Musical Hotspot

Singing in a Group

2010-11-18T22:59:00.000+10:00

Luke gives some tips on working as a musical group

In improvised shows, a lot of our singing is with other people. Duets, trios and choruses abound, where we join forth in a unified sound of genius... or something to that effect. But, unless you are doing regular music jams together, sometimes it can be hard to get into the swing of things. So today we will be looking at a few tips at getting into your groove a bit quicker.

A Strong Opening

In improvised group songs, normally someone will lead out with a chorus or verse. If you are the one leading off the song it is important you establish a clear structure for everyone else to follow. It is a lot of responsibility, but you will need to set up the initial tone, melody and structure of the song. Once people can clearly see it’s an AA BB rhyming structure with a rousing double time feel it will give them the hook to reinforce it (with, say, a chorus or tilt such as a sad character coming in with a half time feel).

It is important with the opening stanza to platform; a song, like a scene, is only as strong as the foundation it is built on.

A Chorus Line

When it comes to singing in the group setting, you will almost invariably come to a chorus. If the opening has established the chorus we should all be on the same page as to the melody and the lyrics of the song. So if we aren’t thinking about what to sing we need to think about how to sing it.

The trick with good choral singing is not to have a multitude of people singing the same thing at the same time really well, but to have a group of people singing well together. It may seem to be a case of splitting hairs but it is a subtle and important distinction. Generally you should not be able to pick out a specific voice in any choral piece.

So, with that in mind, there are a few things you can do to help out with the blend. If you have a louder, more powerful voice, you could be mindful of holding back a little bit so your voice doesn’t stand out as much. Also if you know your voice is a bit brassy you can aim to soften it out a bit for the choral pieces. Naturally warmer voices will generally find it easier to find this blend as their resonances and harmonics generally will fit into a wider range of vocal tones.

An important part of finding this group cohesion is to ensure you do your vocal warm-ups together, and make sure you get your bodies nice and loose. If you are fully warmed up and the voice is relaxed you will find that your voices will blend more naturally.

Big Finish

Its always nice to have a big tag on a group song but it is very easy for a great song to be ruined by a lacklustre or incoherent close. It is usually best to let one person take the lead and for everyone to yield to their idea for the close. It is important that the person taking the lead clearly signifies this either physically or vocally. This can be achieved simply by stepping forward or by coming in louder on a chorus. A big dynamic close can be a great way to cap off a brilliant song or to bring the audience back after an uninspired offering.

In conclusion

While some of these simple tips might get the ball rolling, the best way to working on group singing is, unsurprisingly, to sing in a group. If you can get together with your fellow improvisers and musicians to work through some ideas and sing together, you will notice an improvement in your group songs.

Photo by Joe Moore

Interview with Robbie Ellis

2010-11-03T22:23:00.000+10:00

Robbie has shorter hair now. Really.

Friend of Musical Hotspot, Robbie Ellis, was interviewed recently by Renée Liang for New Zealand website The Big Idea. Robbie has a pretty varied musical background, studying, writing and performing music, as well as working on radio as a presenter and producer. He's also one of New Zealand's most experienced improv musicians.

Read the article "Cultural Storytellers: Robbie Ellis."

The interview gives a fascinating insight in to his thought patterns when underscoring a long improv story, especially the way he anticipates impending changes in the story, to allow for it in the music. (I can see only what is just barely around the corner; it sounds like Robbie can see down the street and clear in to the next suburb.)

The article was timed to help promote an improv show by NZ's ConArtists, a long-form musical called Austen Found - The Undiscovered Musicals of Jane Austen. Their season finished at the end of October, to rave reviews! I'm always ecstatic to see an improv show getting reviews in major or even minor press, and this show scored big, with positive reviews in The New Zealand Herald and NZ's National Business Review.

Congratulations on a great season, Robbie!

Three-Way Chorus Circle

2010-10-20T22:54:00.002+10:00

Back when we were discussing counterpoint, it sure sounded like a difficult sort of technique to learn. There's an exercise that makes it all much easier. If you're teaching a workshop, or working with your group on new techniques, it's worth giving this a try.

This exercise is based on another one we've covered earlier, Chorus Circle. Chorus Circle tries to teach participants the value of a simple, repetitive chorus, while reinforcing that non-driving team members can contribute and support very effectively by shadowing the singer.

In this exercise, which we will call, um, Three-Way Chorus Circle, we divide the class/group up in to three chunks, kind of like you'd do for Emotional Symphony. Just like Chorus Circle, you pick a title or inspiration for the song, and get cracking on a vamp that will support a chorus. Instruct just one of those groups to cook up a simple, mid-speed chorus that fits your music and the inspiration for the song. One intrepid volunteer from that group sings the chorus once through, then everyone else in that group sings it through once or twice.

Now that the first group has committed it to memory, keep the same vamp going and do the same exercise with a second group. The second group should construct a more wordy, faster paced chorus.

Then do the same with the third group, but create a less wordy chorus with nice sustained, soaring notes.

Finally - get group one to sing their part, layer group two on top, then add group three. They'll all sing compatible parts at different speeds, and they'll overlay quite nicely. If you can, conduct them! Raise and lower the volume of groups.

When we tried this at a recent workshop, I found that once all three groups were running, I could happily change the chord progressions in the accompaniment, and it all still held together very well.

Last, find a way to signal an end, and bring it to a close.

Hopefully you'll discover how easy this is! Even better if you can put it in to practice and pull it off during a show. If you find you're on stage with people that have done this exercise, you'll all get it, and hopefully find yourself doing some fantastic counterpoint.

Photo by Rusty Sheriff. Written by Kris Anderson.

You Can Never Go Home

2010-10-06T23:06:00.004+10:00

Most songs (impro or otherwise) tend to revolve around a root chord, their home chord. A song in the key of C might start with a C major chord, meander around to other places, but keep checking in back to C major. But not always. You can create a certain tension in a song by avoiding that home chord.

I've become addicted to Katy Perry's song Teenage Dream lately. (Hear that? It's the sound of any musical credibility I had, smashing to the ground. Stick with me, ok?) On the first listen I found something about it fascinated me, but I wasn't sure what. The lyrics are all about a new beginning with a partner, and all the fantasy and excitement of a potential shared life. The music is in Bb, and features the usual assortment of 4ths, 5ths and minor 6ths. But it never, not once, hits that root chord.

To me, avoiding that root chord introduces a lot of tension. That tension builds and never releases. I find this is completely consistent with lyrics that dream about a wonderful future. The progression in the song sings of happy potential, without ever touching down in reality.

This reminded me of a song we did in Worst Side Story. Extraordinary Day was one of the great lovers' duets from that show. In the preceding scene, the couple is dreaming about their white-picket-fence life they'll have together. That song had a pretty similar device where the music completely avoided the root chord. Hopefully it set up the right sort of feeling of anticipation. It did eventually come back to that root, right as the song finished.

I'm fascinated by how specific chord progressions or tricks can inspire specific feelings and emotions. I relentlessly hammer a hero-chord-progression for a recurring character in one show, and now it is his theme. There is a dissonant chord called the Devil's Chord that invokes fear and oppression, and I've discovered it in a theme for another recurring character, arguably the darkest character in that show.

I suspect there's a whole school of musical theory around stuff like this, and I'm only just glimpsing it. My formally trained musician friends are at this point laughing at my childlike intellect. (Or they're still laughing at the Katy Perry song. Not sure which.)

Photo by Cornelia Kopp. Written by Kris Anderson.

Lists

2010-09-22T23:36:00.000+10:00

Dan shares another song-trick: using lists.

There are impro scenes that have depth. Scenes that touch the heart. Scenes that make us step up out of the absurd and actually make a statement about the human condition.

And then there are hoop games.

A hoop game is a scene that makes the performer work his brain hard and fast like a little fox terrier leaping through a plastic ring.

There's nothing wrong with hoop games. They're very entertaining and you can't have nice Christmas dinner without some ham. Indeed, I would put to you that any improvised song is a hoop game. There’s already a handle on the scene that forces the performer to use an unrelated skill to impress the audience.

Hoop games involve something that's a little tricky to do but looks impossible. This week's trick involves lists.

There are songs in pop culture that do lists. Kids' songs are the first port of call. "Old MacDonald", "Dry Bones" (foot bone connect to the leg bone), and the ultimate list song "1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12" from Sesame Street.

But you'll see it in novelty pop songs too. "Opposites attract" by Paula Abdul is a list of behaviours in a partner. "I'm Too Sexy" by Right Said Fred has a list of unrelated items that he compares to his sexiness.

The great thing about a list is that you always know where you're off to next.

Is it a song about the weather? Each successive line can be inspired by rain, sun, sleet, snow, tornados.

