Friday, November 26, 2010
Monday, April 26, 2010
Music Performance Report 2
Welcome back fellow follower. What an amazing semester this has been. I am very sad to report that this will be my last blog post and I hope that I don’t disappoint you. I am writing the Performance Report of my music class over a recent musical that the University of Texas At Dallas was hosting. This musical was Side show. The storyline starts off introducing these two Siamese twins who are part of the circus. Upon meeting these two men who promised to train them and their voices to make them a wonder of the world. They leave with these men to hopes of one being famous and two finding love. After trials and tribulations, in the end the twins end up with each other.
The Performance was quite a show starting off with a song. Everybody in the cast was dressed in costumes even the people that didn’t participate actively, meaning the manual labor people were even dressed. They dressed to give a sense of being a circus ambiance. The costumes and personals that were displayed consisted of a bearded lady, a cannibal King dressed in a loin cloth, normal city people, belly dancers, snake charmers, chicken eater, fortune teller, reptile man, and the head of the circus. At first it seemed like all the dialogue was sung but there actually were some parts that the dialogue was just speech. It was pretty interesting to see that the crew of Side Show amplified their voices by have a square microphone on the middle of their forehead. Sometimes in monologues, while one person was speaking all the other people were frozen lead the audience to focus their attention on the speaker. I believe the one two was and alto and the other was a soprano.
The Music of Side Show, the first song, Come Look At the Freaks was very loud and had a very fast tempo which caught the attention of the audience immediately as if the light didn’t give that clue. All the lyrics sung were memorized which gives the audience a sense of how much time and effort the cast put into to making Side Show very professional. From, what I heard each phrase of the songs all rhymed. I believe the rhyming scheme for most song was A:B:A:B. Many times I heard one twin sing the melody while the other sang the harmony. Buddy and Terry, the two male leads of the show sang with much emotion as displayed on their facial expressions. Buddy was definitely a tenor while Terry was a baritone.
The Audience of this show on Thursday night especially because it was free, I saw a wide variety of people in seats. It funny to see that even though the ages of the audience ranged from 18 to seventy seven, the back was mostly filled with students while the front were filled with the elderly people. The audience clapped after every song and every act. There was comic relief during the musical which did illicit laughter among the audience members.
The time and space of the Side Show consisted of being held at University Theatre. This particular production had many props. They had a freak sign, stairs on wheels, signs that told the audience which scene that cast was performing, and the heart-shaped chair which was used during the song the Tunnel of Love. The floor was decorated with the colors red, yellow, and blue with five circles and the red circle was in the middle. The lights always dimmed when the show about to start. Dr. Stone had his own TV screen to see what the audience saw because his back was facing the crew members’ back so in order to cue the orchestra correctly he need to know what was going on. There were moments when the different light would shine on the performers creating a shadowing effect on the curtains as well as the stage. Side Show indeed proved to show all the elements of a music performance.
Words Cited
Side Show. Bill Russell. Director Kathryn Evans. UTD. University Theater, Richardson, 16 April, 2010.
Evans, Kathryn. Program notes. Side Show.16 April, 2010. Richardson. UT Dallas University Theater.
Monday, April 19, 2010
Rock Post
Welcome back fellow follower, the blog post that I am going to write about today is about a subgenre of rock music. This subgenre is call psychedelic rock. The perfect example would have to the beach boys. They created many songs in which replicated the feelings of the high of using drugs. In many of their songs used rock elements which were the reason why they are considered to be in the genre of rock music. Often, they used electric guitars and they had small ensembles. This group of guys also had an emphasis on singing. One great example would be of their song “Wouldn’t it be Nice”. Although this song isn’t specifically psychedelic rock it also fits into another genre of rock and that subgenre of rock would be soft rock. In, this song you could hear electric guitars being played as well as seeing that they were really creative in using the technology of the time by creative an album. One psychedelic rock song the screams to me when psychedelic rock comes to mind would have to be that song “Somebody to Love” by Jefferson Airplane. Both of these songs employ certain techniques in the lyrics to get a certain emotional response from the audience and that is one of the many elements of rock.
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