June 2017 Assignment
Play your song and describe in some detail the arrangement you imagine, or bring a recording of your song (and device to play it on) and explain your accompaniment choices.
Your song is more than just lyrics with music in the background. It’s a story told through words and music.
The arrangement you choose influences the story, whether you have great performance chops or, like a Nobel Prize for Literature laureate you may know, you sometimes stand your lyrics up against C-D-G.
The arrangement is personality. It’s attitude — the sneer on the face of a song, the anguished crack in a song’s voice. The music and its arrangement tell parts of the story that mere lyrics can’t explain.
How does the arrangement you’ve chosen influence the story you want to tell? What impact might another arrangement have on your song?
Credited to Lennon & McCartney for professional reasons, Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday” is among the most performed songs in music history, illustrating the universal sense of unrequited love that all humans experience in their own ways. As compared to the original treatment, think about the ways the starkly different arrangements influence the story. What does one arrangement say that another arrangement does not say?
“Yesterday”
Kresten Korsbæk (classical guitar)
Cesar Espinoza (pan flute)
Los Buhos (Argentina)
Pearl Sisters (Japan)
