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(Europe: ~1400-1600 AD)  The Renaissance period presented a renewed appreciation for art and creativity and scholars still revere many of the comedies written during this period. Many writers of this time acknowledged the profound potential of comedy, understanding that a genre that prides itself in avoiding seriousness could still make serious statements about life, society, culture, and humanity, just as earlier writers had discovered and contemporary writers still explore. However, despite the growing inspiration of artists during the Renaissance, comedy still remained a lesser form of expression in the eyes of critics. In the same vein as the Italian Commedia dell’Arte, that continued into the Renaissance, was the Comedy of Humours of Renaissance England. It is due to the influence of Commedia dell’Arte and the Comedy of Humours that we see stock characters in many comedy films. For example, the character of the wealthy woman (usually an older relative of the protagonist) appears in Twentieth Century (Howard Hawks 1934), The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey 1937), Bringing Up Baby (Hawks 1938), and His Girl Friday (Hawks 1940), just to name a few. The narratives are not the same, simply the replicated character.  Erasmus The foremost comic theorist of the Renaissance was Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536), Erasmus wrote along the lines of art for art’s sake. He felt that one should appreciate comedy as something that has value in itself, not for what comedy can teach or to what it can lead. He also used humor in his critical writings, Erasmus’ best-known work that discusses comedy is his In Praise of Folly. In the writings of Erasmus, we find support for the argument that critics and scholars should judge comedy works for what they are, not how well they can approximate another genre.  Shakespeare The greatest comic writer of the Renaissance, and perhaps the most celebrated playwright of all time, William Shakespeare (1564-1616), was as much a master of comedy as he was a master of tragedies, romances, and histories. He crafted comic situations and characterizations that are still relevant in today’s comedy, and no two of his comic plays are exactly alike. As we are able to see in his plays, Shakespeare inherited his treatment of comedy and his methods for crafting it from many older comic sources. We know that the works of Menander, Plautus, and Terence were part of the curriculum in most European schools at the time. From this fact, and from the similarity of some of his comedy to that of the Classics, we can surmise that Shakespeare would have encountered the comic works of Classical and Medieval comedians during his schooling. He used all of this acquired knowledge of past comedies in order to synthesize his own. Shakespeare had the ability to take both paths of artistic innovation—he followed the styles of earlier writers and created scenarios uniquely his own. A lot of literary scholars conclude that the Medieval Carnival played an important part in the shaping of Shakespeare’s approach to comedy. However, one cannot discuss Shakespeare without mentioning his exquisite originality. As I mentioned in the post about Classical Comedy, the works of Plautus and Terence were taught in Renaissance schools, plausibly linking Shakespeare’s comedies as a continuation of the Classical New Comedy. Shakespeare used comedy to instruct because it is a form that could have been understood by the wealthy Globe patrons in the balconies as well as by the ‘Groundlings’. Comedy has the power to address all social classes. Unlike the comic characters of Ancient Greece, Shakespeare’s comic characters exist for a purpose beyond comic relief. Most often, his comic characters are deep and fully formed. As genuine, convincing, and believable comic characters, they live on in dozens of like types and in the comic situations of film. Through the convincing realism of his comic characters, we once again see that comedy stays close to reality. Unlike the ironic characters seen in some forms of comedy, Shakespeare’s comic protagonists are often willing to admit their flaws. There is a sense of self-discovery in his character studies. Maybe this humanness is why Shakespeare’s comic characters, just like George Webber of 10 (Blake Edwards 1979) or Felix and Oscar of The Odd Couple (Gene Saks 1968), are so appealing to audiences—they are not all “put together” and they do not know in what direction they are headed. Unlike the heroes of non-comic works, that often seem to have a clear purpose and clear objectives, the comic hero is much like the typical viewer that focuses more on the present and life’s little mishaps than on his or her “destiny”. Comedy is the only genre that can comfortably and successfully deal with subjects that are taboo. One of these subjects, of course, is death. Death is present in so many narratives of Shakespeare, but in his comedies, death does not have the final say. For example, consider Claudio’s ruminations on death in Measure for Measure or how The Comedy of Errors begins with a death sentence for Aegeon. Following Shakespeare’s influence, numerous film comedies deal with death—consider Arsenic and Old Lace (Frank Capra 1944), Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer 1949), or M*A*S*H (Robert Altman 1970)—but often, as in Shakespeare, as an afterthought. With Shakespeare, we first see the term Comedy of Manners as applied to New Comedy social situations. Just as Shakespeare can discuss death through comedy, he is also able to discuss law, class differences, and government through the same lens. The films of Chaplin, Sturges, and the Marx Brothers all exploit the nature of encounters between people of different classes. Shakespeare often used foreign settings in order to criticize his own government without becoming too overt. In much the same way, Duck Soup (Leo McCarey 1933) mocks governments and war without directly mentioning any real countries by creating the fictional countries of Freedonia and Sylvania. Shakespeare’s The Tempest, his last play and one of his most acclaimed, is laced with social critique. Shakespeare is free to discuss social issues in The Tempest, because of its setting on an unknown island. Impersonation in film comedy has had a lasting impression over the years, whether it is Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis disguised as women in Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder 1959), Chico and Harpo Marx both dressed as Groucho in Duck Soup (1933), or Jack Lemmon seemingly taking on the traditional roles of a woman in The Odd Couple (1968). Shakespeare’s comedies include many instances of deception and imitation. Often important plot points revolve around a character that is disguised for a particular reason, which Mozart later expands upon in his Cosi Fan Tutte and Marriage of Figaro. Recognize though, that the place of cross-dressing as a part of performance in Shakespeare’s day was much different from that of Mozart’s day and later eras. Male actors filled both male and female roles in a Shakespeare play during his lifetime, making a cross-dressed man not an unexpected joke, but something taken for granted as commonplace. Shakespeare’s comedies have retained their status among critics and scholars, but the popularity of specific plays may rise and fall in cycles over time. In much the same way, we find films that are praised by critics and yet fail at the box office, only for audiences to rediscover it years later. Regardless of their popularity at any given time, the conventions that Shakespeare both adopted and synthesized continue to influence new comedies.  Cervantes A contemporary of Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) is one of the most praised Spanish writers of all time, especially for his creation of Don Quixote, one of the world’s favorite characters of any genre. Much of the humor of the character comes from that which he imagines, just like when the character of Richard Sherman in The Seven Year Itch (Billy Wilder 1955) thinks of the women in his life, or George Webber in 10 (1979), as his fantasy eventually becomes a reality.
