Interview with David Maddux
David Maddux is a New York-based arranger and composer whose varied and storied career includes serving in such roles as resident music director of Seattle Civic Light Opera, A-list Nashville session singer, and consultant to Disney Entertainment. He has arranged and orchestrated revues and materials for Harvey Fierstein, Rosemary Clooney, Lily Tomlin, Lesley Gore, Nell Carter, and countless others. His a cappella jazz vocal recording, An Evening In December, was nominated for a GRAMMY award.
David has been publishing his arrangements with ArrangeMe since 2017.
ArrangeMe: How did you get started arranging?
David Maddux: I started playing piano by ear when I was a really young kid, like five years old. And I thought I was getting in trouble with my mom, when she would come into the room where the piano was, expecting to see my sister at the piano when I was playing solfeggiettos and Debussy's "Clair de Lune" and so forth, and she thought it was her. And so I got sucked into piano lessons right away. My very first piano teacher started me associating the note on the keyboard, the note on the page, and learning to write it. I learned notation from the get go. As I grew up, I moved to another piano teacher who was a fantastic, very fluid gospel style pianist and she would teach me an hour and a half lesson, half of which was classical piano and half of which was gospel improv. So through her, I really started to develop my arranging thinking at the piano and it just kind of took off from there. I started writing pieces for church and sketching out things for musical theater in high school. And I just had all kinds of opportunities and it just sort of rolled from there.
AM: What does your arranging process look like? Has it changed much over the years?
DM: I've been very fortunate in that the mechanism for thinking up an idea for an arrangement or actually creating a concept for an arrangement has come very naturally to me. I mean, something will spark, or I'll be talking with the client about what they want and that will trigger something and I'll think, ‘Oh, wait a minute. If we did this and this…’ and it all tumbles out from there. I'm sure other people do this the same way. You get a single hook, an idea for something you want to do in the second half of the first verse that gives you a concept for, ‘Oh, then I could do this in the chorus. And this is the intro and the tag at the end.’ The more you arrange, the more facility you develop in just knowing what your own process is. How you listen to this idea and turn this one down. I love it. It is my personal drug.
“The more you arrange, the more facility you develop in just knowing what your own process is.”
– David Maddux
AM: I always like to think about arranging like a big puzzle: how do you make the pieces fit?
DM: And as you go through an arrangement too, you find that every arrangement has its own little vocabulary. You know, you're not just gonna put every idea you can think of there. Certain things as you go, you'll think, ‘well, this bit is actually not really in keeping with the rest of this,’ and other things will suggest themselves that are in alignment with it, so once you're done, you actually have a cohesive arrangement that sounds like itself.
AM: Where do you find inspiration for arrangements?
DM: Anywhere, everywhere! Where don't you find inspiration for arrangements? It can be like a five second moment in a Pixar movie or some little vocal hook off of a commercial on TV. For me personally, I'm very influenced by film scores of all kinds, and classical and contemporary musical theater scores. Those two things influence my sound a lot. Not that that's always a jumping off point, but those flavors almost always play into what I'm creating. More often than not, a lot of the inspiration comes directly from the client that's actually asking me to arrange something. Either they have a specific idea or they're suggesting a specific song. And I think, you know, if you're kind of feeling wild, we could go this direction with it. That's part of what I love about collaborating with a client is that they will come up with ideas and you bounce some back. And between the two of you, you wind up with something that's, that's really cool, and bigger than the sum of its parts.
AM: What is your most popular arrangement thus far?
David’s composition “Michael’s Letter to Mama”
Performance by the Portland Gay Men’s Chorus
DM: I would say that the most popular piece of music that I've ever created, which I'm just about to polish and put on ArrangeMe, is “Michael's Letter to Mama”. It's been around for a long time. In the early nineties I was acting as the staff arranger for Seattle Men’s Chorus, a very large chorus in the Pacific Northwest and they were gonna put on a program that was featuring books by author Armistead Maupin, and his series Tales of of the City. They were inviting him in to read part of the texts of his books. And they were interspersing pieces of music for an evening concert. And the director asked me if I would take one of the most important texts, out of Tales of the City, where one of the main characters Michael Toliver, is in a hospital bed and it occurs to him that he needs to write his own coming out letter to his conservative parents in Orlando in the early seventies. And the text of this is so beautiful and so powerful. And I thought, ‘Wow, this is kind of a big moment.’ And this is one of those things writers have. These experiences where you just sit down and you start writing and it just, it flows out of you. It tumbles out of you. You can't stop it. You're just a stream of consciousness. This particular piece of music is original. It's Armistead Maupin’s text from the book and it's my music. It's about 12 minutes long, but I think I wrote this in a couple of hours. It just fell out.