Is it a song about Monopoly? You've got hotels, train-stations, going to jail, free parking, collecting $200.

The little pocket of chaos that a new word provides can give you the spark of inspiration that you need.

Each time you sing about a list of elements, you're setting a platform. You're making a promise to the audience. Keep your list going and every successive item will trigger the delight of recognition. If you keep that promise your audience will be happy. If you can tilt that promise at the end they'll be ecstatic.

There are dozens of ways to sing an impro song. This is just one option when the opportunity presents itself. Give it a little practice and using lists to create songs will be as easy as one, two, three...

four...

five.

Photo by Matt

Counterpoint

2010-09-15T00:05:00.003+10:00

A few weeks back, we talked about how you can pace your lyrics, varying the speed of an improvised vocal around the music. The music is going to set a particular pace, and it might suggest a pace for the melody to follow, but as the singer you can take it slow or run at double-speed. That's all good if you're a solo singer. What if you are performing a duet?

An incredibly effective technique for a multi-singer song is to have the singers overlapping each other, but singing at different speeds. Perhaps one is moving along with a stately, slow vocal, and the other is zipping around with a rapidfire line. The two will sit nicely together. The audience will probably get only a sense of the lyric from each, instead of being really tuned in, but the two will still combine to make something bigger than the whole.

In a two-singer situation, probably the best combination I've seen is to have one person hitting a medium- or quick-tempo line, and a second doing a sweeping sustained, soaring vocal line.

Wikipedia has a quite informative entry for counterpoint, from the perspective of traditional classical music. (I'm awfully impressed with Wikipedia lately. It has surprisingly detailed entries for many things. Kids wanna know something? Wikipedia.)

The really crazy thing about this technique is that it sounds so difficult, but it is actually pretty easy. A class I taught a few weeks ago had a mix of about half rookies, half pros, and they took to this technique like ducks to water. We kicked off with an exercise to really illustrate the technique, then launched in to some scenes where we had two- and three-singer counterpoint going. There's something about a well executed counterpoint that really pushes my buttons, in a good way - if you do it right, it is impressive enough that it could have been something that was composed and planned.

I assume (given I'm not on stage trying to pull the singing part off myself) that the hardest part is to shut out the other singers and avoid synchronising with their melody or tempo.

In lieu of a wonderful improvised example, this week I've got a song by Jason Mraz. His stripped-down original demo for I'm Yours is lovely and clean, and really focuses on the vocal. Have a listen to how the verse in the song is fairly rapid, and the chorus is sung much slower - another good illustration of pacing lyrics. Around 3:10 (on this version of the song) he layers the verse and chorus over each other, creating a lovely counterpoint.

Michael Pollock goes in to more detail on contrapuntal techniques in his book, Musical Improv Comedy. I've pushed his book before. You should buy it.

In a few weeks I'll go in to more detail on a great teaching exercise to help people get the hang of counterpoint. Stay tuned!

Photo by Wally Gobetz. Written by Kris Anderson.

Gifting yourself a song title

2010-09-08T20:30:00.001+10:00

In his first Musical Hotspot post, Dan helps convert a plain offer into a great one.

They say that there "are no bad offers".

This is true. But there are some really, really good ones. There are offers that inspire. There are offers that make you or your partner's eyes light up with possibility. Being inspired by your offer is never more important than when you're making up a song. Every great Impro scene has some strong emotional relationship in it. This is the case for songs as well, but whereas in a basic scene you've got time to explore and discover this relationship, in a song you need to make your mind up immediately.

But that's okay, because sometimes you can give yourself this offer.

With this in mind you need to take your bland offer (for instance 'Cows') and turn it into something with an emotional attitude.

Think about what could be an emotional experience for a cow. If a cow cared about something, what would that be?

Giving birth to a calf?
Getting to grass?
Becoming a steak?

If nothing occurs to you, imagine an emotional response to the cow. Most songs are about love, but find any strong emotional state and you've instantly got your first verse.

I love you, cow.
I hate my cow.
Why did you leave me cow?
I don't need you anymore, Bessie.

The last trick is to use the offer as a metaphor. I tend to avoid turning an offer into a metaphor (or a simile) because there is an element of wimping there. You're not accepting the full impact of the offer, but a song is one of those games that can get away with it.

My love for you is like a gurnsey.
I'm not going to be your dairy cow anymore.

All of these ideas give a motivation. It's a shorthand that allows you to figure out why you're singing about the cow. There's nothing that inspires less confidence in a performer than one who starts their song "Once I met a cow...". It simply tells the audience "I don't know what to do". Of course, none of us know what to do, but the trick is to look like you do.

As an MC you can help your performers out by giving loaded offers. Natalie Bochenski stumbled onto the rather brilliant trick of giving offers for songs that read "My love is like a...". This instantly forces the performer to go down the metaphor route. Myself? I often provide odd relationships. It’s easier to sing from the point of view of a character because we're focusing on what they want rather than flailing for a clever storyline.

An offer of 'Bigfoot' might yield a song that begins "Bigfoot was walking through the snow".

An offer of 'Bigfoot and the Cryptozoologist' is much more likely to provide something like "All my life I've searched for you, there's an empty footprint on my heart". The offer is filled with motivation and purpose.

Selling these offers is about playing them seriously. If you want to make a funny song, you'd better be able to pump out the funny. You're much better off trying to emulate an emotional song. The ridiculous offer will carry you. You don't need to introduce any more wackiness if the song is from a cow's point of view about being in love with the grass it can't reach.

I think that's a situation we can all empathise with.

Dan Beeston started improvising in 1997 and hasn't stopped since. Well, I mean, he did when he went to Townsville for a couple of years, and then when he had a fight with the organisers, and of course he's not literally improvising all the time. He does sleep, and work, and stuff. Look, this has all gone off topic much faster than usual.

Photo by Terrance J. Sullivan

Challenge - Response

2010-09-01T22:58:00.002+10:00

Normally, in an improvised song featuring multiple singers, one singer will take and own an entire verse/bridge/chorus, and perhaps someone else might come in to do a different verse/bridge/chorus. That's just a convention of course - there are other ways to structure a shared song.

One of the devices I love in an improvised song is when the singers trade lines in a verse. One singer starts a verse with a line, and another singer does a rhyming couplet to continue. Simple! Well, except that the rhymer has very little time to construct a line that fits the story and rhymes.

As an aside - you know how I feel about sacrificing story for the sake of a rhyme. Don't do it. That said, this challenge-response technique in a song only seems to work if you can construct rhyming responses.

Any duet is going to have the best chance of success when there's a strong relationship between the characters. This challenge-response form can play on that very nicely. Two lovers might progressively up the stakes about how they feel about each other; foes might trade insults; friends might sympathise with each other over a common issue.

We've had a good example on Musical Hotspot previously, with Luke and Amy's song Best Friend/First Mate, where Amy repeatedly set up rhymes, and Luke knocked 'em down. But for this article we're going to concentrate on an example from Worst Side Story.

You're Nothing Without Us

This scene takes place fairly late in the show. Melissa/Messy is packing her bags to leave town with her love Napkin Ring, when her old gang members Fingers and Drive-In show up. They both want her to come back to the gang, and are trying to convince her she won't survive on her own. Fingers is taking a hard line; Drive-In isn't as good at hiding his feelings.

Listen to You're Nothing Without Us, then we'll look at some of the really good bits.

There are quite a few occasions in the song where the singers trade rhymes. Near the start, Tom Dunstan (Fingers) and Joel Gilmore (Drive-In) trade an opening line. As the song progresses, Kiesten McCauley rhymes with both Joel's and Tom's setups, throwing their taunts back in their face. Joel and Tom neatly trade rhymes in the first chorus; Joel and Kiesten in the second. I think this challenge-response works very well in this song with the different dynamics between the characters. There's a strong adversarial relationship between the gang and Messy on one side; there's a strong sympathetic relationship between Fingers and Drive-In.

Other things I like in this song:

This is one of those times when you can hear the piano make a very distinct "It is time for you to sing now! Sing!" offer. Usually I ease in to those situations, but in this one I think it was quite a strong offer.
Joel's setup for the chorus was brilliant - the "You're Nothing Without Us" was a perfect line, phrased just right.
Kiesten's final line really signalled a dramatic end to the song. With just the audio you miss her turning on her heels and striding off stage confidently, walking away from her old gang in a huff.
Joel's post-song coda was fantastic! I only wish I was on the ball enough to not accompany him when he sung that. (Homage to Homer Simpson. "Mono... D'oh!")

Only one more song to be featured from Worst Side Story, in a few weeks. Stay tuned :)

Photo by Al Caeiro. Written by Kris Anderson.