This quality of authenticity both of the comic characters’ demeanors and of their actions is an essential attribute of many comic characters. The comic heroine does not see herself or her own actions as funny. She behaves in a way that is logical to her—following the Principle of Comic Logic. A great film example of this is the character of Inspector Clousseau in Blake Edwards’ Pink Panther series. Throughout his antics, Clousseau views himself as a gifted investigator, clever sleuth, and shameless womanizer—not the bumbling idiot that the viewer and most of the other characters see. Don Quixote was (and still is) successful critically and popularly. No proper study of comedy is complete without it.
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 Music is an artform that combines multiple modes of thinking. It is limitlessly both subtle and expressive while at the same time exact and mathematical. Today’s topic of rhythm comes from the mathematical side of music. Rhythms come from combining shorter notes into longer sounds and dividing longer notes into shorter divisions. If you remember from earlier posts, the beat is the underlying pulse of a piece of music. Fitting within that beat we can have longer notes that take up several beats or smaller divisions that are just a fraction of one beat. The easiest example (and most common time signature) is based around 4 beats per measure. The largest note would be the whole note that takes up all 4 beats. As one can understand, only one whole note can fit within a measure of 4. When we divide the whole note into two equal parts we get two half notes (notice the math connection). If the whole note is 4 beats, each half note gets 2 beats. Dividing each half note equally again provides 4 quarter notes. Each quarter note would then receive 1 beat. It is with these quarter notes that you can start to see how important these smaller divisions are to the overall sense of the beat. Counting each measure as 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4 is a lot easier to follow than counting as whole notes 1---, 1---. Without the divisions, it is very difficult to feel a steady pulse.  Of course, quarter notes can be divided into 8 eighth notes in a measure of 4 beats. Smaller still would be 16 sixteenth notes in a measure of 4 beats. With the possibility of these small divisions, comes the necessity to use them to keep the beat. If a measure includes eighth or sixteenth notes, simply counting 1-2-3-4 gives us less of a chance of playing a rhythm accurately than if we were to count 1-and-2-and-3-and-4-and (eighth notes) or 1-e-and-a-2-e-and-a-3-e-and-a-4-e-and-a (sixteenth notes). When writing music, we find that smaller divisions of the overall beat can help to propel the music forward and give it a sense of movement. Even if a song is based upon 4 beats per measure, the drummer dividing the beat into 8 eighth notes or 16 sixteenth notes on the cymbal helps to keep the music exciting. Also think about how 8 eighth notes or 16 sixteenth notes in a measure allows the player that many more opportunities to vary the dynamics (volume) for each note. Next time you play or listen to music, I encourage you to try to hear and feel the divisions of the overall beats and think about how it changes your perception of the music.   In honor of the upcoming April Fools Day and my new restoration of the classic 1936 3 Stooges short Disorder in the Court, I wanted to share my thoughts on the film. Disorder in the Court was my first introduction to the 3 Stooges when I was about 6 years old. My Dad and I had visited the local video rental store (yes I am that old...) and found a VHS with 4 Three Stooges shorts on it (really old…). I was instantly hooked. I was delighted by how the Stooges made even simple tasks like swearing in as a witness so complicated and therefore hilarious. They take all of the audience’s expectations of how a courtroom works and go against it. Part of the appeal of the Three Stooges is that they are outsiders. Often their adventures involve them representing the working class with little control over their situations and contrasts with upper class characters.  I would assume that most viewers have been involved in a trial as often as the Three Stooges. I am only familiar with courtroom procedures because of other movies and TV shows that I have seen. The “take the stand” confusion is great because if Curly had never been in a courtroom before, how would he know what it means to “take the stand”?
