How do you use multimedia in your concerts and student recitals?
George Litterst is a nationally known music educator, clinician, author, performer, and music software developer. A classically trained pianist, he is co-author of the intelligent accompaniment software program, Home Concert Xtreme, and the electronic music blackboard program, Classroom Maestro, from TimeWarp Technologies.
Multimedia is nothing more than the combination of two or more modalities of communication. Combine images with text, motion video with music, or ballet with sound effects, and you have created a multimedia piece.
Unlike traditional recorded music, the live concert experience has always had a visual component to it. As members of the audience, we become engaged by the physical movement of the performers as they play, the clothes that they wear, the appearance of their instruments, and the other sights and sounds of the venue.
When attending a concert, we’re often presented with a program that not only lists the pieces but also contains program notes. If we consider the fact that a live concert frequently combines both visual elements and text with the music, we can say that we’re already accustomed to enjoying a multimedia experience–even when we attend the most traditional classical concert.
A true multimedia performance, of course, goes much further and combines extra-musical elements with the musical performance in a deliberate and artistic manner. The central purpose is to engage the interest of the audience more fully or to communicate at a higher level.
I’ll never forget a performance of Saint-Saëns’ Carnaval des animaux that I heard during my grade school years. It totally captivated me. The orchestra engaged an artist who rendered each animal as a chalk drawing on a large easel in real time as the orchestra played. In particular, I remember how carefully the artist coordinated her final flourish of the chalk with the last note of each zoological vignette. And lest I forget to mention it: the piece was also accompanied by the witty lyrics of Ogden Nash.
That performance was designed to reach out to children but was enjoyable for adults as well. The same general concept can also be used with more sophisticated pieces. For example, I occasionally perform another Carnaval, the opus 9 of Robert Schumann. This amazing work musically depicts two lovers, in full disguise, searching for each other during an 1830s masquerade ball.
Since I have not encountered many people who have attended such an event in the 1830s, I have found it helpful and fun to present a coordinated slideshow of paintings that depict the various scenes that Schumann has so beautifully composed. My slideshow of mostly 18 th and 19 th century paintings is certainly not necessary for the enjoyment of this work, but the images do inform the audience in ways that the notes alone cannot.
As you read the two responses below, I think you’ll get the idea that creating a multimedia component for a student or professional recital can be a lot of fun. It does, however, require time and creativity. But I can assure you that engaging in the act of creating the multimedia components of a recital is one of the most educational things that you and your students can do.
My First Multimedia Student Recital
by Penny Lazarus
Penny Lazarus has a private music studio in a 250-year-old colonial house in Newburyport, Massachusetts. With an M.A. degree and Ph.D. coursework in Art History, a B.A. in Piano Performance from the University of Pittsburgh, and certification in Secondary Education Social Studies, Kindermusik, and Eurhythmics, Penny has experience teaching all ages and is most interested in how students learn as much as how to teach students to play the piano. A member of NGPT as well as MTNA, Penny is still learning herself: she is currently studying voice, recently performing the work of Mark Hayes at Carnegie Music Hall in New York as part of a festival choir. For questions regarding teaching with technology or just plain getting electronic technology to work in an old house, Penny is grateful for the tutelage of husband, typographer, and graphic designer, Josh Faigen. Keyboard Companion and the Piano Pedline have also been extremely helpful technology resources.
Adding a New Dimension to My Student Recitals
As a teacher of 35 private students of varying ages and years of study, I am always looking for different ways to present them in recital. My students really enjoy recitals with themes because each experience is different, and we often extend the thematic idea throughout the teaching year. It’s fun for our audiences too, as they have come to enjoy the unexpected. And, it’s a lot of fun for me, as I find that working with a theme provides a framework for choosing new music for my students and discovering new ways to approach my teaching.
Last year was the first time we used any sort of presentation technology within our recital program. We titled the program Pictures at an Exhibition, after Modest Mussorgsky’s suite, and one student started the recital with the movement, “The Great Gates of Kiev.”
Gathering Images
We took the title of this suite literally: every student selected an image that best expressed the mood of their recital piece. Almost all of my students already had the computer skills to email their image to me in .jpg or .pdf form. The collection of images included personal photographs, graphics from the Internet, and even paintings and collages made just for this occasion. Starting with that material, we made a PowerPoint (www.microsoft.com) presentation that was ultimately projected onto screens above the stage and synchronized with the recital program. (It should be noted that our recital took place in a church that was set up for projecting PowerPoint in this way.)
One of the challenges was obtaining images that were clear enough for projection onto a large screen. This meant that sometimes I had to talk to my students about the issues of image size and resolution (a minimum resolution of 300 dots per inch or “dpi” was recommended) in order to obtain pictures that would not look grainy when projected. Every student took these technology lessons in stride.
Prior to the concert, each student wrote an explanation as to why they chose their image and how it helped them to deliver a more expressive performance and a clearer interpretation of their piece. During the recital, I read these explanations as each student approached the piano to play.
Sources of Inspiration
I often encourage my students to make an empathetic connection with their music by creating a mental picture. My background as an art history professor comes in handy–we often pour through those gorgeous art history picture books to find historic art to jumpstart our discussions.
