The Sound of Broadway Music


Book Description

This title examines the careers of Broadway's major orchestrators and follows the song as it travels from the composer's piano to the orchestra pit.




Mixing a Musical


Book Description

When mixing a live show, for the first time or hundredth time, there are countless things running through your mind, foremost- this is live and you have to get it right! Whether you are working on Broadway, in a regional theatre or on the school production, having an understanding of the equipment, set up, and how sound behaves is crucial to the success of your show's performance. In this guide to live sound mixing for theatre, Shannon Slaton shares his expert knowledge and proven, effective techniques acquired from years of experience working on Broadway shows. Written in a clear and easy to read style, and illustrated with real world examples of personal experience and professional interviews, Slaton shows you how to mix live theatre shows from the basics of equipment, set ups, and using sound levels to creating atmosphere, emotion and tension to ensure a first rate performance every time.




The Broadway Sound


Book Description

The remarkable career of composer-orchestrator Robert Russell Bennett [1894-1981] encompassed a wide variety of both "legitimate" and popular music-making in Hollywood, on Broadway, and for television. Bennett is principally responsible for what is known worldwide as the "Broadway sound" and for greatly elevating the status of the theater orchestrator. He worked alongside Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers, and Frederick Loewe on much of the Broadway canon, eventually providing orchestrations for all or part of more than 300 musicals between 1920 and 1975. This work is the first publication of Bennett's autobiography, which was written in the late 1970s. It also includes eight of his most important essays on the art of orchestration. George J. Ferencz is Professor of Music at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater.




Broadway Beat


Book Description

(Music Express Books). Do you hear that beat? It's the sound of people entering the theater on the most famous street in the world. It's the sound of dancing feet and orchestras tuning up. It's the sound dreams are made of. It's the sound of Broadway! Celebrate musical theatre with hits from Hairspray , The Music Man , The King and I , Wicked , Rent and Grease , and a medley of favorites from George M. Cohan! This unique musical collection for upper elementary and middle school students features seven kid-friendly arrangements for unison voices, piano accompaniments, and fun facts about Broadway by John Jacobson. Extend learning further with a Broadway timeline, board game, and recorded history with music excerpts spanning over a century of song and dance. It's the beat of Broadway and nobody can stop it! Available separately: Teacher Edition, Singer Edition 20-Pak (full color), Performance/Accompaniment CD, Classroom Kit (teacher, Singer 20-Pak, P/A CD). Duration: ca. 25 minutes. Suggested for grades 4-8.




The Sound of Music


Book Description

(Vocal Score). Vocal score with 15 songs from one of musical theatre's masterpieces. Includes: Climb Ev'ry Mountain * Do-Re-Mi * Edelweiss * The Lonely Goatherd * Maria * My Favorite Things * Sixteen Going on Seventeen * So Long, Farewell * The Sound of Music * and more!




Broadway


Book Description

(Applause Books). A companion to the six-part PBS documentary series, Broadway: The American Musical is the first comprehensive history of the musical, from its roots at the turn of the 20th century through the smashing successes of the new millennium. The in-depth text is lavishly illustrated with a treasure trove of photographs, sheet-music covers, posters, scenic renderings, production stills, rehearsal shots and caricatures, many previously unpublished. Revised and updated, with a brand-new foreword by Julie Andrews and new material on all the Broadway musicals through the 2009-2010 season.




Sound Play


Book Description

Video games open portals to fantastical worlds where imaginative play and enchantment prevail. These virtual settings afford us considerable freedom to act out with relative impunity. Or do they? Sound Play explores the aesthetic, ethical, and sociopolitical stakes of people's creative engagements with gaming's audio phenomena-from sonorous violence to synthesized operas, from democratic music-making to vocal sexual harassment. William Cheng shows how video games empower their designers, composers, players, critics, and scholars to tinker (often transgressively) with practices and discourses of music, noise, speech, and silence. Faced with collisions between utopian and alarmist stereotypes of video games, Sound Play synthesizes insights across musicology, sociology, anthropology, communications, literary theory, philosophy, and additional disciplines. With case studies spanning Final Fantasy VI, Silent Hill, Fallout 3, The Lord of the Rings Online, and Team Fortress 2, this book insists that what we do in there-in the safe, sound spaces of games-can ultimately teach us a great deal about who we are and what we value (musically, culturally, humanly) out here. Foreword by Richard Leppert Video Games Live cover image printed with permission from Tommy Tallarico




