Posted on

A review of the Musical Theatre Concert & how to engage young people of different ages in musicals

Ms Katie Butler, Performing Arts Assistant, looks back to our recent Musical Theatre Concert here at WHS, as well as how we can engage different age groups in this popular form.

From Tap Dancing to Trunchbull

This year’s Musical Theatre Concert featured a selection of solos, duets and group numbers, with the very on-brand Wimbledon High theme of “Imagine”. This enabled us to tie numbers together through a common thread, while still allowing us to explore all sorts of different styles and stories. We hired in professional choreographer Lily Howkins to help create more specialised dance numbers, along with a brilliant three-piece band who really brought the music to life. This concert showcases the singing and dancing talents of girls across the senior school, providing a chance for Year 7s to perform with Sixth Formers, and for younger girls to have a taste of solo singing without the pressure of a whole show.

Sweeney Todd
Sweeney Todd was the WHS Senior Musical, with performances in January 2019

After Lilly and Emma kicked off the show with ‘Pure Imagination’ from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, we enjoyed Year 8’s spectacular ‘Revolting Children’ from Matilda, featuring ten girls stepping out of their sensible Wimbledon High personas and into a rebellious, anti-Trunchbull mob, with ties tied around their heads and hockey sticks as weapons. We featured more Year 8 talent in the upbeat, energetic Hollywood party number ‘Someone in the Crowd’ from La La Land, with Lauren, Amelia, Phoebe and Alyssa combining pitch-perfect vocals with challenging choreography to their usual high standard.

Another choreography highlight was the tap-toed delight that was ‘Singin’ in the Rain’, with Melody and Lizzy’s vocals combined with the brilliant tap skills of Jasmine and Shangavi. Musical theatre stalwart Erin gave a convincing performance as Evan Hansen, showing real resilience and deftly taking on various characters throughout the night. Sweeney Todd’s ‘By the Sea’ and ‘Seventeen’ from Heathers were presented together, as despite the different musical styles and the twenty-five years between their creation, they explore very similar themes of women trying to convince murderous men to live a normal life with them. For the latter, Erin was joined by Lizzie, who also showcased her fantastic vocal versatility in the contrasting ‘I Feel Pretty’. All in all, it was a wonderful celebration of dramatic skill and musicianship from the entire WHS community.

Little Shop of Horrors
This dramatic moment from Little Shop of Horrors – the Year 9 and 10 musical in June 2018

Curating a Programme

As a facilitator of these kinds of events, the challenge for me was to choose a programme that was varied, interesting, and age-appropriate, engaging all the girls. Appreciation of musical theatre, and indeed of all strands of the arts and storytelling deepens with age, maturity, and life experience, and personal development is particularly accelerated during these teenage years; it’s the reason that Year 11 can sob their way through Les Miserables, yet many Year 8s are twiddling their thumbs by ‘I Dreamed a Dream’, and I was keen to curate a concert that reflected this and provided something for everyone to enjoy.

While we had Year 12 Izzy performing the wistful ‘The Movie in My Mind’ from Miss Saigon, a ballad by a Thai showgirl during the Vietnam War dreaming of a better life, we also enjoyed Izzy from Year 8’s delicately beautiful rendition of ‘Jenny’s Piano Song’ from Howard Goodall’s little-known 2010 musical Love Story (an adaptation of the 1970 film), as well as Anna’s (Year 11) infectiously positive ‘I Can Hear the Bells’ from Hairspray.

The key to a successful programme is contrast – and so with powerhouse, belting performances like Anna’s and Eleni’s rendition of ‘Let Me Be Your Star’ from NBC’s Smash, we also had numbers like Anna’s (Year 13) genuine and engaging ‘I’m Not Afraid of Anything’ from Jason Robert Brown’s song cycle Songs for a New World, and Eleni’s other number, the vulnerable ‘When He Sees Me’ from Waitress, showing off her real versatility as an actress, and brilliant comic timing.