Any chords will do

2010-08-25T23:37:00.001+10:00

We had our annual Grand Final for our Youth Theatresports competition a few days ago. As always, a massive show - six of the best high-school teams in the state, playing in the round in front of a jam-packed hyped audience. Usually by this stage, the kids have a good handle on the game formats, with enough spark to create genuinely funny scenes, and a little dose of panic that comes from not-quite-mastering the games. Fun.

Before the show, one of the teams (one I hadn't played with much before) made a request of me - if they performed a Song, could I please take it a bit easy with chord progressions (something along the lines of "not more than four chords") and not make it too fast or too hard to follow. That's a fair enough request, especially for kids without much stage time. The "oh my goodness singing is hard" thing comes in to play as well of course. So they were pretty unkeen for me to bust out a lightning-fast complex thing like The Famous Polka.

I will admit that a request like that tends to push my buttons a little bit, and encourage me if anything to go more crazy to make a team move out of their comfort zone and work for success. However, when that team did choose Song, I restrained myself and gave them a pretty slow ballad. Speed as requested? Check.

BUT... did I respect the request for simple chord progressions? Nope, not at all. I started them out pretty simply, but as the song progressed got more and more complex and daring. Abrupt changes? Check. Complex chord progressions? Check. Key change? Check. Safe? No, not really.

Did they panic? No. Did the singing match the song? Of course! Even with all that complexity? Yep.

Why is that? For starters, no matter where the music was roaming, it always cued chord progressions with a walking bassline, and singers instinctively follow those cues and land on good notes.

The other thing is that a confidently delivered note, with good pitch and timing, is going to sound good. You might be a half-step away from a really nice sounding note, so a little course correction might be required, but often busy music can jimmy around behind a simple, stable melody and they'll compliment each other. Just hit that note and be confident.

The team, as it turns out, had quite competent singers; they put together some very clever stuff, and delivered their scene very confidently. They took home the trophy at the end of the show.

Photo by Liz Strnad. Written by Kris Anderson.

Close Your Eyes

2010-08-18T00:05:00.001+10:00

One of the most significant skills you have as an improv musician is being able to compose music on the fly in your mind, often in response to the happenings on stage, and realise that music through your hands and your instrument. All improv musicians will have cultivated this skill – without it, you aren't doing the job. Discussions on this skill come up very frequently in this blog.

I've found a technique that helps me with this is to practice with my eyes closed. I'll sit at the piano, close my eyes, centre myself, then put my hands on the keys and start playing. Sometimes I'll play real songs to see how well I can translate them blindly. On the flip side, I do find just sitting and improvising pieces to be tremendously satisfying, and I like the extra challenge from composing eyes-closed.

When you're improvising. this blind playing can provide unexpected catalysts for the music. You don't know where your hands are going to fall; you might start on something wonderful and strong, or something unsettling and discordant. There are no mistakes here – don't say "Oh, wait" and start again. Use it and build something out of it! You're creating music, and you should take the universe's suggestions (aka 'accidents') on board and use them to build and extend your composition.

Perhaps this activity is beneficial because it makes you focus, to really concentrate on the music and nothing else. Part of it is just getting familiar with keys and scales, learning to visualise where your hands are falling. This is the sort of familiarity with your instrument that you really want to cultivate.

Unfortunately, it means you are even more likely to play air-piano when you're walking along or driving, so apologise to your friends/passengers now for the stupid looking gestures you will be making.

One unexpected benefit I've found is that I can play in pitch black now when required. In our long-form shows we will usually go lights down in between scenes. Often the music wants to continue in the darkness to segue in to the next scene; if we are doing a directed show, there might be a voiceover to cue the next scene. Perhaps one scene ends with a bitter confrontation between two powerful characters, the lights go down, the VO indicates the next scene is with a lone, despairing gentle character. That offer specifically directs the music to change, and the change happens in the dark. I've found I'm often able to take the music from the old scene, find a resolution to close it, key change or otherwise morph, and begin something new to suit the direction coming from the VO. By the time the lights come up, I'm playing something different, and (most importantly) hopefully providing a nice platform for the emotional character of the next scene.

I know the idea of closing your eyes and playing sounds like a strange exercise to try, but have a crack at it!

(Next crazy thing I want to try: Composing without headphones or monitors so I can't hear what I'm playing at the time, and recording it so I can listen back to it. My expectations are low. I'll let you know how it goes :) )

Photo by e m ♥ i l y. Written by Kris Anderson.

Pacing lyrics

2010-08-11T23:18:00.002+10:00

(Boy, the blog entry titles just get worse and worse, don't they.)

Sometimes a musician performing an improvised song might strike up something very up-tempo and expect an improviser to jump in and start singing. Does the improviser have to keep up with something just as fast? No! Same goes if the musician plays something slow - are the improvisers required to sing something slow? No! The pace of the accompaniment and the pace of the vocal don't have to match.

You'll find that a nice medium-tempo accompaniment can often support not just vocals that match the tempo of the song, but rapid staccato vocals or slow soaring vocals as well. Now, I suspect rapid staccato vocals are more difficult, regardless of the speed of the music; the improviser has to think through and articulate many more words in a short space of time, which seems like a big challenge to me.

Michael Pollock discusses this in his book Musical Improv Comedy. (If this blog is interesting to you at all, and you haven't bought his books, you should definitely check them out.) He provides a few worked examples as well.

Being aware of this choice of speed can be quite useful as you're constructing a song. For example, you might choose to sing a song such where the vocal during the verse is fast- or medium-paced, changing to slow and soaring for the chorus. That light and shade can really help to develop a song and give it character.

Even more impressive is varying the vocal speed while having several singers singing simultaneously. (Seriously!) If you have an opportunity to have one person sing a fast-paced line, and another sing a medium-paced line, they can weave around each other to create a very complex-sounding piece. It's not difficult, but it sounds difficult.

This sort of concept is pretty hard to discuss without an example. Predictably, I have an example handy.

We Don't Need Them

The example this week comes from Worst Side Story. The song We Don't Need Them opened the second half of the musical. The first half ended on a very dark note, with a death, a relationship breakup, and the banishing of our two lead characters from their gangs. We knew we needed something upbeat to start the second half, something to bring up the audience's energy levels, and re-acquaint them with the story so far. The song is akin to a separated duet, but with two gangs instead of two lovers. Story-wise, this song takes place between the two songs featured a few weeks ago in Something's Gonna Change/Extraordinary Day.

Now, to illustrate changing pace in a lyric, we're going to focus on just one verse from the song: the second verse, performed by the always-excellent Amy Currie. Amy varies her delivery speed as she performs her verse. The first stanza is very quick (with fantastic rhyming):

In this fast food restaurant, everyone was damned
Until we came in here, now their napkins are monogrammed

Her second stanza is slower; she takes the same sort of content and stretches it across twice the duration:

Without my brother
Things are looking finer
Lets grab a tablecloth
And take it to the diner

Then she effectively does it again to tag her verse. The "We just don't need him, we just don't need him" line is double the speed of "We just don't need him anymore."

As always, I have some favourite bits of the song:

Tom's gruff speaking voice carries right in to the song.
Amy's opening statement about being on the other side of town, having a similar conversation. It sets up the separation nicely, with a nod to the audience.
I always really like when the improvisers can interleave talking and singing, and I think they do a great job in this song. Actually, I'm really impressed that the cast managed to put on credible American accents for the whole show without dropping them. Mostly.
Once again I abused Joel with an instant key change. He'd already started his verse, and with zero notice switched effortlessly in to the new key. (I tried to freshen each verse with a key change and sometimes a slight change in the feel of the song... just left it to the last minute for Joel!)
The counterpoint in the final chorus is excellent. It was a pretty simple lyric, which freed the singers up to experiment with the timing and sing over each other.
Right as the music started to hint at an ending, just as the characters were speaking their realisation that maybe they did in fact need the two outcasts, Joel nails the tag to finish the song, and everyone else jumps right on his bandwagon.

Fast/Slow photo by Ken Mayer. Worst Side Story pictures by Al Caeiro. Written by Kris Anderson.

Agatha Holmes - Destroyer of Walls

2010-08-04T06:25:00.002+10:00

Serves me right. I go and pronounce to the world that Breaking The Fourth Wall Is Always A Bad Bad Thing... and then I am shown the error of my ways.

We recently wrapped a season of Impro Mafia's Agatha Holmes, an improvised murder mystery. The show revolved around the five residents of Cadsworth Manor, a very proper 1940's English countryside estate. Each episode saw a visitor arrive, only to be murdered by one of the residents. It was up to the great detective Agatha Holmes to solve the crime, ably assisted by his sidekick Wastings.

