We went to the Boston Pops, joined by the Metropolitan Chorale tonight, and they have a marvelous arrangement of "The Twelve Days of Christmas" which includes numerous musical jokes. You can find that here.
I was surprised at how many of the vocal arrangements were SAB instead of SATB, with the bass line being carried by the cellos (or sometimes the double bass).
2 comments:
SAB and SATB mean nothing to me. Bells not rung. HUH?, I say. Please to explain.
Soprano-Alto-Baritone vs Soprano-Alto-Tenor-Bass. The women's voices are divided into two harmonies, the men sing together rather than dividing into higher and lower harmonies. I tended to think of SAB as the easy route for arrangers when I was growing up, because high school choruses use it a lot, not having enough strong male choral voices. I thought the full four-parts, such as in Handel's Messiah or older hymns, was the "real" way to do harmony.
Though I heard many SAB arrangements in my lifetime, I must still have thought that, because I was surprised that a professional chorale, which clearly would have an abundance of strong male voices to draw on if necessary, used it so much.
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