This particular piece of music has been performed by men's courses and mixed choruses, literally all over the world for decades. I would say that is my most performed piece of music. In a short time it's going to be available on ArrangeMe in its original TTBB form.
AM: Very cool. That story is powerful. We can't wait for you to publish that piece! So, what is your favorite arrangement? Is it “Michael’s Letter to Mama” or something else entirely?
DM: I have to say in thinking about what is my favorite arrangement over the years, my favorite arrangement is always the one that I'm working on at the moment. I just love the process of creating. I feel like the most fortunate person in the world that I get to do this. Create stuff from my own imagination for people that are going to perform it in darkened auditoriums in front of audience members I will never, ever meet. The arrangement of the moment is inevitably my favorite one until I move on to the next one. I’ve been an arranger composer for 50 years now. And over the years, I've changed a lot. I've matured. I've broadened my perspectives and my influences. So it's like every era of my career I'm sure there was a standout, but I never keep track of that. I never keep score.
David’s best-selling ArrangeMe chart is “Spirit of the Season” from the film Polar Express, arranged for TTBB Chorus.
AM: Your website davidmaddux.com is one of the most sophisticated sites that I think I've ever seen from an ArrangeMe user. It's really brilliant. How was the site developed and how do you use it in conjunction with your social media accounts to promote your music?
DM: I built the website myself. I just have a commercially available build-your-own website package and download plugins and so forth. I built all the graphics, and it didn't always look like it looks right now. At the beginning it was creaky and kinda clunky. But it was important to me to have a platform where a user could come in, see a thumbnail of the title and go, ‘Ooh, what's that?’ And click on it and be taken to a page where you get a little description and indication of what the instrumentation is, what the performance time, the running time of the arrangement is, and hear an audio demo and be able to page through the piano vocal score and then also to have clickable links where you can go and purchase the piano vocal score and, or the instrumental parts. That was the big goal. And I finally streamlined it down to just that. Maintaining your own website is a lot of work. There are a lot of bells and whistles and a lot of stuff can go wrong in the background. But having a platform like this to display and introduce an arrangement, I love it. It's fun. It's great. I think it's really beneficial for users that come and browse around and find material. And I'm a big tech geek, so yeah figuring out the bells and whistles was really great. And then being able to plug into, say, Facebook, invariably I will do, you know, a few posts a month on Facebook saying here's what's new in the catalog, or I have this new idea for a full two-act revue for a chorus. And here's the blurb and take people from Facebook or other social media sites to the website.
AM: What do you find most rewarding about arranging music? And then the flip side of that, what is the thing you find most challenging?
DM: Years ago, it used to be that you would sit down and arrange a piece of music. Even if you worked on a computer, and printed it out and went to a copy store and printed a whole bunch of copies and FedEx’d it to your clients. And of course, now I sit at the computer with incredible sounds that play back instantaneously as I'm writing. I finish off the scoring parts and put it up on ArrangeMe and the client downloads it and I get paid. Hello, that's stinking great! That's the business part of it. The thing that I love most is interacting with a client who has an idea or a partial concept for a piece and comes to me and says, can you make this happen? And to come up with a concept that I'm excited about, that I hope they will be excited about . Bring that to life, make that happen, send it off, knowing that it's gonna get put in front of players and singers in an entirely other city. Or knowing that it's gonna be a live experience that you create you've contributed to. That's the coolest, coolest, coolest thing. I love that.
The most challenging thing is when, either because of my own state of mind or the suggestion of the client, I'm just not feeling the song. I mean, writers write from an emotional place or they tap into their emotions and sometimes you just ain't got it, you know? Or, or the song is just so completely... colorless, you know? There is an adage for arrangers and that's that a great arranger can take a mediocre song and make it sound wonderful but no one and nothing can save a truly bad song. But I mean, sometimes, the best thing you can do in that kind of a circumstance is step back, take a break or continue the next day, if you can. And new, fresh ideas always show up.
“I finish off the scoring parts and put it up on ArrangeMe and the client downloads it and I get paid. Hello, that's stinking great!
”
– David Maddux
AM: Looking back over your several years in this business, is there anything you'd change about how you started out selling your own music? Is there anything you wished you'd learned sooner? Any assumptions that you made early on that you had to correct?
