Choral Arrangement for When the North Pole Melts

by Captain Sea Level


Here is a 1.1 meg file with the arrangement for bass, baritone, two tenors, one soporano or alto, and melody.   Other files have the lyrics and guitar chords.

Errata and More Arranger's Notes

1    The soprano.  In the 1988 recording, the soprano is inaudible most of the time because she lost her voice practicing the part the night before, so we mixed her way down.  That's the first tenor hitting that "F" at the end.  So if you only have five voices, I would omit the high part.
2.    Introduction.  I didn't write out the introduction, but it is the same as the first line for the chorus, except nothing but oo's and ah's.  
3.    Ho and Ho-ho-ho in the third and fourth line.   The tenors get to sing "ho-ho-ho" in the first measure of the third and fourth lines for verses 1, 2, and 3, while the bass, baritone, and soprano sing a "Ho" for the "Hole" note.  In the fourth verse, by contrast, all voices just carry a legatto "Ho" all the way through the first and second measures--those eight notes really become quarter notes.   The bass gets his ho-ho's in later, of course.  
4.    Variations in the third verse.   The 1988 recording had both a long and short version, with the latter omitting the third verse.   We thought the song was probably too long.  But other variations in the mixes left the poppin p's even more pronounced, so the radio stations played the long version instead.  At the time, it seemed to me that the only way to get people to play such a long song with so many words, was to give some variation to the delivery of the verse.  I can not speculate on whether you would need to do this, so I'll just tell you about what I was thinking and what we did:  In the recording, the chorus sang the first and second verses the same as always; but Walter, Carl,  and I came into the booth to record a second melody track to represent the Australian Labor Party and some Russians (then part of the Soviet Union). The Australian Labor Party just sings melody.  As Russians, Carl and I sang melody one octave lower than the verse is written; Walter sang the same words and rhythm as us, but sang the same pitches as the bass. John's baritone part did the same thing for that line only.  (Kirby and the two tenors sang the entire verse the same way as always.)   By doing it this way, we were violating a general rule of choral arrangement, which is not to have people down in the bass cleff singing intervals less than a fourth--we had thirds and seconds.  Doing so creates an annoying, muddy sound.  But for 4-6 bars when you are trying to call to mind some Volga Boat Men, it seemed to work.   Live,  we had the baritone and bass do what John and Walter had done, and one of the tenors and I sang melody an octave lower.  The higher tenor and soprano joined me in singing "the currents can do the rest".  As a general point, it doesn't seem to matter much whether the higher voices sing the melody or their part while helping with the 3rd-verse lyrics.
5.    Oops:  The bridge between the verse and the chorus.  Note that this version of the chart omits the shift back into 4/4 time for verses 1,2, and 3.  So write that in.   Note that in the fourth verse, Santa only has four ho's and everyone is singing quarter notes for "When the."
6.    In the last measure of the chorus for verses 1,2, and 3, melody helps to create two chords by backing off on the volume to become part of the mix.  Depending on the verse, you may need to take a breath, and backing off into the mix makes the breath less obvious.
7.    Oops.  You need to annotate that the bottom of page 5 is the ending of the chorus for verses 1, 2, and 3; and the final line on page 6 is the ending for verse 4.