treated canonically. Pete McGarr uses this technique in Wyrd Sleep where the melody is 'shadowed' aleatoricly. In Prayer Before Birth, Tara Creme opens with a semitone scalic passage, repeated ad lib and out of synch by the women's voices to create a constantly flowing tone cluster.

As well as homogenous blending qualities, voices are also individual. Composers can play to that in-dividuality by writing solo lines. This has the added advantage of retaining considerable flexibility in scoring, as the solo lines can be allocated according to availability of resources. Solo lines can be accompanied by the other singers, but balance is best achieved when the soloist is in the middle or upper tessitura of their voice and when there is significant pitch differential between the soloist and accompaniment. Similar pitch accompaniment is of course possible, but the dynamic contrast needs to be great to allow the soloist to be heard.

However useful these tips are as tools for compos-ition, no composer should be bound by existing techniques. If the sound is in your head, there should be a way of notating it and performing it.

Since choral writing as we know it began, every century has produced something startling. What will the 21st century produce? Get out your quills (or mice) and let your imagination run riot!

Works performed by COMA Voices since forming in July 1998