 Opening up concert band classes for piano and keyboard students is a wonderful opportunity to build your program. In this post, I include several tips for how to successfully include keyboards in a band setting. Often these instruments are excluded from bands and orchestras or only have a place in jazz bands. By not making modifications to include these instruments, we may be excluding students that want to learn music in an ensemble but also do not have the desire to switch from piano to another instrument in order to join an ensemble.  TuningThe first consideration for the group is tuning. Unlike other instruments that have tuning that can adjust, we will assume that electronic keyboards are always on the correct pitch of A=440Hz. This description says that the A above middle C on the keyboard sounds at a frequency of 440 cycles (sound waves) per second. This means that instead of tuning the band to the oboe or 1st clarinet, the band should be tuned to the keyboards.  Learning The Black KeysUnlike beginning piano lessons, students playing keyboard in band will need to incorporate black keys into their known notes early on. The black keys are not as scary as many learners seem to think. If the player’s fingers are curved properly at the best playing position, students will have no trouble reaching these keys.  Start One Handed Unless a student has previous experience with piano lessons, I strongly recommend that students begin reading just one staff (usually starting with treble clef unless the student has experience with bass clef) and attempting to play the lines with just one hand instead of trying to double each part with two hands or read two staves with different parts. Since many band pieces favor flat keys, it can be helpful for students to play Bb with their left hand and then C, D, Eb, F, and G with the fingers on their right hand. This will avoid students having to start playing using finger crossings. Also, just because keyboards can play chords does not mean that keyboard students should have to play chords to start. A chance to play a familiar melody can be highly motivating.  Finger CrossingOnce students gain confidence, one technique that keyboard students in band will want to learn is finger crossing so that they can play beyond a range of 5 notes. The teacher can help students to explore finger crossing by giving each student a fingering chart and putting the fingering numbers over the notes, so Bb, C, D, Eb, F, G would be labelled 2, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Just this range and fingerings cover many approachable band pieces. Finger crossing is awkward for every student at first and you may hear many complaints. But the truth is smoother playing comes from finger crossing and not lifting the hand every few notes.  Range Can Reinforce Other PartsOne of the great things about including keyboards in your band is the range that the instrument has. Depending on your numbers and instrumentation, the keyboard can be used to reinforce other parts from the lowest notes to the highest notes. If you have a lot of keyboards, you can even split them up so that some reinforce the bassline while others play higher harmonies. If you don’t have many bass instruments, keyboards can add to the bass line. Even if the keyboard students have not learned bass clef yet, they can simply read it in treble clef and just move down the keyboard to the lower end. Likewise, if your group needs more sound on the high octaves, the keyboards can supplement that. One of the nice things about the keyboard is that every octave has the same key arrangement, so transitioning octaves is not difficult, especially if students follow the fingerings.  DynamicsIf your school has the budget, I recommend using keyboards in band classes that are touch sensitive, meaning the keyboard volume responds to how hard or soft a student presses the keys. In this sense, changing dynamics is more like percussion students than wind or brass players. Also remember too, that a keyboard cannot sustain notes for a long time without replaying a note. An organ setting for keyboards does allow for sustained notes, but without the touch sensitive dynamics. Another idea is that keyboards cannot crescendo or diminuendo on a single sustained note.
I believe if you give keyboard students the opportunity to participate in band, you will be pleasantly surprised and how they add to your ensemble.