The Stooges’ confusion with courtroom procedures is what makes this short so terrific. I hope that you enjoy watching it.  By the time he made Young Frankenstein, Mel Brooks was already one of the leading creators of parody in the world. Brooks understood how audiences came to parodies with numerous expectations, which some of his most successful gags would purposely go against to achieve their success. Mel Brooks is perhaps the most prolific filmmaker-parodist of the Twentieth Century, exploring various subjects like the Old West (Blazing Saddles, 1974), silent film (Silent Movie, 1976), Alfred Hitchcock thrillers (High Anxiety, 1977), world history (History of the World: Part I, 1981), science fiction (Spaceballs, 1987), the Middle Ages (Robin Hood: Men in Tights, 1993), and vampires (Dracula: Dead and Loving It, 1995). Brooks was at his peak in 1974, releasing two of the most popular and critically acclaimed parodies, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. Brooks feels that Young Frankenstein is his best film, but he gives all the credit to the power of Mary Shelley’s novel. With Young Frankenstein, Brooks achieved a new level of sophistication for parody. Few films are as fine a parody as this one. It lampoons the conventions of previous, dramatic film adaptations of Shelley’s novel—and yet at the same time, it approaches her novel in a reverent way. His film reveals the necessity of the borrowing of the conventions of tragedy in order for comedy to succeed. Many scholars argue that Brook’s comedy is far closer to the spirit and themes of Shelley’s original work than the earlier, “serious” pictures. In an unintentionally backwards way, I viewed this film years before James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), which resulted in me feeling horribly underwhelmed when I finally saw the latter film. I can say in all honesty that Young Frankenstein is truly a superior film, for it simply has a tighter narrative, more carefully crafted tension and release, and is a more genuine portrayal of Shelley’s characters, particularly The Creature. The plot points and character motivations of Young Frankenstein are clear and succinct, no matter how absurd they may be. On the contrary, Frankenstein (1931), just ends with Henry Frankenstein’s father celebrating with young women after the monster is apparently gone forever. It presents the denouement necessary to a non-comic film, yet it feels tacked on—almost an attempt to distract the viewer from the real tragedy of The Creature. Though not necessary to a comedy, Young Frankenstein does present a resolution for The Creature, as he becomes the intellectual of Shelley’s novel—however, the primal instincts that The Creature had displayed now seem to have been brought out in Victor—perhaps arguing that those instincts were always within him, but repressed. I find the creation scene of Young Frankenstein as much of an aesthetic experience as when Sir Laurence Olivier recites a Shakespearean soliloquy. It is here in the film that the line between the conventions of comedy and the borrowed ones of drama blurs the most. The platform slowly raises as Frederick’s enormous shadow covers the wall. As I stated above, Young Frankenstein comes closest to the intellectual Creature of Shelley that reads frequently and is quite eloquent. Brooks presents a bourgeois Creature that reads the Wall Street Journal, while Karloff’s portrayal presents a stiff-limbed mute who merely stumbles around.  Brooks’ film is as much another, equally valid, interpretation of Shelley’s novel, as it is a parody of past interpretations. It not only explores the themes of Shelley, but the role of comedy as a direct foil to drama. Comedy reveals the painful truth of The Creature’s longings beneath the surface of his actions more readily than tragedy can. Young Frankenstein works exactly because it gives us better access to Shelley—a direct approach that only the genre of comedy allows. The seminal idea for Young Frankenstein came from the mind of Gene Wilder while he was working with Brooks on Blazing Saddles (1974). Wilder agreed to play the role of the Waco Kid in Blazing Saddles if their next collaboration could be his idea about Frankenstein’s grandson. Much of the techniques used in the making of this film actually came from the Universal horror series that it parodies, including the use of green makeup for the creature, and the original sets and laboratory equipment. Brooks took care to remain true to the original films, making his parody work so much better by copying the original conventions so precisely—causing the viewer to realize how one takes the conventions for granted in the original source. The preview audiences hated it, and it appeared to Brooks and company that it was a failure. Wilder and Brooks got together and cut the film down considerably. Both felt that the final cut was far superior to the original cut. The experience of the test audience reminds the reader of the communal nature of comedy. The live feedback of the test audience is the same phenomenon of spectator participation in the Medieval Carnival, the audience reactions to live Vaudeville acts, and the Marx Brothers’ road shows. Brooks’ discussion of the running time of the picture alludes to the episodic nature of comedy—shown so well through Vaudeville. The shorter (than drama) runtime of a feature comedy seems to be an audience expectation, related to the aforementioned audience feedback.  Reception Young Frankenstein was highly profitable. With a budget of $2.8 million (about $13 million today), it ended up grossing $86 million (nearly $400 million today). It reassured the public and film executives of Brooks’ box office appeal that he had established with The Producers (1968) and Blazing Saddles (1974). The film was nominated for two Academy Awards, Best Sound and Best Writing (Adaption), but did not win either. Tim Dirks of American Movie Classics Filmsite remarks that it was odd that Madeline Kahn and Gene Wilder were not nominated for their performances and that Gerald Hirschfield was not nominated for his cinematography. If we consider the cinematography of the opening sequence, for example, we see that it serves as a running visual gag that continually mocks the cinematic conventions of dramatic presentation. It is for this reason, I surmise, that no reviewers thought to recognize Hirschfield’s contribution, as critics only saw his work as a parody of cinematographer Gregg Toland’s style .