Other performances included the wittily staged ‘Show Off’ from The Drowsy Chaperone by Jasmine & Lilly in Year 12, and the always brilliant Musical Theatre Choir taking on an arrangement of Hamilton’s Helpless that even girls much older and more experienced would have found challenging. As Year 7 girls took to the stage with a lively Disney medley, featuring solos from Melina, Martha, Hannah and Sophia, it was clear that the future of musical theatre at Wimbledon High is in very safe hands. We ended the show with two more similar numbers: ‘The Life I Never Led’ from Sister Act and ‘Nothing Stops Another Day’ from Ghost, sensitively performed by Millie and Shangavi (Year 12) respectively, followed by a rousing ‘We’re All In This Together’ from the upcoming Year 9 & 10 production of High School Musical.

Musical Theatre: more than jazz hands

Having a concert solely dedicated to musical theatre, and particularly lots of different numbers from different shows, allows students to experiment with the differences between acting through song compared to acting through prose, and how despite the snobbery that often surrounds it, musical theatre absolutely provides as much opportunity to get stuck into interesting, complicated characters as straight theatre.

For next year’s concert, I’m keen to develop this further, delving into shows by writers like Sondheim that challenge these stereotypes better than anything else. As a writer of musical theatre myself, I’m particularly interested in using platforms like this to explore adolescent pastoral themes, and with shows like Dear Evan Hansen and Heathers featured, we were able to open up conversations about darker issues like mental health, bullying and violence in schools, performing songs from musicals that wouldn’t necessarily be appropriate as school productions, but that are absolutely worthy of attention and that many of the girls know and love.

I also hope that it introduced both cast and audience to some lesser-known shows, further fuelling their interest in and passion for musicals, and that it demonstrates the versatility of musical theatre as an art form, showing that it isn’t all jazz hands and happy endings, but can be a medium to explore all manner of themes, issues and musical styles.

Posted on

Making a living as a composer in the 21st Century – 29/06/18

Miss Katie Butler, Performing Arts Assistant at WHS and professional composer, looks at the important role of being a composer in the 21st Century.

Introduction

The role of the composer in society has changed a great deal over the centuries. Before the invention of writing and printing, music would have been passed down through oral tradition since time immemorial, but the first musical notation systems can be traced back to Ancient Greece. From there, the ability to notate music made it easier to create longer-form, more complex works, and through the centuries the process developed, from plainsong and early polyphony to the more defined periods of Western art music that we learn about in GCSE and A Level music (Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, and Romantic, up to the present day).

From pen to screen: how has technology changed the composition process?

With the explosion of technology and readily accessible media that has happened in more recent decades, there are more ways to be a composer than ever before – meaning the competition is much greater, but at the same time, so are the opportunities available. Now that we have composing software like Cubase and Logic, and sample libraries (that is, plugins of pre-recorded instruments that allow you to recreate a realistic orchestral sound from your computer), composing is no longer exclusively for those with formal musical education and the ability to read music, or a big budget to record live musicians in studios, and the lines between composer, orchestrator, sound designer and producer are becoming increasingly blurred.

In an age where anyone with a laptop can be a composer, how does this affect the opportunities open to us, and how do we take the step from composing for ourselves to making a living from it?

A little history

Going back through the centuries, many of the great Classical composers were financially able to compose the volume of work they did because of aristocratic patronage. Rich families would appoint composers to write music for private performance in their homes, providing them with a regular income and guaranteed performance opportunities, in return for entertainment and improvement of their own social standing and influence. This Classic FM article will introduce you to some of the major patrons through history. The process was similar for performers and writers; actors and musicians would be affiliated to specific families, and without patronage, we would not have the majority of Shakespeare’s work. Musicians have been making a more sustainable living from composing ever since copyright was introduced (in its earliest form in the late 18th century, and in its present since the early 20th). With rights and royalties, the great composers of previous eras would be earning a great deal more today than they would have done when they were alive.