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 Context When modern critics and scholars analyze Bringing Up Baby, it is impossible for them to consider it outside of its relation to other Hepburn-Grant films. Since the film, Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant went on to make the successful comedies Holiday (George Cukor 1938) and The Philadelphia Story (Cukor 1940) together. Separately, both actors went on to many successful roles in comedies as well as in other genres, and are now remembered as being two of the greatest motion picture performers of the Twentieth Century. Howard Hawks (1896-1977) was one of the most successful filmmakers of the 1930s. Some film scholars have dubbed him an auteur. Hawks cited Chaplin as a source of inspiration when it came to his comedies. At the time of Bringing Up Baby’s development, Katharine Hepburn (1907-2003) had gained some notice in dramatic pictures, but RKO wanted her to branch out into comedy. When the film failed financially, the studio blamed her. Hepburn was quite athletic, and Hawks’ film allowed her to express her abilities. Her physicality set her apart from the other female leads of the time, who could impress only on a verbal level, to which she could add a physical level. Like Clark Gable at the time of making It Happened One Night, Cary Grant (1904-1986) was not yet the megastar that he would become later in his career. He had already appeared in the successful The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey 1937) with Irene Dunne, but after Bringing Up Baby he appeared in a string of successful comedies, to only later branch out into other genres in the 1950s and 60s. Eventually, he became the ideal American man.  Reception The film eventually did make a small profit, but not enough to satisfy the studio. While the reviews were mixed, the critical reaction was not as negative as many scholars would lead one to believe. Norbert Lusk of the Los Angeles Times hated the film, stating that it was the wrong type of film for Hepburn. Film Weekly found the film to be passable, but criticized it, “The opening is a little off-key and several comic sequences have only the elementary appeal of slapstick”. Those were the only negative contemporary reviews that I was able to find. Note how both use comic terms, particularly “outrageous”, “slapstick”, and “parody”. Also notice how the reviewer for film weekly finds physical comedy, “slapstick” in particular, to be only “elementary”. Unlike these two reviewers, reviewers from four major publications gave the film positive reviews. Another reviewer for The Los Angeles Times incorrectly predicted, “in the end Bringing Up Baby will probably be a decisive hit”. Mae Tinee of the Chicago Daily Tribune said, “It’s been a long time since we’ve had a real feature length slapstick comedy. As a quite amusing specimen of this class, I welcome Bringing Up Baby”. Variety praised the performances of Hepburn and Grant and called it “definite box office”. We see critics praising the inclusion of slapstick as they did with Duck Soup (1933), and the performers as they did with It Happened One Night (1934). After the success of later Hepburn-Grant projects like Holiday (1938) and The Philadelphia Story (1940), Bringing Up Baby found a renewed interest among film reviewers and audiences. Most recent reviews praise the rapid pace of the film. In 1997, Jeffrey M. Anderson of Combustible Celluloid said, “It’s a brilliant movie, and one of the greatest and most intense ever made”—using the term “intense” to describe the film’s use of the Principle of Comic Logic. Diane Wild of DVD Verdict described the Screwball Comedy’s collaborative nature, calling it “Magic…a sublime convergence of greatness”. Jon Danzinger of Digitally Obsessed added, “It really is one of the all-time great screen comedies, and in almost seventy years it’s lost none of its fun, charm, wit or spirit”, speaking of its longevity. Joshua Rothkopf of Timeout New York Magazine agreed with Danzinger, saying, “A comedy that never should have worked is now all but immortal”.  Legacy In subsequent decades, Bringing Up Baby inspired dozens of television series and motion pictures, most notably Peter Bogdanovich’s What’s Up, Doc? (1972). Bogdanovich had several interviews with Hawks before and after making his film, and credited Bringing Up Baby for giving him the idea for What’s Up, Doc?. Hawks himself called his own Man’s Favorite Sport (1964) a remake of Bringing Up Baby.
