Women of Note have an extensive repertoire of multi-part arrangements of music that covers all styles and genres (from Bach to the BeeGees and beyond).
This has been boosted in recent years by the creative productivity (she says “madness”) of Rebecca Ferrari, who set herself the task of composing/arranging a piece for every member of the group, each one specifically tailored to their personal range and singing style.
Rebecca explains in more detail below:
No.1 ‘Oddity’ choral arrangement of David Bowie’s Space Oddity written for Jools on her 50th birthday and in memory of David Bowie
The journey of Bowie’s astronaut Major Tom from the launch pad to his walk in space. His words are given to the solo voice, as are Ground Control’s final attempts to contact him. Major Tom does not return.
No.2 ‘Son Of A Preacher Man’ written for Rosamond on her 60th birthday
Rosamond is one of our ‘solid crew’ of altos and so this arrangement is driven by the alto part, with a riff derived from the melody and a gutsy solo line. The other lines layer on top, to create what I hope will be an energetic, gospel-style take on the original.
No.3 ‘I Will Survive’ written for Tam
Everyone wants to sing Gloria Gaynor’s power anthem but the original is a solo without even backing singers, so how to make it work for a choir? This arrangement includes solos for Tam (whose all-time favourite song it is) but I have also shared the main vocal line around between all three parts. The whole is bolstered with a couple of new melodies, which I hope will make it a real ensemble piece.
No.4 ‘Weep You No More Sad Fountains’ for Cat
Roger Quilter’s beautiful song is given to Cat’s solo line, with the choir accompaniment based on the original piano score. As I discovered, converting piano writing to vocal lines is more difficult than it looks! I have kept the lilt of the original and the more flowing feel of the second verse, but I have diverged from it with some notes of my own, notably in the rawness of the writing at the end of the first verse, making my version unequivocally a lament.
No.5 ‘Suo-Gan’ for Pamela
Pamela has taken up the challenge of mastering the Welsh words for this traditional lullaby, so I have set the first verse to show off the solo voice with a gentle chordal accompaniment. The writing gets richer in the second verse with the addition of a recorder part for our resident recorder maestro Cath, played on the treble recorder so that it interweaves with the vocal lines. I have excused the rest of the choir from Welsh lessons and set the English translation for the second verse. After the simplicity of the opening, I have added some more alternative harmonies as the piece draws to a close.
No.6 ‘People Will Say We’re In Love’ for Margaret and Mac Poulton
Women of Note sang for Margaret and Mac’s wedding reception. As Margaret had the great good sense to marry someone who was also a singer, I thought it would be lovely to make her song a duet for them and chose Rodgers & Hammerstein’s People Will Say We’re In Love. I have been ambitious (and perhaps presumptuous!) firstly in adding duet writing to the original, with an additional solo line based on the original piano writing and secondly in making the final refrain a duet (or perhaps a duel!) between the soloists (as the lovers) and the choir (as the chattering neighbours, the ‘people’ of the title). This works on paper but is yet to be tested in rehearsal…
No.7 Kraftwerk’s ‘Autobahn’ for Timothy Thornton, our original accompanist
“Wir fahren, fahren, fahren auf der Autobahn”. Kraftwerk’s original is a pioneering piece of electronic music celebrating the motorway, at a time when it was a modern wonder. “We are driving on the motorway. The road stretches before us in the glittering rays of the sun”. This is one of the songs of my childhood and I was delighted to find that the blocky chords of the original fit straight into three voice lines, (almost as if it had been written originally for ladies’ choir..). My jangly accompaniment deliberately uses only one line of music, so that it could be played on a synth keyboard balanced on a stand by someone wearing a black poloneck…
No.8 ‘A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square’ for Cath
The challenge here is that the solo line, written for a low alto voice, has to fit in beneath the other vocal lines, so the melody is on the bottom and the accompaniment on the top. This made me feel that I should create something very different from the original writing for voice and piano, which is the other way round. I felt that Cath’s melody would not need support from the other vocal lines and this gave me a lot of freedom to choose what the other parts could do. In the song, the Mayfair streets are an enchanted land; the air is full of magic as well as the nightingale’s song and I wanted to convey some of this magical quality in the writing, imagining the solo line with a dusting of chords above it and adding some little references to the nightingale’s song.