The power of the internet

Fast-forward five-hundred years or so, and it’s a concept that’s still present today. Now that music is so widely accessible, the modern day “patron” is just a customer that downloads an album, goes to a gig or concert or buys sheet music. Websites like Patreon and Kickstarter allow freelancers invite their followers and fans to fund their work, providing exclusive and personalised content for those that subscribe. The internet is also a brilliant platform for performers to advertise their talents, as we have seen with the explosion of the “Youtuber” and Vine artists – for example, Justin Bieber, Carly Rae Jepsen, and Charlie Puth, who were all catapulted to stardom having been first spotted on their Youtube channels.

The same goes for composers. We can now market our work online with a website, and for all the Youtube videos, bloggers and adverts, there is music that get used in them, with many composers gaining a sizeable portion of their income from writing “library music”: individual tracks that could be used for all sorts of media, from adverts, corporate and educational videos to television and film. Library music companies will invite submissions from composers, where they will be professionally recorded and labelled for production companies to browse online, and composers are normally paid a one-off fee for the unlimited use of their music. One of the leading library music sites is Audio Network – take a look around the website to see the multitude of different styles that are available. Does it take the soul out of the process? Perhaps, but what it lacks in soul, it makes up for in flexibility, freedom and creative control, without the tight deadlines and clashing egos of film and television. Learn more from some composers who are making a living from library music here.

Film and television

Another strand of composing is for film and television, which has had a huge increase in popularity in recent years. It’s a career that relies almost entirely on building relationships with directors, writers and producers, and slowly working your way up. Film music has to fit a picture exactly, mirroring the movements onscreen, conveying emotion, and is very collaborative. It also involves working with directors who don’t necessarily know what they want, and requires such a broad knowledge and understanding of so many different genres of music that many people come to film composing later in their careers. While potentially hugely lucrative and undoubtedly one of the most exciting, rewarding composing careers, it is perhaps the most difficult one to break into.

Musical theatre

From the days of classical patronage to today, in order to earn a living as a composer our output is largely controlled by whoever is paying us – be this a patron, an advertising executive or a film director – but an area that allows more creative control than usual is musical theatre. Having monopolised the West End for decades, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s more recent original productions have been relative commercial flops (for example, the Phantom sequel Love Never Dies (2010), and the bizarre Stephen Ward (2013) that closed after three months), and he is now channelling his focus into helping the next generation of musical theatre writers and composers.

Love Never Dies – a musical failure? Or the catalyst for promoting young composers?

In 2017, he purchased the St James Theatre and renamed it The Other Palace, with the main purpose of bolstering new musicals, and they host regular open mic nights as well as workshops and showcases of new work. Off the back of this, composers can then earn money from licensing shows for amateur performance, or from a transfer of a show to a bigger theatre. Because the process from page to stage takes a great deal of time, other forms of income are still vital. Commercial song-writing allows this freedom to an extent, and there is a faster turnover of projects, but there is still the pressure from record labels to write hits that will sell and the competition is greater than for any other medium.

What can I do now?

As for where to get started while at school or university: GCSE and A Level Music courses will introduce you to the techniques used for composing and give you a chance to try it out, before specialising in university and postgraduate study, where you have the creative freedom to explore your own personal style without worrying about the mark schemes and hoop-jumping that comes with passing exams. You can also come along to our various composition clubs that take place during the week, where you have the freedom to work on your music. Early composition assignments can feel like creativity by numbers, but as they say, you have to learn the rules like a pro so you can break them like an artist…

It’s harder to get started making an income composing than in a lot of careers, but once established, there is essentially no cap on how far it is possible to go. It’s about finding your niche and a way of making it work for you, and new music (particularly by female composers) is being championed more now than ever. Here are some links specific to young female musicians:

PRS Women Make Music

Women In Music

Glyndebourne: Balancing the Score

If you think composing might be your thing then immerse yourself in learning more about your craft – go to gigs and concerts, see films in the cinema with the high-quality speakers and surround sound, explore both the West End and Off-West End theatre scenes (many shows have cheaper ticket lotteries or day tickets, and seats at the back for as little as £20). Seeing how others do it is the best way to learn how to do it yourself, and as Wimbledon residents with central London practically on our doorsteps, there really is no excuse not to! Most importantly, be brave and put your music out there so that people can see what you can do.

Happy writing!