The rapid, zany style of Bringing Up Baby influenced later Screwball comedies, including Arsenic and Old Lace (Frank Capra 1944) and The Odd Couple (Gene Saks 1968). In 2006, Premiere Magazine named it one of The 50 Greatest Comedies of All Time and Entertainment Weekly named it the 24th Greatest Film Of All Time. The genre of comedy and the subgenre of the Screwball Comedy would not be the same without Bringing Up Baby. Like It Happened One Night, it is a treat to witness two of the last century’s most acclaimed performers lose all inhibition and act goofy. Notice, from It Happened One Night to this film, how reviewers look for chemistry between the romantic leads—revealing a critical convention in the analyses of romantic comedies that first appears in the critical language of the mid-1930s.  Vaudeville and the British Music Hall The style of performance known as Vaudeville began to appear just a few years before the invention of the motion picture. The term “vaudeville” comes from the song parodies of Eighteenth Century France. Vaudeville focused not on a narrative or order of events, but rather on the performer herself. There was no director of the performances, aside from the owner of the venue that would choose the order of acts and determine which performer received the best audience response. This absence of a director left the performer as the controller of timing, audience rapport, and content. Later in the Twentieth Century, the Vaudeville tradition continued in the form of stand-up comedy. Vaudeville, and the British equivalent of the Music Hall, had more influence on the style of comedy film than on any other genre. The episodic style of Vaudeville introduced a performance rhythm that became expected in film comedy and ultimately led to television variety shows. With its widespread influence, the style of Vaudeville and Music Hall affected many later filmmakers and theorists, including the great Russian filmmaker, Sergei Eisenstein, who wrote more about the art of montage than any other filmmaker or film scholar. He credits the inspiration of creating meaning through the juxtaposition of separate elements to Vaudeville and the Music Hall. The rapid-fire delivery of antecedent-consequence, set up-punch line style of comedy that audiences come to expect with film comedy has its roots in Vaudeville. Another innovation that came from within the context of Vaudeville is the duality of the comedienne as a character and the comedienne as herself. By the 1930s, it was not uncommon to find examples of comedians, like the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, or (for that matter) Cary Grant, who appeared in films impersonating themselves instead of a fictional character. Of course, studios at the time could not help but encourage this trend. If a comedienne, or more importantly, if her style, were popular with audiences, succeeding pictures featuring this comedienne were more likely to be successful, as audiences members knew what to expect from the comedienne’s performance. Vaudeville also presented the mindset that a successful comic performance should be judged not on the creativity of the performer or the variety of his or her performances, but on the number of laughs that the performer elicits.  The Motion Picture Since the birth of the motion picture in the late 1800s, film comedy not only developed due to the influence of other art forms, but also within the film medium as the techniques and styles of filmmaking became conventions of expression. It is important here to note that the film genres that we know today did not appear fully formed, but rather developed gradually over a period of a couple decades. The major genres of the infant years of film were melodrama, comedy, and historical epic. Comedy was successful critically, as well as financially. In the 1920s, film reviewers and audiences saw the comic Chaplin as at an equal level as that of the dashing Fairbanks. There was no difference between the comic performer and the dramatic performer. Some of the most influential comic characters and situations that are familiar today come from the silent film comedies. Silent film comedy had true universal appeal, as knowledge of the language was unnecessary. As was the case with Vaudeville, the character and her routine of gags is more important to the silent film comedy than the narrative. However, film comedy would not remain the prominent genre that it had been in the 1920s. While audiences seem to be forgiving of dramatic films that reuse plot elements and character identities from film to film, audiences immediately notice when the same gag or comic situation is reused. As I stated before, similar gags not only kept their impact over a period of a couple decades, but rather for centuries. Consider the influence of Vaudeville’s episodic structure on film comedy, and how the medium of film allowed for the filmmaker to insert gags at any moment of the film. A gag recycled from earlier films may even recur in the same film, if the context allows. Film comedy changed style more drastically than any other genre out of necessity, meaning that verbal comedy became the main form of comic expression. Comic style also became more diverse as the homogenous style of slapstick comedy branched out into “comedian comedies” and Screwball comedies. But verbal comedy did not eliminate all forms of physical comedy, as some of the most successful comedians developed trademarks with their physical mannerisms. Indeed, physical comic styles did not die completely in favor of purely verbal comedy. Rather, they remained ever present, synthesizing a greater comic impact than verbal comedy could alone. In the 1930s, comedy did not simply coexist with drama, it complemented it. Sometimes only comedy is daring enough to show society as it really is. The next major technical innovation after the sound film was television, which became the primary showcase for comedy in the 1950s. As a