Come from Away


Book Description

From the bestselling author of Tides of Honour and Promises to Keep comes a poignant novel about a young couple caught on opposite sides of the Second World War. In the fall of 1939, Grace Baker’s three brothers, sharp and proud in their uniforms, board Canadian ships headed for a faraway war. Grace stays behind, tending to the homefront and the general store that helps keep her small Nova Scotian community running. The war, everyone says, will be over before it starts. But three years later, the fighting rages on and rumours swirl about “wolf packs” of German U-Boats lurking in the deep waters along the shores of East Jeddore, a stone’s throw from Grace’s window. As the harsh realities of war come closer to home, Grace buries herself in her work at the store. Then, one day, a handsome stranger ventures into the store. He claims to be a trapper come from away, and as Grace gets to know him, she becomes enamoured by his gentle smile and thoughtful ways. But after several weeks, she discovers that Rudi, her mysterious visitor, is not the lonely outsider he appears to be. He is someone else entirely—someone not to be trusted. When a shocking truth about her family forces Grace to question everything she has so strongly believed, she realizes that she and Rudi have more in common than she had thought. And if Grace is to have a chance at love, she must not only choose a side, but take a stand. Come from Away is a mesmerizing story of love, shifting allegiances, and second chances, set against the tumultuous years of the Second World War.




The Oxford Handbook of The American Musical


Book Description

The Oxford Handbook of The American Musical offers new and cutting-edge essays on the most important and compelling issues and topics in the growing, interdisciplinary field of musical-theater and film-musical studies. Taking the form of a "keywords" book, it introduces readers to the concepts and terms that define the history of the musical as a genre and that offer ways to reflect on the specific creative choices that shape musicals and their performance on stage and screen. The handbook offers a cross-section of essays written by leading experts in the field, organized within broad conceptual groups, which together capture the breadth, direction, and tone of musicals studies today. Each essay traces the genealogy of the term or issue it addresses, including related issues and controversies, positions and problematizes those issues within larger bodies of scholarship, and provides specific examples drawn from shows and films. Essays both re-examine traditional topics and introduce underexplored areas. Reflecting the concerns of scholars and students alike, the authors emphasize critical and accessible perspectives, and supplement theory with concrete examples that may be accessed through links to the handbook's website. Taking into account issues of composition, performance, and reception, the book's contributors bring a wide range of practical and theoretical perspectives to bear on their considerations of one of America's most lively, enduring artistic traditions. The Oxford Handbook of The American Musical will engage all readers interested in the form, from students to scholars to fans and aficionados, as it analyses the complex relationships among the creators, performers, and audiences who sustain the genre.




Enchanted Evenings


Book Description

This new second edition of Enchanted Evenings offers theater lovers an illuminating behind-the-scenes tour of some of America's best loved, most admired, and most enduring musicals. Readers will find such all-time favorites as Show Boat, Carousel, Kiss Me, Kate, Guys and Dolls, My Fair Lady, West Side Story, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George, and Phantom of the Opera. Geoffrey Block provides a documentary history of each of the musicals, showing how each work took shape and revealing, at the same time, how the American musical evolved from the 1920s to today, both on stage and on screen. The book's particular focus is on the music, offering a wealth of detail about how librettist, lyricist, composer, and director work together to shape the piece. Block also includes trenchant social commentary and lively backstage anecdotes. Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hart, Kurt Weill, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, Frank Loesser, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and other luminaries emerge as hardworking craftsmen under enormous pressure to sell tickets without compromising their dramatic vision. The second edition includes a greatly expanded chapter on Sondheim, a new chapter on Lloyd Webber, and two new chapters on the film adaptations of the main musicals featured in the text (including such hard to find films as the original 1936 version of Anything Goes and the 1959 film adaptation of Porgy and Bess). Packed with information, including a complete discography and plot synopses and song-by-song scenic outlines for each of the fourteen shows, Enchanted Evenings is an essential reference as well as a riveting history. "A solid and fascinating work that should become a model of how to investigate and report on the evolution of a musical. Block's research is persuasive and his writing vivid. . . Indispensable for anyone who cares to know more about Broadway musicals than Playbill can provide." --Steven Bach, The Los Angeles Times Book Review