Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas: A Holiday Classic That Time Almost Forgot
The 1977 Jim Henson special, “Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas” is back, with Paul Williams’ classic music and all. Here’s the story.
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A Closer Look at Leonard Bernstein’s Music in West Side Story
In the above video (courtesy of our free course The West Side Story Companion created in partnership with Carnegie Hall), we dive deep into the score of the greatest American musical of all time. This video features insights from Grammy-winning conductor Marin Alsop about the harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic backbone of the piece’s musical score. In West Side Story, composer […]
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The Four Ingredients That Made West Side Story Great
In anticipation of Carnegie Hall’s upcoming production of West Side Story at the Knockdown Center in Queens, New York this weekend, we’ve been binge-watching anything and everything we can find about the well-loved musical and its creators on YouTube. Of course, it helps that we recently made a series of videos about the show for the aptly named course, The West […]
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Nothing is Perfect: A Guide to Analyzing Musical Theater
Musical theater nerds are nothing if not extreme. Some people shamelessly love The Music Man and hate Wicked with a fiery green passion. Some people are moved by the rock anthems of Spring Awakening and left cold by the soaring melodies of South Pacific. This enthusiasm for shows of such variety is wonderful, but some […]
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What You Need to Know to Compose for Musicals
The Broadway musical is such a mélange of parts — often Frankensteined together — that it’s easy to take for granted the weight that each of the creative elements bear. I think ten out of ten composers would agree that songwriting is the most integral of said elements. After all, no music = no musical. […]
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How to Write a Musical: Find Your Song Posts
This is part 3 of a series on how to write a musical. Start from the beginning with a brief history of musicals and explore the role of the music in telling the story. The basic question we’re looking at today is: when writing a musical, where do you begin? First of all, it’s important to know the purpose that […]
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How to Write a Musical: The Purpose of the Music
This is part 2 of a series on how to write a musical. Start from the beginning with a brief history of musicals or jump forward to learn how to select song posts! This is part 2 of our series on how to write a musical, inspired by a friend’s efforts to write a musical about an undercooked piece of pasta named Al […]
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How to Write a Musical: The History of Musicals
This is part 1 of a series on how to write a musical. If you can’t wait to start writing, jump forward to the purpose of the music or how to select song posts! A few weeks ago, I had drinks with a buddy of mine who’s writing a musical about an undercooked piece of pasta named Al Dente. He’s […]
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Six Tips for Musicians in New Cities
The summer of 2012 was pivotal for my husband and me. We had loved living in Boston, but the time had come to move on. Between the two of us, we had a pair of music school degrees, decades of instrumental experience, resumés that were useless outside of the entertainment world, and a handful of enticing prospects […]
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5 Ways to Better Prepare for a Recording Session
This week, my band and I had a recording session for a new album and I was reminded, as I am every time we record, just how much preparation plays a role in a successful recording session. Obviously, you always hope to just show up and the magic will take over, and before you know […]