Agatha Holmes followed the usual Impro Mafia convention of getting offers before the show, then (in the minutes before the show started) selecting several that seemed to give the best basis for an entertaining story. (More about the mechanism we use in a future post.) This way the audience provided both the murder weapon, and a clue that would help to lead Agatha towards the solution. Each audience member also voted for the resident they wanted to see as that night's murderer. (Sadly, there was a clear winner each night. Would have loved to see two murderers.)

One of the handles for the show was that Agatha Holmes himself (Greg Rowbotham) did not leave the audience's sight all night. He milled around with them before the show, entered the theatre with them, jumped up to perform in the first half, (excitedly) went with them for a drink at interval, rejoined the show with them in the second half, and eventually at the close of the show retreated backstage. Greg genuinely did not know who had been selected as the murderer or what the murder weapon might be. Sound familiar? It's basically a long form murder endowments game.

The fact that the great detective Agatha Holmes spent most of the night with the audience immediately means that illusion of an on-stage reality wasn't really a factor, for his character, anyway. Most of the characters couldn't see and didn't acknowledge the audience. Greg (as Agatha Holmes) would quite frequently turn and talk to them, or otherwise bust the bubble by somehow alluding to the fact this was a play instead of a reality. He did this. A lot. And you know what? It worked a treat. That character, because of the way the show was constructed could get away with it just fine.

Now, what tenuous connection am I trying to make between this and improvised music? Greg/Agatha did something no one's done to me before; I've never had a character stop the story to tell me to change the music! Harumph. Seriously, I don't know too many actors or characters that could do that and still have it make sense.

There are lots of good moments from the show where we broke the fourth wall. Agatha discussing how a will looked like a prop. Agatha getting in an argument with the audience as though it was a pantomime. (In fairness, everyone else started getting in on the act too.)

We had a custom theatre set for this show! It was complete with bookshelf-with-secret-passage and painting-that-slides-so-you-can-spy-from-behind. It was also only marginally structurally sound, and Agatha had a tendency to be rough with the set. I'm sure he remarked about the flimsy manor more than once.

One of my favourite happenings was when Agatha and his sidekick Wastings (David Massingham, the director of the show) were on stage reading a newspaper. The prop newspaper David grabbed from backstage was a local paper, which just happened to have an article on the show, along with a picture of Greg in costume as Agatha Holmes!

Something's Gonna Change/Extraordinary Day

2010-07-28T23:00:00.000+10:00

Lovers' duets can form some of the most memorable parts of an improvised musical. We've discussed them before, in a great series by Luke Rimmelzwaan, featuring New Lovers, Separated Lovers, and Bringing It All Together. All of those entries featured examples from One Bride for Seven Brothers, Impro Mafia's first themed fully-improvised musical.

Worst Side Story revolved around another couple. Luke Allan and Kiesten McCauley played those lead roles expertly, and of course they collaborated on several improvised lovers' duets. I've got two of them for you.

These two songs demonstrate some nice concepts, but they're more than just a few ideas and techniques strung together; as improvised songs, they were incredibly well executed.

They're probably some of the best examples of improvised lovers' duets that I've ever heard, and I'm so pleased I could play a part in them.

Something's Gonna Change

The story

Our story so far... Luke's character Napkin Ring has been established as the young enthusiastic pup of the Hoity Toitys. Kiesten's character Messy is the new recruit in Fingers' gang. They know each other by reputation, but have never met. The scene started with Messy joining up at Papa Chocolate's roller derby rink ("chocolate" and "roller derby" being two of the audience offers for the show). After a few minutes talking to Papa Chocolate, Napkin Ring arrives at the rink. Have a listen to the scene featuring Something's Gonna Change, and then we'll discuss it.

The scene

Rather than give you just the song, you can hear the scene preceding the song where Napkin Ring (who introduces himself as "Nappy") and Messy (calling herself "Melissa") meet each other. We really tried to take inspiration from West Side Story; when the couple met and instantly changed, irrevocably falling in love at first sight. Nappy and Messy experience much the same thing.

It wasn't hard to pick the point to start vamping in to a song. Once Kiesten's character said "I don't feel like I'm ever going to be the same again - from this day on", a song was inevitable :)

The song

Kiesten starts the vocal, following the very simple piano line. For the first verse, you can hear her very specifically lagging the bar to hear where the music is going to go, so she can follow along with the melody line. Once the form was established, she took over and started leading the bar. The biggest gamble was going for "In a way", hitting that note strongly and hoping the music would meet her there.

The chorus was really simple again. Just a single simple phrase, which Kiesten took from Luke's earlier song:

I know today
Something's gonna change
In the most extraordinary way.

Sounds a little awkward if you just say it; Kiesten set it really nicely in to that chorus.

Luke's reply verse didn't exactly match the form of the first verse, which is just fine in my book. What is important is the recall of the chorus, once it came around again.

Musically, everything was pretty simple, other than a few embellishments in the vocal gaps. I think the crux for me was that first chord in the chorus, a B on Eb. That first-inversion on B sort of gave a sense of building momentum, promise and potential - a good match for the theme of the song.

I recall freaking out at the beginning of Luke's verse. Right around 2:20, I realised I was about to rip off Bryan Adams' Everything I Do. Best not to go there.

I can also remember being really keen for the last strike of the song to feel a bit unfinished, I guess again reflecting that this was just the start of something big. The closure on the music did come eventually, as the scene played itself out.

Extraordinary Day

The story

A lot happens between that first song, and today's second song Extraordinary Day.

After Messy and Nappy meet, they have their first date at the roller derby rink, where Messy is pitted against Nappy's older sister Salad Fork, who also happens to be the reigning roller derby champion. When the gangs hear Nappy cheering Messy on and realise they are together, a rumble ensues, resulting in the accidental death of Papa Chocolate - apparently at Nappy's hands. Upset, Messy quits her gang; Nappy's gang kick him out for being disloyal.

Later, a mournful Messy is kneeling by Papa Chocolate's grave. The clip starts as Nappy arrives.

Now that you're all caught up, time to listen to Extraordinary Day.

The scene

I love this scene, and the way the dynamic between the characters changes. You'll forgive me for including such a long bit of non-music before the song; I think the journey the characters take, from cold anger through forgiveness to hope and optimism, is wonderful. The song seems to naturally cap off that transition; they couldn't get any more hopeful and optimistic using spoken words alone, but a song bursts through to a whole new level.

There's a mark of a successful poignant scene in here. There are moments where the 80-strong audience is deathly silent, and nothing is rushing to fill the awkward gaps in the dialogue or relieve that tension. Sometimes a quiet audience is a disengaged audience, but not this time - the audience is genuinely happy when Messy decides to trust Nappy, and they go absolutely crazy when she kisses him. If you recall back to the opening song, the audience was anything but warm at the start of the show, so to get them this warm is a great hint that the actors were nailing it.

The song

The song took me by surprise a little bit; in contrast with the very obvious signs in the earlier song, this one just sort of started. You can hear me fumble around a little bit as I figure out where I want to go. Eventually I remember that first-inversion structure from the old song - along with Kiesten and Luke's clever reuse of those 'Something's Gonna Change' and 'Extraordinary Day' phrases, we're reprising both lyrical and musical elements.

One of my favourite bits is the running joke about Nappy wanting a big family; his lyric in the song to keep the joke running was just excellent.

I really liked how Kiesten and Luke traded lines as the song progressed; Kiesten would set up a rhyme, and Luke would finish it (much like he did in Best Friend/First Mate).

I specifically recall as the song went on that I kept misjudging the end. There were a few times when I set up chord progressions that would naturally lead in to an ending, but as the next line developed it obviously wasn't going to be the end after all. After a few of those, Kiesten gave a very definite wrap-up signal with her "Because today" line, which then gave me permission to go to town and set up a nice musical ending.

Photo by Al Caeiro

Queensland Youth Theatresports Grand Final 2010

2010-07-22T22:40:00.003+10:00

The 2010 Queensland Youth Theatresports festival is coming to a close. The always exciting Grand Final is again at the La Boite Roundhouse Theatre in Kelvin Grove, and this year the action takes place on Sunday 22 August. Update: The show date has changed! The show is no longer Friday 13 August. The new show time is 2pm on Sunday 22 August. Tickets are available on-line from La Boite Theatre.

You can get more information about the show at the Youth Theatresports Grand Final 2010 page at the Sit Down Comedy Club website.

The Youth Grand Final is always a massive show, with amazing teams and an incredibly pumped audience. It sells out quickly too, so if you're looking for tickets, grab them as soon as you can. The teams will be great; some of the teams that were knocked out of the running in the semi-finals were just superb, and that speaks very highly for the ones that made it through to the finals. I've had a great time working with these kids in the heats, quarters and semis; I can't wait to see the stuff they pull out for the final show.

