Blue Springs1 is a very small town in southern Alabama. It comes across as a quite desolate, lonely town - with less than 100 inhabitants. I wanted to capture this desolation when I passed through the town late at night needing to fuel up our car.
I sat on the hood of the car and wrote the lyrics and the opening chords of the piece.
This piece is probably the piece where I used the voices in the least "creative" way, since there are lyrics most of the time and the voices do act as the main melodies almost all throughout the song.
After the first verse, there is a small interlude, where the voices are being used as a backing, doubling the oboe, the english horn and the trumpets (Example 1). First they are doubling them with lyrics and then with the last syllable of "peacefully" going into the doublings on the vowel "ee", which is a sound that makes it possible to imitate the more direct and sharp sound of double reeds and trumpets, especially in Voice 3, who is singing along with the first trumpet.
I tried to include the voices as seamlessly and integrated as possible in passages where the whole band is playing.
In Example 2, in the four-bar interlude leading up to the first chorus, I used the voices as doublings for higher ranged instruments (the trumpets, flute and english horn), using these horns in their mid range to make them blend warmer and softer together with the voices, who sometimes were in a quite high register already. This is also why sometimes the blending didn't work out as smoothly as we might have wanted to, but all in all, I was pretty happy with how it turned out.
In the interlude after the first chorus and solo, the full band is playing a sort of "tutti-special" (Example 3).
The vocals are included in this special with their own voices. They double part of some horns, but also change in which instruments they double and play their own rhythms. This way, the timbre of the human voice that adds a new colour to the whole ensemble wanders around the band and keeps the lines interesting. However, the fast sixteenth-note quintuplet line in the first two voices made it a bit hard to blend nicely with the other instruments playing the same rhythms, as voices use a very different attack in faster lines, and can't just "press a button" to change the note, so there, the voices are quite present in the whole sound of the band.
1 Langley, Rivers. "Blue Springs Alabama." Wikipedia, 30 Oct. 2011, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Springs,_Alabama. Accessed 23 Dec. 2022.