At the time of its release, the reviews were overwhelmingly favorable. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times said that “it works on a couple of levels: first as comedy, and then as a weirdly touching story in its own right”, alluding to its unique interpretation of Shelley’s work. Box Office Magazine gave the film a positive review and noted that Brooks “takes on horror movies, a field that has sometimes been funny when the films were done too seriously”, raising the point of how daring Brooks had to be in order to parody a series of pictures that elicit laughter in their own right. Both reviewers talk about the necessity of an original, non-comic source for parody to work. Jay Cocks of Time Magazine liked the film, especially the dance hall sequence, which he called “some sort of deranged high point in contemporary film comedy”. The sequence curiously stands out because of its furthest departure from the novel. The one negative review that I found comes from Stanley Kauffman of The New Republic. In it, he mostly complained about the running time, which he thought was too long, “Brooks is a funny joke-and-gag man, but not 104- minutes funny”. Vincent Canby of the New York Times, focused on the gags as well, “Mel Brooks’s funniest, most cohesive comedy to date…. Some of the gags don’t work, but fewer than in any previous Brooks film that I’ve seen, and when the jokes are meant to be bad, they are riotously poor. What more can one ask of Mel Brooks?” Notice how Canby addresses the narrative structure through the term “cohesive” and describes the gags as “riotous” and also implies that one should not expect more from a comic filmmaker than a few funny gags. I find it interesting that only two of these five reviewers acknowledge the necessity of the conventions of the established Frankenstein lore for the parody to succeed. Quite a few of the more recent reviews of the film have been negative, much more so than when it premiered. I attribute this partly to the fact that so many later comedies, like The Naked Gun series, The Scary Movie series, and even some television comedies, have copied Brook’s manner of parody so closely, that the humor of Young Frankenstein does not seem to be as fresh and original as it genuinely is. As for the less than favorable reviews, in 1999, Donald Liebenson of the Chicago Tribune said, “Viewed from a Marxist (as in Brothers) perspective, Young Frankenstein is Brooks’ Night at the Opera. It is not his purest, funniest film, but it is his most sustained, satisfying, and accessible”. His terms “pure” and “funny” describe the gags, while “sustained”, “satisfying”, and “accessible” describe the narrative—ignoring the necessary balance between them. In 2007, Dennis Schwartz of Ozus’ World Movie Reviews complained that “Most of the gags were juvenile and bombed”, adding that “The best parody of Frankenstein is Whale’s own followup of The Bride of Frankenstein”, echoing early statements of the source series’ (unintended) laughable quality. The majority of reviews are still positive. Unlike the earlier reviewers, almost every Twenty First Century reviewer focuses on the necessity of Shelley’s novel and Whale’s interpretation to the success of Brook’s comedy. In 2006, Ryan Keefer of DVD Verdict said, “If James Whale’s films are the gold standard, then Brooks’ interpretation of the Mary Shelley characters is a more unspoken, yet outstanding sequel to the original”. In 2009, independent critic Cole Smithey, stated that “Mel Brooks caught comic lightning in a bottle” and added that it contains “an atmosphere of reverent delight beneath its bawdy puns and outrageous physical humor”. Bill Gibron of Filmcritic.com, loved the film stating, “No one could have expected the abject brilliance that was his take on the terror genre” adding that there is “something so satisfying about this movie, so likeable and loving that it’s hard to look at the rest of Brooks’s canon in a similar light”. Adam Smith of Empire Magazine called it “a marvelously crafted, beautifully shot comedic homage to James Whale’s 1931 classic”, adding that it is “a perfect example of early Brooks firing on all comic cylinders, and what it demonstrates is that for spoof to work, the spoofers must have deep affection for the material” that they parody. The statements of these reviewers reinforce my argument that Young Frankenstein is one of the finest examples of parody, for they not only acknowledge his faithfulness to Shelley’s novel, but his superior filmmaking sense over that of Whale. Parody’s closeness to its source allows reviewers to clearly evaluate it against the source material. With these few reviews, we see a faint comic blip on the radar of film criticism, in that these critics directly praise a comic filmmaker as having created a work more significant than that of a “serious” filmmaker. The film was an indisputable triumph for Brooks and he took great pride in his work on Young Frankenstein. 3/15/2021 0 Comments Film: Scene vs. Sequence These two ideas may be the most confused terms in filmmaking. Part of the reason for this confusion is that the definition of each term changes depending on context. For simplicity, think of a scene as an event that occurs in one location. It is a smaller unit. A sequence is a series of scenes that when put together create an overarching plot. Now to get to the more complex. In the early stages of making a film, every location change is listed as a new scene. The location does not have to change drastically. The change could be from inside a house to outside the same house, but each change would be listed as a scene. SCENE INT. HOUSE SCENE EXT. HOUSE SCENE INT. HOUSE  While filming the above example, you would film all the dialogue or action inside the house at one time and then all the dialogue or action outside the house at another time. To go back and forth between two locations (no matter how close) would mean wasting a lot of time setting up equipment and taking it down. In this case, the scene would probably be considered everything being filmed at one location at one time even if it does not appear chronologically this way in the finished product. So now that we know how a scene is defined in the script and during filming, how does it change during editing? Most video editing programs have the ability to find enough changes in imported footage to automatically separate shots into different scenes.  Notice I used the term “shot”. What is that? I thought we were talking about scenes and sequences!
