Eight bars for an amateur choir: which faults to fix in thirty minutes
A candidate is arranging an eight-bar strophic song for an amateur SATB choir. The brief fixes three conditions: the tune stays in the soprano and unaltered, the key stays D major, and both verses use the same music. The tune spans A3 to C5, and its third phrase repeats A3, the fifth of the tonic. The tenors cannot sing below C3, the altos are reliable only between G3 and D5, and the basses are strongest between G2 and D3. In the candidate's draft, bars 3–4 place the tenor on B3 under an alto A3; bar 6 ends with C♯ in both soprano and alto; bar 7 gives the bass a leap from D3 down to E2 and straight back; and bar 8 finishes with the tune on A. Verse 2 has one syllable more than verse 1 at bar 5, where the tune has a single minim. The candidate has thirty minutes of the lesson left and can make only a handful of revisions before the draft is submitted.
1. Rank the draft's problems by how much they would cost marks, and explain your ranking.
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Rank by whether a problem is a hard constraint or a fluency fault. Hard constraints cannot be argued away: the choir physically cannot sing the note, or the brief is broken. Fluency faults are audible but fixable by a small edit.
- The bass leap to E2 (bar 7). This is a hard constraint twice over. E2 lies below the basses' strong range, so the note will either be dropped or sound hollow, and the leap of a minor seventh down and back is a line fault regardless of who sings it. It changes the chord's inversion or the harmony, so it must be settled first.
- The doubled leading tone (bar 6). C♯ in soprano and alto is an unambiguous tonal-harmony error: the leading tone is the one note that should not be doubled, and because it wants to rise to D, two of them make the cadence sound over-specified and the resolution clumsy. It is audible, but it is a stylistic fault rather than a physical impossibility.
- The tenor–alto crossing (bars 3–4). A crossing muddies the texture and looks careless, but it can be repaired by exchanging two notes, so it costs least.
A different order is defensible if the reasoning is explicit - for example putting the leading tone first on the grounds that the bass note, though low, is at the edge of range rather than outside it. What earns credit is the principle, not the number.
2. Solve the bars 3–4 problem within the brief's three fixed conditions.
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Diagnose before rewriting. The crossing happens because the tune itself drops to A3 in that phrase, so the soprano is sitting where an alto would normally be. With the tenors' floor at C3, the space between the lowest tenor note and the soprano's A3 is small, and the draft has relieved the squeeze by pushing the alto below the tenor.
Acceptable fixes, in order of preference:
- Re-voice, exchanging the two parts. Give the alto the lower note and the tenor the higher, then check: alto no lower than G3, tenor no higher than E4, no more than an octave between soprano and alto or between alto and tenor. This keeps the tune and the key untouched.
- Thin the chord. If the exchange still crowds the tenors, omit the fifth. Three-note chords are perfectly legal and often preferable to a forced crossing or to writing below a singer's range.
- Widen the bass. A first inversion in bar 3 or 4 lifts the bass and opens the texture, which gives the inner voices room without altering the tune.
Reject the shortcuts: transposing the whole arrangement down a tone breaks the stated key, and moving the tune into the tenor breaks the stated soprano condition. Fixing the voicing costs nothing against the brief; changing the given material costs marks.
3. Resolve the bar 5 syllable problem and the bar 7 bass problem, stating which brief condition constrains each decision.
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Bar 5. Two conditions are in tension: the tune must be unaltered, and both verses must share the music. Splitting the minim into two crotchets is the obvious move and the least good one, because it edits the given tune. Work the underlay first: distribute verse 2's syllables across the whole phrase so the extra one falls where verse 1 has slack - often a repeated pitch, or a word whose second syllable is unstressed. Say both verses aloud against the rhythm; if verse 1 still scans and verse 2 no longer forces a squeeze, the problem has gone without touching a note. If no distribution works, split the minim and flag it in a sentence as a deliberate, minimal adjustment: an acknowledged small edit is a better answer than a silent one or a broken brief.
Bar 7. Only the bass line is broken; the harmony is fine. Keep the same chord and change its position: first inversion, or move the E into the tenor and give the bass another chord tone, keeping the bass inside G2–D3. Re-harmonising is the last resort, because it changes the setting rather than the voicing. The reason to prefer these solutions is that a leap of a seventh is a melodic fault in any voice, so octave-displacing the E downwards does not solve it - it only makes it unsingable as well.