Hallelujah -- Adventures in LilyPond

I really like writing music. Not composing, that's probably beyond my capacity, but creating new sheet music from scribbles or rearranging songs.

As usual, my favorite tool is a non-IDE, non-WYSIWYG program, in this case LilyPond (http://www.lilypond.org/). LilyPond allows me to use gVim (http://www.vim.org/) as editor and to think of the music as text, with the beautiful display of notes as a reward when the work is done. And LilyPond produces really pretty music, IMHO more so than most WYSIWYG tools I've seen so far.

Now, my choir leader asked me to put together a version (Yet Another) of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. What he had was SAB notes for five verses, all of them arranged differently. He wanted me to select three verses (and consequently to choose three of the verse arrangements).

The straightforward thing to do would have been to transcribe the existing notes into LilyPond notation and assemble the thing from there, but for some reason I decided to search for existing LilyPond notes for Hallelujah first. I did find some nice notes, but in G major instead of A major which we were going to use (the original is in C major), and in 6/8 time instead of 12/8 (which didn't matter much). It's very easy to transpose notes in LilyPond, but working with text notes in G major and proofreading in A major was a major bother (every note being off by one, as it were).

Because of this, it took me a lot longer than usual to get the notes and chords completely right. At the same time, I was trying to choose three verses that would make a satisfying whole. Jeff Buckley put together the most famous cover, using five verses (''I heard there was a secret chord'', ''Your faith was strong but you needed proof'', ''Baby I've been here before'', ''There was a time when you let me know'', ''Maybe there's a God above''). Cohen's lyrics have two more verses (''You say I took the name in vain'', ''I did my best, it wasn't much''). Basically, all of these verses are good, strong poetry. It's said Cohen wrote 80 verses, presumably not all top notch, before he managed to pare them down into a song.

''I heard there was a secret chord'' isn't one of the best verses, but it's hard to imagine the song without it, so I kept it as the initial verse. I took the unison women's voices arrangement and added men's voices to it, still in unison. The refrain would be the same for all three verses, a full SAB arrangement. For a second verse, I chose ''Baby I've been here before'' in a SA arrangement, without men's voices. The main reason for choosing this verse was the ''Love is not a victory march / It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah'' pair of lines. Now I had three or four verses left screaming for attention, but in the end ''I did my best, it wasn't much'' won out. I think it's a very satisfying ending to the song, which may be why most covers leave it out. The first half is sung by the men, with a SA ''O___ O___ A___'' backup. The second half of the verse is a full SAB arrangement: I considered letting the men sing all of it alone, but decided the climax should have as many voices as possible.

I really like this song. Both the music and the lyrics resonate with me on a fundamental level (I realize this isn't a unique sentiment, this being one of the world's most popular songs). Editing it into an arrangement for my choir was a bit of a dream come true. Even though I made labor-increasing mistakes in the beginning, it was very enjoyable and rewarding work.

I dedicate my work on this song to the memory of R.M.