DM: Oh boy. Yeah. The difference between when I first started and today primarily is finding rights to arrange a piece of music. Early on, before the advent of the internet, you would have to dig and find some way to get in touch with the publisher and make a cold call or write a letter and hope that they would get back to you. I mean, just nightmare stuff. Frustrating and endless. Which is why I'm such an ArrangeMe addict. It's like, oh my gosh, I don't have to dig at all. I just type it into the search engine. Is it available? Oh, there it is. Boom. And one of the biggest advantages to the ArrangeMe platform, I'm starting to get my clients signed on as signatories to ArrangeMe so that even before they call me to ask for an arrangement, they themselves go to ArrangeMe to see if it's available for me to arrange. They'll stumble across something they hadn't thought of, so it's a catalyst for creativity. It's just, it's a total win for the arranger and the client. So the fact that the licensing is taken care of in the background automatically, that's a piece I wish I would've known how to do early on and I just did not have resources for it.
AM: Well, you knocked out the next question, which is what's your favorite thing about the ArrangeMe platform, to which your answer is perfect. It's a remarkable tool!
DM: Oh, I mean, have been on the phone with clients where they're envisioning or brainstorming like a music revue of the songs of the 60s or something. And I have the ArrangeMe search open on the browser in front of me as I'm talking and I can actually check in real time. Can we get this? Can we get that? I mean, it's perfect. It's ideal, it's great.
AM: So you've alluded to some of your clients so far, the Seattle Men's Chorus, for example. For those that don't know, tell us about the GALA Choruses and how you began working with this network of men's choruses nationwide.
David’s arrangement of “Dancing Queen” by ABBA.
Performed by the Seattle Men’s Chorus
Sheet music available here
DM: In 1992, I believe, I was back in Seattle and got a call from the director of the Seattle Men’s Chorus saying, “I'm aware of your work, and would you like to arrange for us?” That was my first experience writing for a gay men's chorus. And I just sort of tumbled into it. It was theatrical, it was highly musical, very professional with high production values and tons of people coming to see concerts. And I became aware that there are other courses like this around the country.
So in 1983 An organization was formed: GALA Choruses, Inc. With offices in DC that create a hub for some, well, these days, some 200 LGBTQ choruses men's, women's, and mixed choruses in the United States, Canada and Mexico, providing resources and organizational tools, support of all kinds. Also, GALA choruses every few years puts on a festival where choruses from the three countries I mentioned, and also from other countries around the world, come and perform for each other. It's a whole week long. And you get to see and be inspired by the way different people handle different materials. Some are very legit and some are very theatrical and everything in between. So I write for gay men's choruses, women's choruses, mixed choruses ensembles, and that has just kind of mushroomed. That's nothing that I really sort of went after it just sort of came out, so to speak, and it's been wonderful. It's an extremely creative venue for me to do wild, fun, very moving and powerful stuff in a wide range of applications. Yeah, it's made for a pretty colorful catalog for myself and I’m really very fortunate to be able to write for these organizations. I love it.
AM: Indeed. I'm also curious about writing specifically for a TTBB ensemble and men’s chorus, which makes up most of what you offer through ArrangeMe and your website, correct?
DM: Yeah. That's true.
AM: What are the things about writing for a men's group that you enjoy or that you don't necessarily get to explore from an arranger's perspective in other voicings or formats?
DM: Taking, for instance, something from a female pop artist, and having to translate a solo R&B artist to a 4-part men's chorus and make that sound legit and not forced. I just completed a Whitney Houston review that was premiered by Heartland Men's Chorus in Kansas City. Sean Cohen is the director there and he produced, wow, just a dynamic show. In working with him, I made the focus not so much on how Whitney Houston sang her songs, which for a male chorus would be pretty impossible, but what her original songs were. Making the focus on treating the songs as songs you remember, not just her performance. Some of them I treated in an R&B style like hers and others I completely turned around. That kind of thing, writing for men's chorus, that's the biggest challenge and the biggest joy. Taking a theater tune or something classical sounding and really making it work … do you want unison or 2-part here to make this not seem too heavy? Or do you wanna expand something? Figuring out a different treatment to make it sound legit and organic to a men's group is a cool challenge. I dig that, it's fun.
AM: Ok, we have a question from Luke in Nashville, TN, an ArrangeMe user who was inspired by your work to pursue a career as an arranger, particularly from your writing on the An Evening in December project recorded by First Call (1985). Here is Luke’s question:
“While many arrangers are focused on writing for amateur groups, you had the opportunity to write for some elite session singers on the An Evening in December project. In what ways did you spread your wings for that group that you may not be free to do for other projects?”
