Thanks to all for a wonderful discussion. Most of what has been said
aligns with what I've found, too, but it's been helpful to have my
own experiences confirmed by others and expanded upon. I agree with
almost everything said, even in cases where there seem to be
contradictory views -- for I think we all recognize that this is a
situation inherent in contradiction. We're all familiar with the
disjuncts between how it was originally intended vs what it has
become, how it ought to be vs how it really is, what I would ideally
like to do about it vs what I'm actually going to do given my time
and budget.
For my immediate job I'm going to go ahead and do a straight
transposition, and I'll do the necessary cross-staffing and clef-
changing to make it reasonable for the pianist.
In this particular case I happen to have another problem which I
didn't even bring up: what happens if the singer wants it in a key
that the piano part resists? It turns out that my singer's favored
key is Db major, which would be all right except that there's a
couple of chromatics that become Bbb and, worse, the bridge modulates
to what would be Gb minor which becomes a nightmare of accidentals
Having tested both, I'm going to write that section as F# minor. The
switch from flats to sharps and back again offends both my sense of
aesthetics and of theory, but the reality is that it's much much more
readable that way.
On the general question, of course I know that most published
accompaniments leave much to be desired. I've occasionally gone the
whole way and written a "real" accompaniment, which can be very
satisfying, but I'm certainly not going to do that all the time.
This reminds me of another observation about accompaniments. Several
on this thread have commented that the ideal accompaniment will vary
depending on the voice, the key, etc. I've found that the idea
accompaniment even depends, much more than I would have expected, on
the lyrics. Of the accompaniments I've written over the years, the
one that has achieved some circulation outside my local circle is one
for Danny Boy. (I originally wrote it for myself and later self-
published it.) This melody has a couple of lyrics that are reasonably
standard, plus plenty more that aren't. One singer contacted me and
asked me to provide a copy with a completely different set of lyrics
of his own devising, and I obliged. There was nothing wrong with his
lyrics per se, but when I put them to my accompaniment and played
through it, I didn't like the match at all. I wasn't conscious of it
at the time, but when I wrote my accompaniment I instinctively shaped
it to the meaning of the words being sung. When applied to a new set
of words, which may have had a similar message on the whole but with
lots of different emphases along the way, it was not nearly as
effective.
But did I write a new accompaniment for him to go with his words? Nope.
mdl
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