If a scene is the same as a foot and a sequence is a yard, then shots would be inches. A shot is every time there is a different camera setup. So a wide shot of a table would be a different shot than a closeup of an apple on the table and a different shot than an extreme closeup of the stem of the apple. A series of shots make a scene. Now that we have defined shot and scene, let’s look at what happens when we connect scenes together--we create a sequence. Most video editing programs call different tabs of footage sequences. How can we tell when something is a sequence and more than just a scene? A sequence presents a larger plot structure than just a scene. A sequence may be a long journey. The individual scenes could be a character at the airport, boarding a plane, the plane in the sky, and the plane landing on a runway. As you can see, each one of these would be a separate scene (complete with several shots) but all clearly related in one sequence that furthers the plot. By varying the length of shots, the number of shots, the length of scenes, and how many scenes make up a sequence, a filmmaker can change the apparent speed of a movie--the pacing. So, to recap: every different camera setup is a shot, shots combine to make scenes, and scenes combine to make sequences.  The recording of sound is as much an art as it is a technology and as with other media there is often a fine balance between the way the technology works and how the artform is captured through the medium. The technology sets the limits for how the art can be captured, and in turn the way the art is created may change to better fit the technology. Experiments with technology that allowed us to capture sound began in the middle of the 19th century. The oldest sound recording that we still have access to today comes from 1860 France. It is clear that someone is speaking, but no actual words can be made out. The tool used to capture the sound is called a phonoautograph- in a sense “writing sound”. But we see the origins of records in the sense of the phonoautograph scratching the soundwaves out.  Phonoautograph, 1860 In the early 1900s, we find a recording technology that has mostly gone away--player pianos. Like the phonoautograph, the player piano is completely mechanical and not electric. A talented pianist would record a song on the piano and this would punch notches in a paper scroll. Every open notch on the paper scroll would mean that key was pressed. After recording, the scroll would then allow the player piano to function without a person pressing the keys. For many of the earliest ragtime piano pieces, the player piano was how listeners would have heard how the composer would have interpreted their own piece.  Now we move on to electricity. To simplify an explanation of how sound is captured--think of microphones and speakers as doing similar yet opposite things. A microphone has a magnet, an electrical coil, and a spring-loaded, movable diaphragm. When soundwaves (air) hit the diaphragm the microphone captures the movement. The movement, or pulses, is read as electricity. Speakers have a magnet as well with an electrical coil. The coil is attached to a cone that receives the pulses and amplifies the signal. The earliest forms of recordings use physical media--meaning something we can touch. The first records were wax cylinders that would spin similar to the later discs. Eventually, it was discovered that flat disc records could spin faster than cylinders. The needle on a record player follows the grooves in the record and the record player converts the electric pulses into sound. Here we see a technology limitation that I highlighted in the first paragraph. Because of the RPM (revolutions per minute) or speed of the record player and the diameter of the discs, there was a limited amount of music that could fit on each side of a record. Because of this, songs that were created for and recorded on records would have to be short enough to fit on one side. Even older, classical compositions were recorded by orchestras at faster than usual tempos so that they could fit on a record.  Phonograph Cylinder, 1890s I do not think that we can overstate how this technology has influenced music. Even today, about 3 and a half minutes sounds normal for a song. Anything longer than that is often the exception for streaming and radio.
Later sound technologies do not seem to have had the staying power of records. The cassette tape was introduced to consumers in the 1960s. Tapes have the advantage of being more compact than records, but did not last as long. The science behind tapes is that the tape itself is magnetic. Another advantage of cassette tapes beyond the smaller size is that tape recorders allowed amateurs to record themselves without the cost of renting a recording studio. This enabled the creation and sharing of music to become more open. It also led to some of the first cases of music piracy, as people would record songs off the radio to share with others. The last physical media we explore are CDs or compact discs. Instead of electrical signals, the music is digital, meaning the information is saved as 0s and 1s. Another description of CDs is optical media, as a low-powered laser reads the digital information on the disc. CDs became available in the 1980s and were seen as the ultimate solution to music recording and storage. No one could foresee that within a couple decades, owning physical copies of music would become the exception to the rule. By the end of the 1990s, internet users began experimenting with the ability to upload audio files for others to download. Today, we remember sites like Napster and Limewire more for legal reasons instead of technology or music reasons. Within a brief time, large companies like Apple and Microsoft jumped at the chance to offer music downloads--this time with the legal permissions of the artists and/or publishers. iTunes and the iPod totally changed the way listeners consumed and stored recorded music. As I write this post, iPods have been replaced by phones that can serve multiple functions and iTunes now focuses on streaming music instead of downloads. Today, streaming is the way that we listen to most music. Streaming really began with YouTube in the 2010s. Music publishers began to notice that most people wanted to listen to music on demand, but did not necessarily want to own a recording of the music. Spotify is now the largest streaming music platform with Apple, Youtube, and Amazon competing for a market share of streaming revenue as well. Right now, streaming is a great deal for the platforms making the music available but a terrible deal for the musicians. Buying recordings directly from artists is still the best way to support artists. Right now Spotify pays an artist between $3 and $5 for 1,000 streams meaning that their music has been played on the platform 1,000 times. We can do the math and realize that if you listen to one song from an artist on Spotify, that artist will be paid between .3 cents and .5 cents for that song, or between ⅓ and ½ of a penny. A Spotify Premium subscription is currently $10/month. Clearly, not all of the membership fee is going to the musicians. Enough about streaming. Hopefully this article gives you a little insight into the development of recording technology and how that technology has shaped, and still shapes the music we listen to.  This is an excellent question that many educators ask. I believe it is a question that we should never stop asking. Having a standard repertoire is wonderful, but we must always reflect on the music we use for teaching to be sure we have not become stagnant. There are several ways that we can group music based on the focus of learning. Several examples are by composer, by era, by style, by culture, by concept (high and low, fast and slow), and by theme of the work. For any of these categories, the teacher has to ask “by creating this category, what music are we including and what music are we excluding?” Let’s say that we decide our unit will focus on Beethoven. So that automatically excludes music from other composers. But clearly we can’t study everything that Beethoven wrote. How do we narrow down which pieces to study? There are several pathways we can go from here. Perhaps, we decide to focus on Beethoven’s works that are most popular. How do we measure that? One great way is to see which pieces are most performed by orchestras and in recitals. You can often find these records from various classical music publications. But perhaps we want to focus on pieces that have been most influential for later composers. In that case, we would study the writings of later composers. As you can see, it is quite a process to select music in this way.  