No.9 ‘It’s Raining Men!’ for Lucy
This is a wonderful song and if you haven’t watched the extraordinary video of the Weather Girls singing it on YouTube, then you should do so immediately (see the link at the bottom of this page). I have added a second solo line (there are, after all, two Weather Girls) and have had a lot of fun with the SSA accompaniment.
No.10 ‘This Nearly Was Mine’ for Max
From the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical South Pacific, this song is sung by Emile when he believes that he has lost his beloved, although their story ends happily as she is reconciled to him. I have tried to bring out the gentle, wistful tone of the original, as the singer imagines what might have been and have also added musical references to the exotic and mysterious South Pacific island of Bali Ha’i, where some of the show’s story unfolds.
No.11 ‘Skyfall’ for Amy
Adele’s original is pure Bond glamour, in fact the original James Bond theme is woven into it. I have used every note and imagined the repeated notes of the opening as the covert transmission of a ‘numbers station’. These are secret short-wave radio stations, whose broadcasts consist of impenetrable strings of numbers believed to be coded messages to spies operating abroad. My other addition is to include some of the words from Tennyson’s Ulysses that are used in the film: “We are not now that strength which in old days mov’d Earth and Heav’n, made weak by time but strong in will to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.”
No.12 ‘There’ll be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover’ for Rosamond
This is our tribute to Dame Vera Lynn in the year of her 100th birthday. Alongside the melody in the final verse I have added excerpts from another famous song of WW2, Ivor Novello’s We’ll Gather Lilacs. I’m not sure why I connected the two, perhaps because both are about the longing for peace and for the return of loved ones. They are linked in a little motif given to Rosamond’s solo line “Tomorrow…when you come home”.
No.13 ‘Lay me low’ for Jess
I heard this at the National Theatre’s mesmerising production of the York Mystery Plays. John Tams was in the cast and sang it in in the scene depicting the birth of Christ. Because of that, I have always heard it as a devotional song, a prayer for strength and sanctuary.
No.14 ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ for Cat
An original setting of words from the poem by John Keats inspired by Debussy’s Sarabande from Pour Le Piano. The nightingale’s song uses the resonance of the piano to create a wash of overlapping harmonies and the dream-like opening lines are set to music that ‘floats’, in the sense that it is not anchored into any one key, both things that I noticed and admired in Debussy’s writing for piano. The original poem is very long and contains many different moods; I have chosen from it the lines that evoke for me the experience of standing in the darkness listening, surrounded by the shadows and scents of evening.
No 15 ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ for Pamela
The original setting by John B.R. Whitfield is a duet for soprano voices, cleverly crafted, in that the voices are in canon, but not suitable for the choir. I loved the melody, which captures the whimsy of Edward Lear’s poem and retained this as a solo line for Pamela, adding some nonsense of my own in new parts for chorus and piano; miaows for the Pussycat, twit-twoos for the Owl and some deliberately sublime writing for the Turkey That Lives On The Hill.
No 16 ‘Bethlehem Down’
Bethlehem Down was composed for a Christmas carol competition in 1927, but sounds as if it is centuries older. Its composer Philip Heseltine went under the name Peter Warlock, perhaps also to place himself in an earlier age, and was fascinated by the beautiful, angular harmonies of Tudor music. The words were written by his friend, the poet Bruce Blunt. One of my aims in arranging the piece for choir was to differentiate the verses (which in the original are sung to the same melody) and to this end I have added new vocal lines and a new piano part, so I hope that you will hear the starlight in the second verse.
No 17 ‘I Believe in Father Christmas’ for Jools
‘I Believe in Father Christmas’ was released as a single by Greg Lake of the supergroup Emerson, Lake & Palmer in 1975 and has been a Christmas staple ever since. Peter Sinfield, lyricist for many ELP songs, wrote the words, drawing on his own childhood memories of trees and tinsel. Although both Lake and Sinfield have spoken in interviews about Christmas as a season of peace and goodwill, a deep sense of disillusionment runs through the song. Perhaps the world betrayed their belief in the magic of Christmas? Sinfield is quoted as saying of the lyrics “This is getting a bit depressing. I’d better have a hopeful, cheerful verse at the end.” However, even this is ambivalent, ending with the words “The Christmas we get, we deserve..” I felt that there was no room for ambivalence at Christmas (or for uncertainty about the existence of Father Christmas) and so have added a properly cheerful finale. I hope that Messrs Lake & Sinfield would approve.
Watch this space for more…