Arrangement Workshop - Lesson 2

In this session it was a workshop based around arranging a song of our choice. We were given the sheet music with chords and lyrics for a few songs and from this we picked I Will Survive by Gloria Gaynor. We chose this because it allowed a challenge as this is a very well known song that we wanted to adapt and change. Something that is clearly well known about the original is it is upbeat tempo and we wanted to change this to focus on the lyrics which upon reading without the music are actually quite sad. We took the tempo and made it slower, and even when the audience would expect it to get faster we remained it at the same tempo and just layered the texture. The emotion that I got from it was a weak reassurance that the person 'will survive' and therefore we also wanted to look at it from both angles of the relationship, thus using a female voice and a male voice at different parts during the song. A relationship is about two people and we wanted to convey this in our arrangement. Another musical technique we used to communicate a melancholy feel was sustaining notes in the vocal part that normally wouldn't be sustained in the song as this suggests a desperation. In the original there is quite a thick texture in terms of lots of instruments and this is something we also wanted to change and took a more simplistic approach instrument wise and just had the piano. Then as it approaches further on in the song the tempo picks up as the echoes in the vocals become apparent to layer the texture so that it makes it engaging for the audience but still keeps it quite simplistic. The final musical technique we used for the piano to express the emotion of the song was at the end I took it up the octave and played broken notes up there to give the piece a calmer, sadder atmosphere to end on to reflect the negative effect of the relationship and the situation.

Original:

                                                       (Wesley Tai 2007)

Our Arrangement: 

https://soundcloud.com/musicianship-1/i-will-survive (Musicianship-1 2016)