An alternative to this approach is to go in reverse order. Begin with the purpose or end goal of the unit. Are you searching for pieces to be performed at the end of the unit? Will students be creating a project to present? Or, are students going to use the studied music to inform their own creations? With this backwards design, we may have an easier time selecting specific works that will best serve our students. Notice that so far all of the planning process is dependent on the teacher. This situation may be the most common way to select repertoire across the world. However, I wish to present an alternative to this approach. The alternative is learner-centered or student-centered--and that is, we have students select the music that they will study. Many may react to this statement with surprise. After all, our students do not have the years of experience with music and credentials that the teacher may have. However, it is important to remember that the music is for the purpose of our students’ experience, not our own experience. By giving students a say in what we learn, we open to them the possibility of having control over their own learning. In my personal experience, student motivation is greatly improved when students study music familiar to them. Just like the teacher selection process, students can follow many different paths when selecting music. The teacher can present learning goals for a class and then students are tasked with finding music that fits those goals. Or to go a step further in the student-centered direction, the class as a whole determine their learning goals and find appropriate music that will help them reach those goals. After this process of creating learning goals, I will often have students anonymously submit music suggestions that they feel will help the class to meet learning goals. Then, as a class we listen to each selection. Depending on the group, we may verbally discuss the selections--how difficult the piece sounds, what may be challenging, what may come easily, how it would sound after practice, etc. If the group has a difficult time discussing thoughts without risking hurt feelings, I would have students submit thoughts anonymously. I often use Google Forms for this process.  This process can take time and there is nothing wrong with it taking time as long as discussions are productive. By engaging in this process, students come to appreciate all that goes into selecting the right repertoire.
By embracing the student-centered nature of repertoire selection, we also get to learn what our students enjoy. I have learned to never make assumptions about students based on their age. Very rarely does an entire class only wish to focus on current top 40 music. I have been introduced to so many different styles, eras, and cultures of music through this process that I learn as much as the students. Also consider that the process can be a balance in which some selections are student selected and some selections are teacher selected. I argue that allowing for student-selected repertoire not only makes for stronger relationships with students in the spirit of collaboration but also sets up students to become more independent in their interactions with music and making musical decisions. I encourage you to try this process with your students, even if it is just for one selection. I do not think you will be disappointed. 2/22/2021 0 Comments Profile- John Williams If any one composer’s name is synonymous with film music of the last quarter of the 20th century and arguably, the last 50 years, it would be John Williams. I had the fortune of meeting him at a rehearsal at Tanglewood when I was 16. For someone that captures such a large sound, he was very calm and soft spoken. Williams got his start as a jazz pianist and played on several of Henry Mancini’s recordings while studying composition. What many do not know is that Williams earned his first Academy Award 4 years before Jaws by adapting music for the film version of the musical Fiddler on the Roof (1971). Williams had critical and commercial success following that with several disaster movies--The Poseidon Adventure (1972), Earthquake (1974), and the Towering Inferno (1974). Many film music fans seem to forget about any of Williams’ work before Jaws, but these scores are worth seeking out. Initially director Irwin Allen did not want any music during the opening titles of Towering Inferno, but Williams convinced him with an exciting piece as the helicopter approaches the tower. Williams’ second Academy award was for his score for Jaws, which I discussed in an earlier post.  The film that made Williams a household name and earned him his third Academy award may also be one of the most influential films in film history and film music history--Star Wars (1977). At the time, the style of music used for the film seemed like an enigma. The Academy award winner the previous year was Bill Conti’s disco-inspired score for Rocky (1976). The top selling soundtrack of 1977 was Saturday Night Fever, so you can see the context from which Star Wars emerges. From the beginning George Lucas wanted a symphonic score not only reminiscent of large Classical works but of the music that accompanied the science fiction action serials of the 1930s and 1940s that inspired Star Wars and later Indiana Jones. Williams showed not only his talent for creating memorable themes but also an incredible knowledge of harmonies and styles that had worked for classical composers in the past and when to use certain techniques. One could spend years studying just his composition and orchestration technique. The same year as Star Wars, Williams collaborated again with Steven Spielberg to score Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The memorable note sequence used to communicate with the aliens was so iconic that many assumed it was a legitimate alien signal that the filmmakers had borrowed. I have read that Williams tried multiple arrangements of notes before hitting the perfect combination. That shows part of the craft and mathematical aspect of music.  The year right after Star Wars, Williams composed my personal favorite of his scores, Superman (1978). It is difficult to say (and hopefully not controversial), but Superman’s main title may be slightly more exciting than the opening of Star Wars. The insistent rhythms and glorious themes never let up for the full 5 and half minutes of the titles. In the film, Williams music brings realism and humanity to the larger than life superhero. He captures the grandeur of flight, the tenderness of Lois and Clark, and the simplicity of Clark’s life in Smallville. This score definitely should have received the Academy Award that year instead of Giorgio Moroder’s experimental synthesizer score to Midnight Express. Williams returned to the Star Wars universe in 1980 with Empire Strikes Back, not only expanding on themes from the original film but adding many more memorable character ideas like the Imperial March, Yoda’s Theme and the love theme for Han and Leia. The end title suite for Empire Strikes Back is absolutely thrilling as it blends the three new themes for the film. 1981 and 1982 presented two back-to-back hits with director Spielberg. The action packed theme for Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) was initially difficult for Williams. He had already written the first part of the theme, but was struggling to figure out a second theme. Once again returning to the mathematical side of his talent, he inverted the first theme, and the second theme is actually the result of that. Beyond the main theme, Williams’ mysterious theme for the power of the ark is haunting.  In 1982, Williams earned another Academy Award for ET: The Extra Terrestrial. Looking back, we can forget just how much of a gamble that Spielberg took on a film that presented a friendship between a lost alien and a human boy. With just too much sappiness or too much cold science fiction, the film could have failed miserably. One great reason for its success was the music of Williams. In the recording of almost every film score, the movie is completely edited and the composer has to synchronize the timing of the music to hit certain important points in the film. After trying over and over, the ending sequence of ET just was not what Williams wanted. Spielberg trusted Williams so much that he let Williams conduct the music without the picture and then re-edited the ending sequence of the film to match the music. There is so little dialogue in the sequence that it almost becomes a science fiction ballet. The ending music of the film is one of the most epic in film history, in which the awe of extraterrestrial space travel and the boundlessness of friendship is expressed in music. It is similar in meaning to the ending of Close Encounters of the Third Kind from five years earlier, but I believe more effective in ET.