Shows at La Boite are always special to me; the first time I met impro it was watching shows at the old La Boite theatre (which was held together with gaff tape and spit). As a performer, there was nothing better than that moment just before the show starts, when you're lining up in the passageway under the seats, the lights go down and the audience goes ballistic, yelling and stamping their feet. Adrenaline rush! Not to mention that the old La Boite is where I first laid eyes on my wife Wanda, when she performed in a team with three barbies and a ken doll (Tom Dunstan), in a team called Ken Desperate. I owe impro a lot.

I know I don't usually use Musical Hotspot to advertise shows; it is intended to be a long-lived blog about skills and technique. In the last 24 hours I've had a slew of visitors landing here after googling "Youth theatre sports Brisbane" or similar, and I thought since they were probably looking for details about the final I'd give them something more meaningful to read. (Youth improvisers - if you're looking for details about other impro in Brisbane, there are a bunch of links to improv groups in Brisbane in the 'Links' section on the right hand side of the blog.)

Pre-show coaching for Youth improvisers

2010-07-21T00:05:00.000+10:00

We're in the final stages of the Youth Theatresports Festival 2010 here in Brisbane. This year over 100 high school teams took part from all over South-East Queensland. Seven teams battle it out in each of three semi-finals, and the top two from each semi goes to the Grand Final in a few weeks.

Last year, in Mysterious Whisper (yep, back when I was still ripping off They Might Be Giants songs for post titles), I touched on the stuff we talk about with the kids before the show. Some of the advice/coaching is based on how music forms a part of the show for the night. I'll also discuss some of the things that I want to see them do more or less of to support the show, even if it's not about music.

The musician can support scenes with mood music and underscoring. It is the musician's job to amplify the emotion the players are putting in to the scene, and react to emotional changes as they happen. Players - don't freak out that the extra musical element is suddenly present. It is there to provide support.

Sometimes the musician will stay out of it, if the scene doesn't need music. It's not a comment on the quality of the scene; it's just that the scene doesn't want that extra element, something we've talked about before.

In a musical game, the musician will give direction in the form of musical offers. Any good musician will follow the folks on stage, and sometimes the musician will make offers of their own; listen to those offers and take them on.

The musician will take direction if the players have something specific they want. It might be that they want a specific style for a song - or even no music at all. (Sob, sniffle.)

The aftermath of the 2009 Youth Finals

Team intros can benefit from accompaniment. Musicians here are pretty used to requests to accompany intros: "Do you know any good ninja/cowboy/jungle/gangster music?"

Shut up! Youth players can have a tendency to talk while other teams are on stage. Aside from being disrespectful to other performers, it means they're missing out on a prime learning experience - watching other teams. Watching another team doing well (or doing badly) is excellent coaching.

Play forward! Kids who are maybe a little nervous about getting up and doing this might hug the back of the stage, and that doesn't help. Even pros need the "play forward" reminder now and again.

Come back! I hate that we see really talented kids go through high school impro programmes (improgrammes?), then once grade twelve is over, they leave impro behind. We always make sure to let the kids know about the variety of improvised theatre in the city - workshops, rookie shows, intermediate shows, pro shows, short-form, long-form, corporate gigs. You don't have to be a capital-a Actor to do impro as an adult; most improvisers I know come from other professions - teaching, human resources, graphic design, law, advertising, journalism... Software development - so many grown-up nerds do Impro; one of my impro colleagues here is a software architect with Boeing, another worked on an Emmy-award-winning digital media project for a major TV network. Graduating high school doesn't mean giving this thing away, and we do what we can to encourage the kids to come back and do more.

Don't Stop Believin' - Epilogue

While we're here, another Youth Theatresports-sort-of-related story: You might recall a few years ago some kids freaked me out by singing along to Don't Stop Believin' - bizarre because the song is relatively unknown in Australia, and I thought I could get away with playing it unnoticed. Well, it used to be unknown - fast forward to this year, and courtesy of Glee, that song is suddenly quite well known. At last night's show, the Glee cast version was playing during interval, and you could see plenty of audience members singing along. Thanks Glee!

Remember My Name

2010-07-14T08:36:00.000+10:00

Last week, we explored some of the ways you might use backing vocals in an improvised song. This week we have an example, where the supporting cast do a great job of providing backing vocals for a solo song.

Have a listen to the scene featuring Remember My Name, then we'll discuss it.

In the scene, Luke Allan explores Napkin Ring, his character from ImproMafia's musical Worst Side Story. This scene immediately followed The Hoity Toitys - Napkin Ring's new gang member buddies have just left the stage, and he has some time on his own.

The previous scene more broadly set the tone for the gang. This one does a great job of setting up Napkin Ring as a wide-eyed enthustiastic dreamer. It is more personal than the previous scene; Luke really opens his character up to the audience.

This song is where one of the themes of the show (one of the tropes from West Side Story) shines through - that everything can change in a single day. Luke sets up a series of reprises with one small bit of song:

Something's gonna change today
In a most extraordinary way

The idea of one extraordinary day came back over and over throughout the musical.

I thought Luke showed a lot of trust in the music here; having just wrapped the previous scene with a song, I wasn't expecting another one to come along so soon. At a certain point in this scene, Luke paused and gave the sense that he might be ready to burst in to song. I opened with a very sparse backing that didn't really strongly suggest a tempo or style, and Luke deftly inserted the opening line.

Backing vocals

There were a few folks backstage providing backing vocals during the song, but you can clearly hear Tom Dunstan setting the tone and driving them. You can hear a few different types of background vocals as the song progresses.

As Luke sings "The future's ahead of me", you can hear the folks backstage doing shapeless backing, primarily aahs. There's a sense of more than one voice back there, and it's even hard to pick their pitch, but they certainly add more weight to the song, helping it as it builds.

Once Luke gets to the chorus, Tom and co weave around the main vocal with their "Hoity Toity" line. The timing and melody of the backing is so cheesily perfect that they get a laugh from the audience. They manage to lag the bar so they can react to the music, wherever it may go.

Right at the end, when Luke sings "Remember my name", I remember thinking I was going to leave that last chord unfinished, just hanging there. Tom and the backing singers came in with a perfect "Remember his name" line, to slowly and decisively close the song.

Photo by Al Caeiro

Backing Vocals

2010-07-07T00:05:00.002+10:00

A fully orchestrated non-improvised song might include backing vocals to compliment the melody and the instrumentation. We don't have that sort of luxury in improvised songs. Or do we?

In any improvised song, there's an opportunity for backing vocals; any participant that isn't actively driving at that moment can potentially contribute. They don't even have to be on stage; we've had many a song in our long-form musicals where off-stage singers provide backing vocals.

We are somewhat resource-constrained when we're doing an improv song; we usually won't have a band on standby, and we're not going to go back and re-record layered vocals, so we have fewer tools we can use to provide light and shade or a nice build within a song. The addition of backing vocals can really help a song to step up, or to provide contrast between verses and choruses.

I'd say there are three broad types of backing vocals we see in songs. I don't know if they have formal names, but for this article I'll give them some: shapeless, layered and weaving.

Shapeless

Providing vowel-based backing is pretty easy and effective. We've talked about this before in Oohs and Aahs.

Layered

Sometimes the supporting players can pick the lyric and melody that is about to be used, either by anticipating a rhyme, or by contributing to a well-established chorus. (I'm startled by how often good players can predict the rhyme that is about to show up. One of those things that can make a show look not-improvised. Hah, like we have the time or inclination to rehearse this stuff.)

Weaving

Supporting players might take those interstitial moments between lead vocal lines, and add their own vocals. This can work a treat; they're not competing with the singer, the extra weight can help to build a song to a climax, and there's a lot more freedom to the lyric. Echoing a lyric (from, say, a chorus) works nicely and can be done by a group of backing singers; extending with new lyrics is more challenging and probably works best with one backing singer.

To sing, or not to sing

To me, there are times when backing vocals are undesirable.

From a story perspective, I like backing vocals layered on solo songs, and on some duets, but not all of them. In a really intimate "new love"-type duet where the characters really open up and share their personal and private feelings with each other (and the audience), the intrusion of other voices seems wrong.

Something I see done quite often in workshops and with short-form groups is having a set of backing singers doing, well, basically, "doo-wop" style backing. I have a confession to make; although I've taught classes and encouraged people to try that out, I hate that style of backing vocal. It took me a long time to figure out why. When you have multiple musicians driving the music for a scene, you acquire a fair amount of momentum and it gets hard to change direction or react to things. A bunch of doo-wop singers are essentially doing the same thing; you establish a pattern, you commit to it so you can extend it, but when you need to change it you all need to recognise the change, musician and singers alike. I dislike unbreakable momentum in improvised songs, and I think that's why doo-wop backing doesn't do it for me.

