Dedication
I would like to dedicate this research to my dear dear friend - incredibly talented composer, arranger, saxophone player and conductor - Benjamin Knecht.
He was a big influence in the big band scene in Lucerne, Switzerland, and was on the way of getting more and more established in the Swiss jazz scene in general. With his big band, the Benjamin Knecht Jazz Orchestra, he recorded an amazing album and went on two swiss-wide tours.
Sadly, Benny lost his battle against cancer in the summer of 2022. He was one of my biggest inspirations for including more vocalists in big bands and large ensembles and he was also the one that got me into researching more about this topic.
Thank you Benny, for the amazing, creative and valuable times we have spent together, you truly were an inspiration to us all.
We all love and miss you very much.
Introduction
The voice has been an integral part of music since humankind started to make music. It’s „presumed to be the original musical instrument.“ (Koopman)1
Danish writer Otto Jespersen wrote: „In the beginning was the voice. Voice is sounding breath, the audible sign of life.“ 2
For me, singing has always been an intrinsic part of my life. Some of my earliest memories are me singing with my mother, and when I finally met my father again when I was 18, he was singing non-stop; in the car, whilst walking, cooking, shopping... I saw so much of myself in this, and it inspired me even more to pick up my studies in Jazz Vocals.
Through my bachelors, I started writing my own music more and more. And it was when I was introduced to the music of Kenny Wheeler by my then arranging-teacher Ed Partyka, that I saw a new way of using the voice in jazz ensembles. I had fallen in love with the sound of big bands and large ensembles already from examples my teacher showed me. I started looking for more and more, but often was kind of disappointed in the role of the vocalists. I loved listening to giants like Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra in front of a big band, and I loved singing tunes like this as well. But again, when I discovered Kenny Wheeler, a lot changed for me.
A lot has changed in composition for big bands since its golden era almost 100 years ago. I am happy to see modern big bands and large ensembles including vocalists in a more instrumental, free and creative way. But still I see the voice being used in one quite definitive way, it mostly doubles another lead instrument and gives the full band a different texture and color.
Through this love I had found for arranging and composing, I chose to do a master's degree in composition, with my main teacher being Ed Partyka again.
With him, I dug deeper into what kind of music I wanted to write and what kind of composer I wanted to be. I found a deep appreciation for writing for vocals again and decided to write for four vocalists and a large ensemble mixing more typical jazz instrumentation with classical instruments.
In the process of writing that program, I explored many different ways of how I could use the vocal-section in connection with the whole band, without the vocalists just being the presenters of the themes.
So, I wrote a program mixing the vocalists role as lyric-interpreters and instrumentalists, as being soloists and singing in mixed sections yet also as an added section to the ensemble.
After finishing my masters in Switzerland, I came to the Netherlands to pursue a second master's degree in Jazz Voice. Since I was still very much interested in learning even more about the possibilities of including the voice in large ensembles, I decided that this was an ideal subject for my research here in Den Haag, and thus, I found my research question:
„How can a voice section be used in large ensembles in different ways of arranging?“
I want to look at the possibilities of using a voice section as an integral part of a large ensemble or big band, and to show that there are many possibilities in using the voice as just another section of a large ensemble.
Methodology
I conducted my research in 5 phases.
PHASE 1 - COMPILING
In the first phase, I compiled as much material of pre-existing compositions and arrangements including voice(s) for analysis. I looked at what had been done with the use of voices in more unconventional ways before me and extracted important inspiration for my handbook.
I bought scores from John Hollenbeck and Dan Weiss. I also reached out to former composition teachers of mine: Ed Partyka, Martin Fondse and David Grottschreiber. They all provided me with various scores of the Vienna Art Orchestra, John Hollenbeck, Martin Fondse, Ed Partyka and Kenny Wheeler.
PHASE 2 - ANALYSIS OF OTHERS WORKS
In the second phase I analyzed all the scores I compiled. I researched how the various composers used vocalists in their music.
I also specifically looked out for a more unusual use of the voices, especially in the scores of Martin Fondse and Dan Weiss, who are using multiple vocalists in their compositions.
PHASE 3 - ANALYSIS OF MY OWN WORK
For the third phase, I dove deeper into my own work. In 2021, I graduated from the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Composition. For my final recital, I composed a program of roughly 60 minutes for a large ensemble of 26 musicians, including four vocalists. Doing this project really inspired me in formulating my research plan to apply for the Royal Conservatoire, so I saw it fit to go through my scores once again and look closely into how I used the four voices in my own music. Also, I wanted to see how many of the things I wrote for voices were done so on purpose, and what things I did more intrinsically.
PHASE 4 - THE HANDBOOK
After the analysis was done, I moved on to the fourth phase. There, I put together everything I had learned from phases two and three and wrote a small handbook for composers and arrangers wanting to use more vocalists in their band. The goal was to compile all the tools I exctracted from the analysis and research I did together in one place.
PHASE 5 - REFLECTING & CONCLUDING
After finishing up all these steps, I reflected upon the progress and the work that I did in these two years in Den Haag so I could come to a final conclusion of my research.
Limitations
I limited myself in a few ways to keep this research concise and to a point. How to implement different ways of using the voice in ensembles could fill an entire book, just as many books have been written about the same topic with horns. So I wanted to take one specific constellation and explore the different ways in only this constellation:
I specifically looked at arranging/composing for a voice section of 4 female vocalists. This is what I wrote for in my concert program two years ago, and what I will write for in my graduating project at the Royal Conservatoire in June 2023.
On the theoretical side, I was a bit limited in the literature that had already been written for my specific situation. There are a lot of books about arranging for larger ensembles, and some of them also include writing for voice.
But the literature for writing for multiple voices is very sparse. It is mostly literature for composers and arrangers of (jazz) choirs, as well as a capella settings, which is not the direction in which I was going to with my research.
In looking at some scores, especially some of the ones who had not been officially released, I often found some chaotic passages, where stuff was wrongly notated, or very freely interpreted on recordings. I also spent a long time trying to contact people from the Vienna Art Orchestra for some vocal scores (even the original singer herself - who did not come back to me). The scores of the pieces I could find were often other arrangements for other instrumentations (this was also often the case with Martin Fondse's scores) where I either had to analyze without an audio example, or had an audio example without the actual score to back it up with.
In the more practical part later in my research, I also had to limit myself in how I would showcase my arrangements for the handbook. Because I was not working with one fixed instrumentation of a large ensemble, and because it was not possible to get that many musicians in time to record the small snippets of arrangements without it costing me a great amount of time and money, the audio samples of the arrangements in the handbook will be taken from Sibelius with the AI-software "Note Performer".
Also, a note here for the remainder of this research: I use the term "horns" or "horn section" in the way it is meant in "big band lingo". A horn section means all the blowing instruments in a big band (including trombones, trumpets, saxophones and all their potential doubling instruments like flutes, clarinets or flugelhorns). If I mention a horn in F, it will be called a french horn in this research.
1 Koopman, John. “A Brief History of Singing.” A Brief History of Singing, 1999, http://www2.lawrence.edu/fast/KOOPMAJO/brief.html. Accessed 22 Dec. 2022.
2 Jesperson, Otto. Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin. George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1968.