listening skills; co-operation; rehearsal; repertoire; strengths and weaknesses
Elements of a Musical Ensemble
For this section of the unit I had to design a PowerPoint presentation and present it to my class. The presentation had to include all of the elements of a musical ensemble.I decided to do each heading as a separate slide and back up the majority slides with evidence, such as videos and images.
For this slide I decided to include examples of frontmen and sidemen for famous bands. I chose each example for a specific reason to compare with the rest of the examples.
Frontmen
Freddie Mercury: Freddie is the front man for queen but has almost a dual personality, he is shy and not very talkative off stage but when it comes to on stage he is one of the most influential frontmen ever.
Julian Casabalancas: Julian acts different to Freddie because he is louder and more confident in interviews than he is on stage. When seeing Julian perform live he takes on the persona of a iconic rock musician, not really interacting with the audience or moving much on stage but still giving his all into he delivery of his vocals.
Pete Doherty and Carl Barat: I chose these two because they are different from the rest, they are both front men for their band. Pete and Carl interact with the audience in a whole new way compared to any other band i can think of. They have both developed this brotherly love, almost romantic which makes the crowd go wild whenever they get close together on stage.
Sidemen
Matt Helders: Matt is one of the more involved sidemen, it is always easy to identify him within a song. He always plays drum solos and difficult, complex rhythms whilst singing backing vocals or backing up the lead vocals in the background. The drums are one if the main features of the Arctic Monkeys.
Noel Gallagher: Noel is an example of your typical sideman, quite and keeps himself to himself but his contribution to the music in Oasis is what makes them one of the best bands of their time, without Noel they probably wouldn't be half as famous as they are now.
For the Organisation i chose to use the college's production of Joseph hand the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat I chose to do this because I thought it was a good example of how organisation is important for a performance.
In order to prepare ourselves for the final performances of the musical we had to organise a date for when all the cast, crew, sound team and band were able to attend. The date for practises was then arranged to be on every Sunday leading up to the event.
Organising the event was a little more complicate. Although all of the teachers had organised the advertising and a venue for it to be performed in, Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber managed to copyright the play write so that it could only be performed in religious buildings such as churches.
Communication
For the communication I thought it would be a good idea to use Foals as an example because they require a lot of communication to keep together with the complicated rhythms and melodies that they use.
Interaction
Queen's performance at Wembley is a brilliant example of how Freddie Mercury uses his incredible vocal range to interact with the audience and get them all fired up for the rest of the songs the band is going to play.
Listening skills are one of the most important features you need to consider when playing in a musical ensemble. Portishead's Geoff Barrow uses his listening skills constantly throughout all of their songs to improvise different scratching rhythms along he track.
Red Hot Chili Peppers demonstrate their ability to listen to each others playing constantly when they play live. They like to show how they have perfected the ability to play off of each others interacting rhythms and melodies.
To demonstrate co-operation within a band I decided to use a video of one of my old bands as evidence. The video demonstrates own the band is discussing various ways on which to improve a new song idea that they came up with. This is a perfect demonstration of co-operation within a band because it shows how everyone is giving their own input into what they think could be done and then the rest of the band putting the ideas into action.
For showing how a band needs to rehearse I supplied a video of the same band from before demonstrating how in a practice we still made mistakes and therefore needed to rehearse more often to be able to give a convincing performance.
I also thought it would be a good idea to add some evidence of what it is like when a band doesn't practice before a big performance. This comical video demonstrates how a band thought it would be alright to just get up on stage without many rehearsals, and when it goes all wrong they take it out on the guitarist.
Repertoire is very important when you are in a famous comercially successful band. As a pose to discussing how various bands have chosen their repertoire and why they have done it, I decided to use an example of how a bands repertoire can change with time to develope a more mature music taste. To help me show this I used examples from Take That to show how they have changed compared to their earlier music.
To Identify the strengths and weaknesses within a band I decided to make a table on what makes a good band and what makes a bad band. I have supplied a video demenstrating an example of what a bad band could be considered as. Various notes I have made are from watching this video.
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