I have found that, if you have more than one backing singer, it works well when one of the backing singers is somewhat taking the lead. They pay attention to the music and the lead singer, reacting to their changes and setting everything up.

Next week we'll have a specific example of backing vocals from Worst Side Story.

Photo by Adam N Ward

Setting the Scene in Song

2010-06-30T18:30:00.014+10:00

Sometimes a song can inject information in to the audience's minds and hearts far more efficiently than a spoken scene. I'm not sure why that is... Perhaps something about delivering those words with the cadence and emotional weight of music.

Tamzin McCauley, Brisbane improv actor/teacher/MC/legend-about-town, often provides the following mnemonic for high school kids about to jump on stage for Youth Theatresports: CROWS. To set a scene, you should be hitting Character, Relationship, Objective, Where, and Status. (CROW seems a common improv teaching tool. I do like the addition of Status though. Status seems like that important extra bit of oil to grease a scene.)

I highly doubt experienced improvisers are on stage whispering "Crows! CROOOWS!" to themselves... Doing this stuff should be second nature for someone with a lot of improv stage time.

I thought it would be interesting to take a "setting the scene" song from Worst Side Story, and see how it stacks up.

Amy Currie as Salad Fork

The Hoity Toitys

After the opening introduction song Table Manners, the gangs dispersed. First, Fingers' gang had a scene to better introduce that gang; immediately following that was this scene introducing The Hoity Toitys.

Listen to The Hoity Toitys first, then we'll discuss it.

Character: The scene clearly establishes Salad Fork (Amy Currie) as the tough-as-nails gang leader. About the only softness she shows is towards her kid brother Napkin Ring (Luke Allan); he comes across as goofy, naive and enthusiastic. Tea Cup (Alex Reichart) is the tough of the gang, unabashedly roughing up anyone in his way.

Relationship: Napkin Ring is clearly established as Salad Fork's kid brother. Tea Cup appears to be a very strong #2 to Salad Fork's gang leader role. The relationship between Tea Cup and Napkin Ring is vague at this time; it comes out later in the story.

Alex Reichart as Tea Cup

Objective: Each of them has a slightly different gang-related personal objective. Salad Fork uses the gang to elevate herself above the less cultured members of society. Tea Cup is similar, but appears quite keen on intimidation and beating people up. And Nappy seems to have achieved his objective: Joining the gang.

Where: The show was already pretty well established as being in a bustling city, by virtue of playing off of the West Side Story tropes. This song adds a strong sense that there are (unseen) inhabitants of the city other than the gang members.

Status: Salad Fork and Tea Cup both take high-status roles, towering over the low-status Napkin Ring. Later in the story we discover that Tea Cup opposed Napkin Ring's entry to the gang. I wonder if a gang composed of just Salad Fork and Tea Cup, both high-status characters, would have been as fun to watch.

Luke Allan as Napkin Ring

I think the guys pretty effectively painted the picture of their gang - they built a strong platform for the rest of the story. That spoken line to finish off the song, about nothing coming before the gang, is vital to the conflict that we knew would come later in the show.

My favourite bits of the scene:

Amy stepping in to the vamp to start the song. She's awfully good at that.
I really liked rhyming 'scum' with 'drum'. Rhyming words buried in the middle of subsequent lines? Brilliant!
Alex's line about helping the old ladies. Alex makes me laugh and laugh; he surprises me, and I'm a pretty old and jaded improviser now ;)
The interplay about clicking. Finger-snapping was an important trope for the genre. I didn't realise that it would be so exhausting!
Stepping out of the song at the end; the guys took the music-slowing cue and ran with it.

Perhaps the character that had the least development in this scene was Napkin Ring. At the end of this scene, Luke set himself up nicely for a solo scene, and I think a lot more of Nappy's character came out in that scene. You'll get that next week :)

Photo by Al Caeiro

Refreshed Podcast

2010-06-25T23:10:00.000+10:00

If you subscribe to the Musical Hotspot Podcast (iTunes), you've probably been sad lately. No new songs. When I created the feed for the podcast, I was terribly clever about it, and as with most terribly clever things I cook up, it broke. :(

I've republished the podcast feed now, with a few changes. If you are an existing subscriber, the podcast might have a bunch of duplicate entries. I'm sorry about that; there was no way for me to avoid it, try as I might.

On the plus side, you can look forward to (hopefully) more reliable podcast delivery!

And if you don't yet subscribe, now's an excellent time to start :)

The last two songs (Our Town and Table Manners) will appear in the podcast in the next few days.

Starting a Group - Hit and Run Musical Improv

2010-06-23T00:05:00.000+10:00

We've talked before about how, as a musician, you might think about getting started in impro. Once you're up and running, you'll probably want to consider joining a group and getting some serious stage time. That's how I got started, and I'd wager it's how many improv musicians get going. Mostly I've joined existing, established groups who needed to add a musician to their ranks. Otherwise I've been part of a brand new show/troupe, under someone else's direction.

But... what if you want to put your own show together? From scratch?

LA-based improv actor Stephen Wilder was looking to do just that, back in 2006. Stephen envisaged a group devoted to long-form musicals (a topic near and dear to me :) ), and, rather than waiting for someone to deliver him the right opportunity on a plate, he took the plunge and formed a group himself.

Instead of me telling you all about it, let him do it. Stephen recently collected up his diary of blog entries relating to forming the group and getting it humming along. I found it to be a fascinating read, with a great many observations about group harmony, narrative structure, song mechanics, and the highs and lows of getting a new show off the ground. I recommend starting with the first post and working your way through each of the 27 entries. This won't be the last time I reference the HnR blog from MH.

Stephen's company, Hit and Run: Musical Improv, is one of the better known improv shows out there on the web; when I was getting started with Musical Hotspot, several readers from around the world pointed me towards HnR. Their site is great - it features videos of their performances, from individual songs to full shows, and they have a variety of video podcasts to suit any improv appetite. The most recent blog or video entry at any given time will be in that little widget on the right hand side of Musical Hotspot. It's worth a visit.

The company performs regularly in Denver, and features in many of improv festivals around the US. I'm going to be in Denver at the end of the year, so hopefully I'll get a chance to catch some Hit and Run in person. Stephen - save me a seat!

Table Manners

2010-06-16T00:02:00.005+10:00

We've previously discussed Introduction Songs, and given one example. We finish the series this week with another example. Worst Side Story's introduction song follows a similar format, with a few twists.

The story was based around two gangs with a mutual dislike of each other’s table manners – an excellent basis for a blood feud if ever there was one. The introduction song had to set up and name the characters, set the scene, and establish the gangs. The scene opens with the two gang leaders having a quick face-off before heading off to gather their gangs for a rumble.

Like Our Town, each character gets a verse to sing. In this song however, they are generally not singing about themselves; they are singing about their counterpart in the other gang. The emotion underpinning the show was conflict, and it makes good sense for the real scene-setting song to highlight that conflict, in tone and lyric. Singing about the other gang is perfect! We decided in rehearsals it would be fun to have each of the gangs endow the other with names. (One of the characters is never again referred to by name during the show – I guess we forgot it!)

Have a listen to Table Manners, and we'll deconstruct it.

Fingers (Tom Dunstan, pictured) is the leader of one gang. He introduces Salad Fork, and starts to set up that she has excellent table manners. He also germinates what will be the chorus.
Salad Fork (Amy Currie) introduces Fingers, explaining his horrible table etiquette. She refines the chorus a bit.
Drive-In (Joel Gilmore) comes on stage to join Fingers. He sets himself up as having lower status, then names another gang member from the other side.
Tea Cup (Alex Reichart) keeps the theme going, expanding on the gangs' differences, and introduces Drive-In.
Another chorus with a sneaky key change. Both gangs are growing now, so the vocals are becoming quite strong. I really like that we established a good simple chorus, it made it easier to remember and recall later.
Messy (Kiesten McCauley) tells her gang about a new guy she’s heard about from the other gang, Napkin Ring. She's never met him, but she knows he's no good.
Napkin Ring (Luke Allan) speculates about the other new opposing gang member Messy. Again, they haven’t met.
Final chorus. It’s well established now, and all six go for it.

The ending was pretty smooth; after that long held note, Tom asserts a nice clean finish.

At this point in the story, the gangs are ready to come together for a fight, but of course the cops show up just in time, and the gangs disperse.

There was a conscious choice that all of the gang members had a personal, established animosity with the other gang, except Messy and Napkin Ring. Those characters were the romantic leads, and although they'd heard about their counterparts on the other gang, they'd never seen them. This helps us set up their meeting, followed later by the realisation they were on other gangs.

The song again immediately followed an overture. The overture itself wasn't particularly minor, but the opening song certainly was – the story was based on conflict, and the song reflected that conflict. Still used slight changes in the feel and tempo, and a fair few key changes, to keep the song moving along.