The impetus for this “Picture Recital” actually came from my son’s nursery school. The teachers had compiled a video of photos of the year at school, put music in the background, and projected it, using the same church we would later use for our piano recital. Not a parent viewed the short movie without tears in their eyes. The power of the images in that video gave me the confidence that our piano picture theme would work.
Kids Are Amazing!
It has been really fascinating to see the level of abstract thinking among my students increase with each year of age. One of my first year students, a seven year old, performed Daniel Turk’s little Allegro. For his image, Petey chose a drawing of a rabbit running “because Allegro means to play fast and lively.”
Anna, a few years older, performed her favorite Beethoven theme: a reduction of the last movement from the Pathetique Sonata. For her image, she chose a photograph of herself holding a young bunny named Diesel. Anna made the whole audience sigh as she relayed how she felt pathos (for Pathetique) whenever she looked at this photograph–Diesel died unexpectedly after only a couple months in the family household and this was their only photo of the beloved pet.
Continuing with the animal theme, high school pianist Luke chose a beautiful photograph of a sleeping kitten to go tongue-in-cheek with his performance of Dave Brubeck’s Take Five.
Not all of the images had to do with animals, however. Michael performed Carl Phillip Emmanuel Bach’s Solfeggieto (first published in 1770) alongside a reproduction of artist Marcel Duchamp’s painting Nude Descending a Staircase (1917). I didn’t help Michael choose this image; he came up with it on his own and artfully compared the arrangement of Bach’s theme stepping through the circle of fifths to this French Cubist painting of a woman stepping down the stairs in broken fragments like a stereoscopic image.
We ended the recital with a short video, made from photos taken with a simple digital camera. This video–set to the music Piano Man by Billy Joel, Leonard Bernstein’s Wrong Note Rag, and the pop song Hundred Years by Five for Fighting–displayed all the stages of work that the students went through in order to perform this recital, the real work that most audiences rarely think about. We had photos of students conducting their own music with a baton to feel the beat, of note cards on the floor dividing their pieces into memory sections, and also of the tears of frustration on a day when one of my most accomplished students just didn’t think he would be ready to perform in time for the recital. (He performed flawlessly, and like my experience at my young son’s daycare, not a parent left the room without tears in their eyes.)
Multimedia on the Concert Stage
by Shana Kirk
A piano teacher specializing in music technology, Shana Kirk is a member of the creative team behind Time Warp Technology's Home Concert Xtreme score-following software. She has also toured nationally as a product specialist for the Yamaha Corporation of America's Say Yes to Music™ educational outreach program, and is active as a music technology consultant and clinician. Shana lives in Denver, CO, where she is past president of the Denver Area Music Teachers' Association.
Why Multimedia?
When you create a multimedia performance from the ground up, there are many factors to consider. For this reason, it’s important to start by deciding why you are adding a multimedia component.
In most cases, the goal is to bring a layer of added interest to the performance by simply adding visual images to the experience. For example, in a performance for general audiences–such as community concerts or school assemblies–the use of projected images often helps to engage the interest of audience members who might otherwise have trouble relating to the length or style of the music. And when you play for more sophisticated audiences, you may find that multimedia presentations add another dimension of understanding, especially for less accessible works.
Where Do You Start?
When putting together a multimedia piece, you are expanding your presentation of the work by adding any or all of the following: still images, video, audio, or text.
Once you decide on a general direction for your performance project and what you plan to achieve, you have to find sources for your multimedia material. Copyrighted images, for example, may require permission from the copyright owner, so make sure to plan ahead and give yourself time to secure the proper permissions. Of course you can avoid these issues altogether if you or a collaborator create original material yourself.
The Nuts and Bolts of a Multimedia Extravaganza
Perhaps my most in-depth (and rewarding) multimedia project involved adding images, video, and other sounds to Debussy’s prelude La cathédrale engloutie. The ultimate goal was to create a performance for two pianists, one playing the original score on an acoustic piano and the other performing on a digital piano, adding additional sounds and instrumental timbres. For this performance, George Litterst and I worked together to create a fantasy world depicting our own ideas about the undersea cathedral and the story that is suggested by the music.
We started by assembling images from a variety of sources, including photos that my husband had taken of the Cologne Cathedral in Germany and some ocean pictures from a recent vacation. We even came up with some high resolution, underwater images.
Once we had our collection of photos, we had a lot of creative editing to do. For example, near the end of the piece, we wanted to show the cathedral above the water and then make it appear to sink gradually as the sun set. To achieve this effect, I used AdobePhotoshop (www.adobe.com) to layer an image of the cathedral with some shots of the ocean as viewed from the shore. By using a number of editing tools provided by Photoshop, I was able to create a sequence of images that progressively showed the cathedral being engulfed by the waves.
After preparing all of the still images for the piece, we wanted to add a sense of motion throughout. We did this by turning the still images into short video clips using Apple’s iMovie (www.apple.com) and a variety of motion effects from other sources that work within the iMovie program.