DM: This is where again, I feel like the most fortunate person in the world. Early on, like in the 70s, I got introduced to Gene Puerling's Singers Unlimited and hence his previous work with his group, the Hi-Lo's from the 50s and 60s, but in the 70s I had never heard anything remotely like this. And it just electrified me. So in 1984, I'm living in Seattle, I'm thinking I'm gonna go into the recording studio here and I'm gonna create my own arrangement of “Lo! How a Rose E’er Blooming,” and I'm gonna sing all the parts, multi-track all of the parts, make it in five or six parts, put it on cassettes, and send it out as my Christmas card. And I absolutely did that. And I sent one copy to an old friend that I had worked with who at that time was the president of Word Music, which was then in Waco, TX. And at the beginning of 1985, he called me and he said, “We wanna do an album of this stuff!” Now, bear in mind that at this point, sophisticated jazz harmony, multipart a capella music was not really a thing yet. Gene Puerling had done it with Singers Unlimited, but it was not, you know, worldwide. And he said, “I’ll give you two options: you can either work with this new studio trio in Nashville. We'll add some more singers. Or we'll send you to London and you can record this album with John Rutter's Cambridge Singers.” That would've been a completely different album (with the Cambridge Singers)! Don Cason was still the president at that point, but he connected me to Neal Joseph, who was the executive director in Nashville. So Neal had me arrange these things and I put all the sauce on the pancakes, right? He had me actually kind of dial it back in some ways, because he was afraid that it would be too much, too soon. So I came into Nashville with this stack of arrangements, you know, wondering is, is this even gonna sell? Is there a market for this? And it was a hit. So consequently, I mean, because they had given me pretty much free reign with a few modifications here and there, after that I was looked at as ‘we don't understand what he does, but just let him do his thing.’'
And so, I mean, I was, after that point, I was really hired to do whatever I could think of for the most part. I have been incredibly fortunate in that respect. I have not been a mainstream arranger, but I don't think I would want to be. I wanted to follow kind of where my ears took me and that opportunity was just laid in my lap.
AM: What a story, what a story! Would you give us a couple of three or four artists that you went on to work with after that in the season where you got to kind of do whatever you wanted?
DM: So we recorded An Evening in December in Nashville, and I think it was June and July. Great time to do a Christmas album. Bonnie, Marty, and Mel (First Call) sang soprano, alto, and tenor obviously, and I sang bass on the project. And of course I was flown in from Seattle, was living in Seattle at the time, but they said, if you were living here in Nashville, we would have you working all the time. And I ended up moving to Nashville in the fall of ‘85 and lo and behold, I became one of the primary session singers. But because of that and getting to arrange for Greg Nelson, I started writing and performing on Sandy Patty albums, Larnelle Harris, and other popular Christian artists of the 80s. And from there it just kind of snowballed. And of course I'm still writing for men's and women's courses all over the place and they're bringing in guest artists. Seattle Men's Chorus is doing a tribute to Rosemary Clooney, so I'm writing charts that she's singing on. And Debbie Reynolds and Leslie Gore and I mean I can't say that any one of those is a favorite because I still think of them like ‘that really happened?!’
AM: That's wonderful. David! So at this point in your career, what's your 100-foot wave? What are you chasing?
DM: I have to say I've gotten to this place that I'm really comfortable in not knowing what is happening next. I have over the last few years started to greatly expand my interest in film scoring and orchestration for animation. There are several things on SoundCloud and my YouTube channel that are examples of my film scoring and I'm really paying a lot of attention to that. That's my current passion. The biggest joy for me right now is just being in the moment and ready to grab what drops into my lap and, and I'm incredibly grateful. I will always be grateful that stuff continues to drop into my lap. That's just amazing stuff. Fun stuff.
“[ArrangeMe] has made my business and the accessibility of my writing so fluid and so stress-free and such a joy to work with ... it has been such a boon to my career.”
AM: That's a testament to your professionalism, skill level, and your commitment to the work. I don't think you have to worry about the phone not ringing as long as you wanna keep doing it!
DM: Yeah, I will say this, not to gild the lily here, but it is greatly the fact that my own website and my arrangements get funneled into and out of ArrangeMe. Man, that has made my business and the accessibility of my writing so fluid and so stress-free and such a joy to work with. I will say that the changes that have been made to the ArrangeMe website in the process of putting up a new tune, it's fun. It's the coolest thing. And I feel so fortunate to not have to try to dig up the publisher and find rights and, it's all there. And that part of the creative process man, has been such a boon to my career. It really has.
To find out more about David and his music, subscribe to his YouTube page, follow him on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, and be sure to visit his outstanding website DavidMaddux.com.