Two often overlooked main themes from the 1980s both have to do with flight. The first from Empire of the Sun (1987), called “Cadillac of the Skies” literally holds the film together. The second, from Always (1989) is probably the most memorable part of the film besides Audrey Hepburn’s final film appearance as an angel. Gather these with the themes from ET and Superman and Williams is a master of flight. Another of Williams’ most celebrated scores comes from 1993’s Jurassic Park. Who thought that a film about humans exploiting nature for profit and people getting eaten by dinosaurs could have such a beautiful main theme? The theme itself speaks to the imagined feeling of a lifelong paleontologist seeing a living dinosaur for the first time. Thirty years after winning his first Academy Award, Williams took on the challenge of creating the sound of the Harry Potter universe. Consider that this sound would have been developing in readers’ minds for quite a few years before the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001) film. Williams music does not disappoint. He returns to familiar ideas of flight, wonder, and friendship. His score is similar enough to his previous work to be comfortable but new enough to stand on its own. By the time of writing this post, Williams has been nominated for 52 Academy Awards, winning 5, nominated for 25 Golden Globe awards, winning 4, and nominated for 71 Grammy Awards, winning 25. Beyond those accomplishments, Williams’ influence on film music will live forever.  (Europe: 500~1400 AD) Although popular accounts of the general mood of Europe in the Middle Ages is rather morose, focused on plagues, wars, and poverty, comedy had a vital place in those societies. Out of this era, we not only find a great number of comedies, but a great variety of comedy as well, The comedies of this time appear in the vernacular, contrasted with “serious” writing in Latin. Of course, this trait affected how widespread a comedy’s influence may be as only one who can understand the language may appreciate the comedy without the aid of a translation—physical comedy excluded, of course. The early Medieval definition of comedy was actually quite free and many works could qualify as a comedy as long as it included a happy ending. Often this idea has been confused with the Classical definitions of comedy, which were actually much more detailed and explicit in what qualified as comedy. This Medieval definition is possibly one of the reasons why today there is so much debate over what qualities make something a comedy. It is important to remember that only the wealthiest in the Middle Ages had the luxury of even knowing about Classical Comedy through reading it. The majority of the population was illiterate and therefore we see examples of characters like devils and vice figures. As I said above, the wealthy, educated members of the societies would have access to the Classical comedy of Menander, Plautus, Terence and others, but the majority of society would not have had this experience. Without knowing the existing conventions of written comedy, crafters of comedy in the Middle Ages had to determine their own ideas of what made a comedy, with the aid of their experience of comedies that would have been handed down orally across cultures. Medieval carnivals became the showcase for comic performers. For a brief time, commoners and royalty alike could escape the reality of the world around them by means of comedy. This sense of Carnival returns in later comedies, including the works of Shakespeare, Mozart, and of course, Monty Python. As I have stated in earlier posts, comedy is a group activity, and we can clearly see its roots in the Medieval Carnival. However, in this same atmosphere of the Carnival, one can see a reinforcement of the notion of comedy as being a lesser art. For indeed, comedy in the Middle Ages came from the lowly Court Jester, not the royalty. Once again, we find the comic hero coming from a low social order, as he will continue to do throughout Shakespeare, Mozart, Chaplin, and more. Note how the comic hero in any era is quite different from the contemporary tragedies and their heroic figures.  Dante Many examples of Medieval comedy demonstrate an appreciation of crude humor. It does not need to be argued that crude humor still exists today, regardless of how low it resides on the comic spectrum. Crude humor was a large part of the early Greek comedies as well, continuing in Dante’s Divine Comedy, considered not only one of the greatest vernacular Italian works but one of the greatest works in any language. Consider that writing in the vernacular gave Dante (ca. 1265-1321 AD) the opportunity to experiment with crude humor, as crude humor would not have been as acceptable in a work written in the “high” language of Latin. Scholars praise Dante not only for his comedy but for the depth of his allegorical and theological sense as well. This endurance marks the power of comedy, even when it is seemingly at its most profane. Dante’s comedy works as a foil to his serious nature of his journey through Hell. As a Twentieth Century analogy to Dante’s exploration of the profane, consider the reaction to nudity in motion pictures throughout the Twentieth Century. Nudity was understood as an artistic exploration in pre-Code American motion pictures that mostly appeared in art museums and the like. However, once the Hays Code was established and films were intended for mass audience appeal, people then understood nudity as pornographic. Later in the century, we see the same discrepancy based on the context in which the nudity is framed when nudity in a 1960s art house picture would be “tasteful” while nudity in a mainstream picture would be “exploitation”. As it has been in the debate of aestheticism of the human body versus pornography for centuries, the actual subject of nudity did not change; the societal reaction to that subject did, based on the contextual framing. In much the same way, a comic work like Dante’s can have the reputation of being licentious in one era while in another era it can have the reputation of being one of the greatest works of Western literature—depending on how one wishes to interpret the nature of his comedy. In the centuries since Dante, many artists like Jonathan Swift, Mozart, and Mel Brooks have followed his example and explored crude humor. Out of this canon of Medieval comedy, we find the origins of farce, When a film attempts to enter the realm of farce, it encounters a type of comedy that has existed for hundreds of years, but one that has never really been critically well recognized.  