For example, when the cathedral was depicted as completely submerged, we wanted to give a sense of movement of the water around the cathedral. To achieve this goal, we used a combination of effects from Stupendous Software’s iMovie Smoke and Glass Plugin Package (www.stupendous-software.com) to make the catacombs and the interior of the cathedral “wobble” as if they were being viewed by a swimmer underwater. Using another iMovie effects plugin, Virtix’s Zoom and Pan (), we helped the viewer “travel” about the cathedral, explore the rooms, and watch it as it emerged from the sea.
The tricky part was synchronizing these mini-videos with our performance. Our goal was not to coordinate our playing to the videos but rather to coordinate the visual presentation to our playing. To do this, we needed to deploy two software programs in our performance, one to track our playing and the other to present the visual material on cue.
It should be noted that our goal was to coordinate the start of each mini-video with a particular moment in the music. And, we wanted the flexibility of playing each phrase of music at whatever tempo seemed appropriate under the circumstances. For these reasons, we had to make sure that each of our mini-videos was longer than necessary!
We prepared the performance by creating a MIDI score of the piano part, and we included a silent accompaniment track whose purpose was to send MIDI cues to the display program, thus coordinating the playback of the mini-movies. This MIDI file was loaded into TimeWarp Technology’s Home Concert Xtreme (www.timewarptech.com), so that George could view the piano part on the computer display and play his part on a Yamaha Disklavier (www.yamaha.com) that was connected to the computer. With the piano thus communicating with the computer, Home Concert Xtreme was able to track each note of his performance by comparing what he played with the saved MIDI file. In this way, Home Concert Xtreme coordinated the playback of the silent accompaniment track and thus sent out the MIDI cues at the right time.
We imported the video files to Arkaos VJ ( www.arkaos.net ), a software program that enables videos, still images, and even sounds to be triggered by specific MIDI notes. Arkaos VJ also supplied us with a suite of transition effects for switching smoothly from video to video. Whenever Arkaos VJ received a MIDI cue from Home Concert Xtreme, the currently displayed video seamlessly transitioned to the next one.
To polish off our presentation, we also created an obbligato part that I played on a Yamaha Clavinova digital piano. This part added a lot of whooshy, ethereal sounds, mostly based on inner voice lines of the original score, as well as a few sound effects, including chimes and crashing waves.
Can I Do This If I’m Not a Technology Junkie?
It is certainly possible to add engaging visual elements to your performances without getting too complicated, and even control them yourself as you play. You actually have a lot of options available!
First of all, if your goal is simply to synchronize the transitions of images or even videos with a piece of music, you can connect a USB foot pedal to your computer and use it to control PowerPoint, Apple’s Keynote, or any other presentation software program. The Pedalpax SAI model (www.pedalpax.com) is built for gaming, but can be programmed on a Windows computer to send a mouse-click, space-bar strike, or any other keystroke you assign to it. With a pedal like this, you need only to practice “feet separately” to create a synchronized performance. A similar USB device called the Fragpedal (www.gamingmouse.com) is available for Macintosh and Windows computers from Good Work Systems.
If you don’t wish to change your slides yourself as you play, you can always engage a second person for this purpose. In this case you would not need any additional equipment – the slides would be changed by the assistant using the computer keyboard. And, if you aren’t worried about exact synchronization, you can find other ways to do a lot of creative multimedia very simply.
One of my colleagues plays a PowerPoint presentation (saved as a video and burned to DVD) with winter scenes running in a loop as the students play their holiday pieces. In Colorado Springs, the local Yamaha dealer actually includes a multimedia category in their Clavinova Festival™, and the students have included everything from original artwork to “real” art matching the style or subject matter of their pieces. In both of these cases, the technological solution was either a PowerPoint presentation connected to a TV, or images loaded into the Clavinova, which also has video output.
It is interesting to discover just how creative your students may become when the doors to multimedia are opened. One recent student went so far as to do a sort of multidisciplinary multimedia performance, by recording her own original composition, drawing her own pictures (which were displayed using PowerPoint), and performing an interpretive dance along with the other two elements. Another student coordinated stills from his favorite movie with orchestrated accompaniments from the film score.
For Lipscomb University professor Jerome Reed, the use of a simple, self-playing PowerPoint presentation enabled him to reconcile his love of playing contemporary music with the realistic need to satisfy general audiences. Over the past few years, he has performed the infamously long and discordant “ Concord” Sonata by Charles Ives more than 30 times across the US and Europe. By creating a presentation that mixes still images (photos mostly taken by Reed himself) and quotations (from authors Emerson, Hawthorne, Alcott, and Thoreau), Reed has made this difficult but fascinating work accessible to a much wider audience.
Since the Ives work has no barlines and many tempo changes that can result in widely varying performance times, Reed has opted not to try and synchronize specific musical moments with particular image or quotation transitions. “I do have markers in my mind along the way,” he says, “so I can tell if I'm going a little faster or slower. I just have to make sure that I don't play so fast that I get to the end of the piece before the presentation gets to the last slide.” (Of course Dr. Reed was very excited to learn about that programmable USB pedal!)
In the next issue: How do you use technology in your summer teaching?