You know, listening to this song and last week's song, I realise that I always endow Joel Gilmore's characters with goofy. It doesn't matter how the introduction song starts... when Joel steps out on stage, suddenly the music goes all oompa-oompa-oompa-oompa, turning vaguely bumbling and low-status. It seems I'm very mean to you, Joel. (As this post goes up, Joel is in Peru, so I should be safe from retribution for a little while yet.) Joel is a wonderful actor and singer, and I've certainly had powerful songs with him before... But in a musical I introduce him as low-status. Sorry Joel.

There was quite a difference in the warmness of the audience for this one. It took us a little longer than it should have for us to get out on stage, consequently the audience had a few minutes of patient waiting, and that probably cooled them down a bit. In the intro from One Bride, as each cast member stepped on stage, the audience went wild; we had to work harder for their love in Worst Side. By the end of the song they were in to it, and seemed pretty warm for the rest of the show. We probably took the audience through more extremes in Worst Side; there were some particularly dark scenes, and some particularly sad scenes that moved at least a few people to tears. (How awesome is that?)

Hopefully these examples illustrate the sorts of things we try and hit in an introduction song.

Photo by Al Caeiro

Our Town

2010-06-09T00:01:00.000+10:00

Last week we discussed Introduction Songs. This week we have our first example.

One Bride For Seven Brothers was set in the town of Rileysberg, and the story revolved around the Riley family. With their parents long since passed, the family of six brothers are the sole inhabitants of the town. The brothers have a problem – they are going broke, and their parents’ will has gone missing, so without a means to pay off their creditors they will lose their beloved town.

As the song Our Town progresses and each of the characters comes on, you’ll hear them acknowledge the problem they have (the missing inheritance), and provide a bit of a clue about their character. This is the chance for the actors to start endowing themselves with personality and motivation. The characters that came out on the night were for the most part quite different to the characters we saw as we went through rehearsals for the show.

The introduction song goes through each of the brothers, one by one.

Archie (Luke Rimmelzwaan), the oldest brother, introduces the name of the town, their money worries, and implies that he’s maybe not so smart.
Cain (Alex Reichart) further reinforces the situation, and shows that he is frustrated with their lack of funds. Later in the story he acts on that frustration in a sneaky, but ultimately redeemable, way.
Brett (Luke Allan) has a similar verse, but is optimistic (and slightly mathematically challenged). This matches his character (later found out to be a matchmaker). Key change when Brett comes on, to freshen the song a bit.
Eric (Joel Gilmore) is a dreamer, sad to be poor, and comes across as a bit goofy. The music changed for this verse, and was a little more playful, which was a match for the character. I don’t think I gave Joel much time to react to a change of key and tempo, but he handled it pretty well anyway!
Dudley (Dan Beeston) won’t take their status lying down – he comes across as aggressive and motivated. The music switched up again, and went to a minor key as well. Dudley ended up being the “bad” character in the story, and I think this came very naturally out of this first verse.
Fudge (Tom Dunstan) had pretty evil sounding scoring, and alluded to family secrets. Later in the story he came across as a bit sneaky and manipulative.
Golly (Tristan Ham), the youngest brother, doesn’t care at all that the family is poor, he’s happy, and his music reflects his happy-go-lucky attitude. (How many key changes did I go through just before Golly’s verse? If that isn’t setting it up for a big ending, what is?)

It's subtle, but I really like that the song ended as it began, with "This is our town". We didn't have a chorus as we worked through the song, and I think that's ok; it still had a good identity. The ending was a little untidy for this one… probably something we needed to work more on at that point. Tristan steps forward and drives the cast (and me) for the ending. His tag at the end is lovely.

As the song progresses, the key moves up slowly but surely, and the tempo picks up. Hopefully this stops the song from being very samey. I have to say I’m always impressed that the guys on stage follow key changes so well. I’m pretty merciless, and they never disappoint.

It was obvious that the audience was warm and receptive from the first moments of the show. Considering a group of 30-40 school kids made up a portion of the audience, that’s a pretty good outcome.

Next week – another example introduction song, this time from Worst Side Story.

Photo by Al Caeiro

Introduction Songs

2010-06-02T20:28:00.002+10:00

In a long-form musical, you have lots of time and scope to set up a fantastic story. A big part of that is introducing the characters to the audience and giving each of them their own identity, and place in the story. An opening song is a great way to get started, and if you do it right, a big ending can give your show the push it needs.

In our themed ImproMafia musicals, we tend to have a largish cast (seven to eight people). We generally go in to the musical with a little bit of structure, perhaps identifying the social groups that take part in the story, and casting the romantic leads. (We always have romantic leads! What fun would a musical be without a little romance?)

You could have a series of short scenes that gradually introduce characters. That’s going to take a lot of time, and that’s time you’re not spending getting to the meat of your story. Opening up a channel in to the audience’s hearts through a song is a pretty efficient way to do the same thing.

Goals

The first scene of a musical often has several goals:

Introduce the characters
Set the scene for the story
Establish the musical mood

One verse per character

We’ve found a good way to do this is to open with a song that lays down the basics of the story, and gives many of the characters some solo time in the spotlight so the audience gets to know them. We might start the scene with only one or two people on stage, and slowly add to the group until most of the cast is gathered. As individuals are added, they get a verse of a song, and can use the verse to perhaps introduce themselves, sell their character a little bit, and provide their place in the story.

This song doesn’t necessarily need to introduce all of the characters. If you have a story where the action comes from catalyst character (like Maria in West Side Story, Tommy and Jeff in Brigadoon, Milly in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers), you might make the introduction song about life before the catalyst, and delay introducing the catalyst for a little while. You might also have supporting actors ready to play supporting characters without strong identities, and they might not take part in the opening song.

Suddenly you have six or seven people on stage, and a song that requires a big ending. Nailing a big finish on the opening scene is a tremendous way to get the audience completely on-side right away. As much as you want it to be a group-effort communal-mind sort of thing, our best success has come when one person has taken the reins to conduct everyone in a tight ending. Arguably it should be a pretty primary character that does this, perhaps one of the romantic leads, or an exceptionally high- or low-status character.

Change up the music

The feel of that opening music will help to set the tone for the rest of the show. A musical set in the old west is going to sound different to a musical set in an accounting firm. A happy-fairy-land musical is going to open quite differently to one set in a meat packing plant. (Hmm, actually, happy-fairy-land music in a meat packing plant would be kinda funny.) Our themed ImproMafia musicals open with an overture, and olde-style credits projected on to a big screen. The overture segues in to the introduction song.

An introduction song that touches all of the characters can make for a pretty long song. As the musician, you want to try and introduce a few changes in key or feel to keep it moving along. It’s good to keep some consistency in the feeling you’ve set up for the musical. There are lots of parameters you can play with, including key and tempo.

Examples

As always, it’s easy to see this stuff in action with an example. Good news – I’ve got two examples for you. Next week you can listen to ‘Our Town’, the introduction from One Bride for Seven Brothers. The following week we’ll have ‘Table Manners’ from Worst Side Story. (Don't forget you can subscribe to the Musical Hotspot Podcast to have these and other songs delivered right to your portable music device of choice!)

Of course, this is just one way to open a musical. If you haven’t tried it, give it a shot – it has worked well for us, and will probably work well for you too.

Photo by DyanaVPhotos

Worst Side Story

2010-05-26T22:31:00.001+10:00

I was lucky enough recently to be involved with another ImproMafia musical, Worst Side Story. In assembling and staging the musical, we tried a few new things out, and learned a few things too, some of which I thought were worth sharing.

Premise

The general idea was to take some of the concepts and tropes from the iconic musical West Side Story, and fold them in to a fully improvised musical, under the guidance of directors Michael Griffin and Luke Rimmelzwaan. The goal wasn't particularly to hit the same plot points as the original – West Side Story does a pretty great job of doing that already. But we did think it would be fun to grab some of the elements and use them to weave a story based on audience offers.

The basic structure would be:

Two gangs
Set in 1950’s-ish unnamed American-ish city
Love blooms between two opposing gang members
Lots of finger snapping
A rumble would be nice

Many of the One Bride for Seven Brothers alum came back for this one, as well as someone new to ImproMafia productions, Kiesten McCauley. Kiesten and I have been friends for nearly 20 years, performing together regularly for Theatresports-branded shows as well as other projects, and it was a great pleasure to work with her again and see her gelling with my other impro family.