result of this transition, among other causes, few notable film comedies came from American studios in the 1950s when compared to other decades. The most successful American comic director of the 1950s would have to be Billy Wilder. His definitive comedies The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Some Like It Hot (1959), described by some film scholars as “sex comedies”, form practically a subgenre of their own. Also, I would argue that none other than Marilyn Monroe was the most successful American comic film performer of the 1950s. Nearly every comedy film in which she starred was a commercial and critical success, in part because she worked with some of the most critically acclaimed directors of the time. Keep in mind that, although she has now been dead for fifty years, she remains one of the most popular cultural icons. Licensing fees for the use of her likeness alone still earn millions for her estate every year. Her legacy is indisputable as is her influence on American popular culture and on comedy. While the American film industry suffered during the Red Scare of the 1950s, British film comedy found a sort of renaissance. Ironically, the successful British comedies of the mid Twentieth Century had their roots in documentary—a genre that relies on a strict narrative structure, unlike comedy. It seems as if the filmmakers of the United Kingdom had to wait for the output of American comedies to stall in order for international audiences to appreciate their distinguishing brand of comedy. The two most influential British comic performers of the mid Century were Alec Guinness, who was equally as comfortable in the historical epics of David Lean as he was playing multiple roles in Ealing Comedies, and Peter Sellers. These two performers introduced the world of comedy to the unprecedented feat of one actor portraying multiple roles within one film—and sometimes within one scene, as Guinness does in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949). Although I admit that many so-called “character actors” populate dramas, if one performer were to play multiple roles in a single dramatic film, it would give the impression of a low budget production that could not hire enough talent. But in the realm of film comedy, the ability of one actor to portray multiple convincing characters in a single film is a demonstration of that performer’s prowess. Note how this quality of performance unique to comedy in the field of motion pictures comes from the theatre, in which a one-performer show—whether comic or dramatic—seems to denote an accomplished performer. By the early 1960s, British and American filmmakers seemed to return to a uniform style of comedy. For 1960s and 1970s comedy, parody was the order of the day. In the United States, Mel Brooks imitated classic Westerns in Blazing Saddles (1974) and classic Horror with Young Frankenstein (1974). Woody Allen used an actual Japanese film that he redubbed in order to lampoon poorly dubbed foreign films in What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966) and he parodied documentaries with Take The Money and Run (1969) and Zelig (1983). The team of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker satirized the disaster movies that had become popular in the 1970s, including notable entries like Airport (George Seaton 1970), The Poseidon Adventure (Ronald Neame 1972), Earthquake (Mark Robson 1974), and The Towering Inferno (John Guillermin and Irwin Allen 1974), with their critically acclaimed Airplane! (1980). Although some scholars may argue that Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964) parodies Sidney Lumet’s Fail-Safe (1964), I disagree with this assessment. Kubrick released Dr. Strangelove in January 1964, while Lumet released his film in October 1964—nearly a year later. It is quite possible that Kubrick had read the novel Fail-Safe (published 1962) and was aware that a film version of the novel was in the works. However, if Kubrick had wanted his film to function as a parody of Fail-Safe, he would have waited for Lumet to release the aforementioned film. In addition, the credits of Dr. Strangelove clearly attribute the story to Peter George’s novel Red Alert (published 1958). For these reasons, I believe that Dr. Strangelove is not part of the parody tradition. Instead, it most closely follows the methods of the Anarchic Comedies. Concurrently, versatile filmmaker Blake Edwards parodied the James Bond franchise with a series of films beginning with The Pink Panther (1963). The success of this series owes much to the performances of Peter Sellers and to the music of Henry Mancini. In the 1970s, the Monty Python comedy troupe lampooned historical epics in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) and Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979). One curious point that I wish to make about parody is that so often the resulting parody is of a higher caliber of technique and aesthetics than the original film that it parodies. Filmmakers begin work on a parody with the assumption that the viewer will be familiar with the original source, but a well-made parody can succeed on its own without requiring the viewer to have any existing knowledge of the source. Most viewers will arrive at a parody knowing the rules for the particular genre or genres that the comedy film parodies. The most successful parodies work because they purposefully go against the rules of the parodied genre. The 1970s ended with a return to romantic comedy as the primary subgenre of comedy with films such as Allen’s Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979) and Edwards’ 10 (1979) finding popular and critical success. Arguably, this trend continues into later comedies, like Moonstruck (Norman Jewison 1987), Four Weddings and a Funeral (Mike Newell 1994), Bridget Jones’s Diary (Sharon Maguire 2001) and more recently, The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius 2011).  |