Boccaccio The next significant comic writer after Dante has to be Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375). Boccaccio studied Dante extensively and was influenced by his Divine Comedy, but Boccaccio often seems to use humor much more explicitly than his predecessor. Boccaccio’s most significant contribution to the genre of comedy is his Decameron. In The Decameron, a frame narrative occurs across ten days, and each day’s stories feature a different style of humor. The Decameron became popular as soon as Boccaccio wrote it. The fact that the Decameron appeared in translations across Europe meant that it could reach a wide audience and have great influence on writers from many different cultural backgrounds. Although there are litterateurs that question the originality of the stories that Boccaccio includes in his work, it is because of Boccaccio that the stories reached writers from other countries, and even filmmakers have followed Boccaccio’s example of using comedy as a tool for teaching moral lessons.Even more than Dante, Boccaccio demonstrates how crude humor can sometimes be the most effective means of delivering social criticism.  Chaucer Many Medieval scholars argue that no writer was more influenced by Boccaccio than William Chaucer (1343-1400). But just like any great craftsman, Chaucer learned from the style of Boccaccio to create a work distinctly his own. Chaucer continues with Boccaccio’s ability to teach through comedy. Through humor, Chaucer leaves his readers with a memorable experience, but one that will cause them to reflect on their own moral dilemmas.
From the Sixteenth Century theatre of Italy came the stylized Commedia dell’Arte, of zany situations and physical stunts. It is curious that something with the word “Art” in its title so closely resembles the slapstick film comedies, which are not held in so high a regard. The Commedia dell’Arte method of incorporating numerous gags and stock characters influenced many artists, including Shakespeare and Mozart. In addition to the comic routines and stock characters, Commedia dell’arte also exemplified physical comedy. So out of this one style of Italian comedy comes the seed for not only the anarchic slapstick comedies of the 1930s, but the stock characters of the Screwball Comedies as well.  If you remember from an earlier post, rhythm is the way that sound is organized through time. A lot of people get the idea of beat and rhythm confused and often think they are synonyms. Once you get the idea of the difference, they are easy to tell apart. Beat is the strongest pulse in a piece of music. Often, they are felt in groups of 2, 3, or 4. How do we know how many are in a group? If you listen very carefully you will hear one beat that is the strongest and one or more slightly weaker beats. A great example of this is a waltz. Waltzes are in 3 with beat 1 being the strongest and 2 and 3 being weaker. The Viennese style of Waltz especially emphasizes this feeling, as the entire foot only touches the ground on 1 and it is just the toes touching the ground on 2 and 3.  If that is the beat, then what is the rhythm? It is how we organize the beat and the space between the beats. It is very rare for a waltz to only have 3 notes all on the beat over and over. We may have longer notes that last longer than 2 beats or shorter notes that move in between the larger beats. It sounds confusing but looking at rhythms and hearing the difference between the beat and the rhythm makes it a natural process.  Rhythms are completely mathematical. Every way that we organize the rhythms is measured. Splitting the overall beat into rhythms is the work of division. For an example, we will start with music based around 4 beats. If one note takes up all four beats, it is called a whole note. To help students remember its name I remind them that it takes up the whole measure. When we split the whole note in two equal parts, the result is two half notes. Again, we notice that these take up half a measure of 4, each getting 2 beats. Splitting the whole note further into 4 parts or 1 note for each beat, the name is quarter note and notice that it takes up ¼ of the measure. Further dividing the whole note into smaller parts, we end up with 8 eighth notes in a measure, 16 sixteenth notes and so forth.
If the number of beats in a measure is constant, then we can use addition or subtraction to figure out which beat we are on. If we are looking at a measure of 4 quarter notes, the third beat is the third quarter note. Either we count to three from the left or we can subtract 1 from the right. In combinations of eighth notes and quarters we simply count each eighth note as half of one beat, so that it takes two eighth notes to fill one beat. It is the opposite for a 2 beat note or half note, there would only be two remaining beats when one half note is present. I’m going to stop here before you get overwhelmed, but be comforted by the fact that rhythms work in an organized system with rules and definite answers. Simple knowledge of fractions and division can go a long way to understanding and organizing rhythms. |