We established before the show that there would be two roughly-symmetrical gangs, each of them having a leader (played by Tom Dunstan and Amy Currie), a support gang member (Joel Gilmore and Alex Reichart), and one of the star-crossed lovers (Kiesten McCauley and Luke Allan). We also kept a father figure in reserve (Luke Rimmelzwaan) who could step in and perform other roles as required. The gangs’ mutual hatred would be based around an issue that came from the audience. As the story progressed, the two lovers (who had not previously met) would meet at a neutral location (decided by the audience) and fall deeply, irrevocably in love, then realise the conflict that came from their crossed allegiances. From there, the story went where it wanted.

The directors and cast kept the story tight and focused on the night; we had several B-stories in our practice runs, which tended to run quite long. On the night we kept it short and sharp; the other characters still had time to develop, but we really concentrated on the main storyline.

Training and tricks

Luke Rimmelzwaan again took the role of Vocal Director, teaching the cast about various song structures and vocal techniques. As with One Bride, these workshops were one of the high points of the process for me. The downside is that only the cast of the show get access to such great training. Luke and I try to pull together many of the important lessons and explain them on Musical Hotspot, but there’s no substitute for workshopping formats, performing using some of these techniques, and watching others do the same.

There were several devices we used successfully in this show, some of which we used in One Bride for Seven Brothers and you may have read about on this blog, others we tried for the first time.

We again had a triad of Lovers’ Duets - falling in love, separated and conflicted, and reunited. Luke Allan and Kiesten did an absolutely amazing job constructing songs for these, effortlessly reprising choruses from one to the next. I'll be sharing some of these in the coming weeks.

In both musicals we performed an introduction song, one opening number where many of the characters get a moment in the spotlight to introduce themselves and establish their characters. In Worst Side Story, one gang would sing about how they hated so-and-so from the other gang (naming them and establishing their character), then the other gang (set somewhere else in the city) would return the favour, and one by one they worked through everyone.

We practiced a rumble/rhyming battle sort of song several times, where the two gangs effectively fought with lyrics, gaining and losing ground on the stage as the upper hand shifted from one gang to the other. We never quite managed to get this format to work in rehearsals, and on the night an opportunity for this kind of song didn’t come up.

I’d intended on applying specific musical styles for both gangs, so their own songs would be quite distinct. On the night, though, we ended up having quite a few separated-gang-duets, so catering to two different styles would have been quite a challenge.

On the night

Fingers' gang: Kiesten McCauley, Tom Dunstan,
Joel Gilmore

We asked for three offers from the audience: Something you feel passionate about, something you’ve bonded with someone over, and something you do when you are sad. On the night, we selected "table manners", "roller derby", and "chocolate". (Based on the responses, about 20% of our audience eat chocolate when they are sad. I guess we could have predicted that one.)

Our opening song, where the gangs introduce each other, leveraged that "table manners" offer to set everything up. It’s quite fun having the gang members endow their opposition with their gang member names! The Hoity Toity gang (exquisite table manners) included Salad Fork (the gang leader), Teacup, and Napkin Ring. The other gang (the uncouth ones) included Fingers, Drive-Through, and Messy.

The Hoity Toitys: Alex Reichart, Luke Allan,
Amy Currie

Roller derby was a perfect setting for the two lovers to meet; it set up a fight between the female leads of both gangs, and further raised the stakes when the fight spilled out of the ring and escalated in to a gang stoush, accidentally killing kindly father figure Papa Chocolate with a knife. (A butter knife, to be exact.) Roller derby came up three or four times with our audience members’ offers, so again a popular choice.

Something very strange happened during the show – I can’t think of another time we’ve done an ImproMafia show that turned out to be a tragedy. In all of our practice runs for Worst Side, we never had one that ended tragically. I guess we just like happy endings. On the night, though, the story wanted a tragedy, and thus we ended up mimicking more of the original West Side Story plot line than we’d expected. We saw a moment of pure panic on stage that night; when one of the main characters died unexpectedly, the shock to both the characters and the actors was palpable. The story developed as it should have, the characters changed, and the ending was quite satisfying.

After a show like this, I'm always amazed at the talent on-stage. Somehow these people manage to tell a great story, create great real-feeling characters, and when the time is just right break in to song in just the right way.

Worst Side Story logo by Anthony Massingham.
Photos by Al Caeiro.

Rhyme vs Story

2010-05-19T23:23:00.000+10:00

Rhyming is an important part of modern songs, and effective rhyming can make the difference between a good and a bad impro song. I’ve been listening to lots of recordings of impro songs, and trying to work out what it is about some of them that I like. I think I’m getting there.

I can’t really write about techniques on how to build rhymes; putting that stuff together isn’t my forte. (Look over at the back at the theatre – that’s me, nestled snugly behind the piano in my little non-verbal cocoon.) But I can write about the stuff I like to see, the rhymes and song construction that resonate with me as a listener.

Probably my biggest wish in a song is that a singer stays true to the story, and doesn’t detour away from it.

Story first! Avoid detours.

In any song, you have to maintain an economy of language, verbalising your thought so it matches the rhythm and cadence of the song. There isn’t much room to stray from the subject of the song. For some reason, an idea expressed in song seems to get around people’s scepticism or defenses and sneak straight in to their hearts. If you maintain focus on the subject of the song, you’ll drive it home and get the audience on board.

It bugs me when people move away from the point of their song just so they can set up an elaborate rhyme – there might be a word they really want to end a verse with, and they find something, anything, that matches it, but to use that word effectively they have to detour for a while to set it up.

Here’s a contrived example, with a boy singing about a girl named Janet. (Please forgive my dodgy lyrics. Sondheim, watch out.)

When she laughs
We laugh together
I know our love
Will last forever

Just like an alien
Living on another planet
I’m in love with Janet

If you’ve set up a song with a certain emotional feel (cheesy love song), pulling out of it to use an incongruent lyric (Aliens?!? Wha?!) breaks the hypnosis for the audience. It’s a “Hey, that doesn’t belong there. Wait! They’re MAKING IT UP!” moment.

Multi-syllable

I think it’s easier to spot a forced lyric when people are trying to rhyme with multi-syllable words. You probably have fewer choices for that perfect rhyme, and you might have to travel further from the story to fit it in. My advice would be – instead of hunting for a suitable matching multi-syllable word, don’t worry about it! You want to leave the listener with a sense that there was a rhyme in there, but it doesn’t have to be an exact match.

Here’s a real-world example of the right way to do it, from ImproMafia’s recent production Worst Side Story. The Hoity Toity gang and their leader Salad Fork (Amy Currie) use every dirty trick in the book to try and raise the level of dining sophistication in their city, including breaking in to establishments and improving their table settings.

In this fast food restaurant
Everyone was damned
Until we came in here
Now their napkins are monogrammed

I thought that was a lovely rhyme. I’m assuming the goal was to get to "monogrammed", and the trick was to find a rhyme to set it up. "Damned" in context worked a treat; it fit the story, and rhymed nicely. Trying to shoehorn in a three-syllable word would have been tough.

You’ll be hearing more from Worst Side Story in upcoming posts.

The wrap-up

I guess, for me, people don’t score bonus points for a rhyme unless it was completely natural, fitting the music, the rhythm, and the story, and heck it just happened to rhyme. Now, if you can string a bunch of those together, I’m pretty impressed.

Playing The Piano Is Fun

This week’s example comes from some of my ImproMafia friends on-stage at the Australian Theatresports Nationals in 2009. Big thanks to Jon Williams, Rebecca De Unamuno, and the folks from Impro Australia for letting me feature it. (Man, I would love to play at this show. An audience of over a thousand impro fans? 20 or so of the best players in the country? How good would that be?!)

In the scene, Natalie Bochenski plays a little girl trying to win back the love of her parents and restore her family unit. The scene was a technical challenge, taking inspiration from a sting by their musician, the talented Penny Biggins. During the scene, after Tom Dunstan (the father) leaves, David Massingham (the mother. Mother-ish, anyway.) encourages her to sing a song to win her dad back. Vamp from Penny, and off Natalie goes.

Natalie’s song was short and sharp, and very tight. The lyrics are great – they’re simple, they are right on the story, and they stay very true to her character.

Playing the piano is fun
Everyone can do it – yes everyone!
We all join in and play together
Then Daddy will come home forever

Yes playing the piano is fun
You’ve got to play it nice and loud
When Daddy comes home, finally
I want him to be proud of me

Even though the lyrics are simple, the rhyming is not – Natalie strings together some pretty complex stuff: fun/everyone, together/forever, loud/proud, finally/proud of me. There were no detours to fit in those rhymes – everything had a place in her story. That finally/proud of me example is especially good; instead of hunting for a three-syllable word to rhyme, three one-syllable words dropped in the same cadence works perfectly.

I have to say that rhyming loud with proud, and rhyming finally with proud of me, at the same time, and absolutely nailing the story, is like hitting two triple word scores in Scrabble. Nice work. Sure wish I could do that.

Photo by Shannon K