This morning I attended the “Music and Song” workshop hosted by Ann Miller, Helen Stroud, and Steve Berman. In this workshop we were split into groups and then we circulated through the three hosts every 45 minutes. Ann had a PowerPoint presentation where she went over all of the rights, royalties and responsibilities within the world of children’s media. Many of the terms she defined with royalties and rights were many that I had seen before in previous classes. Steve went over what his company called “The Composerworks” does and what it means to be an agent, which is his profession. The most memorable part of this workshop was being involved in the demonstration by Helen Stroud. I found this one especially interesting for a number of reasons. One was the fact that the other two were not very interactive and in Helen’s she let us listen to numerous theme songs. She first explained the many different children’s series that she works for and also gave some background on what it is like in children’s media. I definitely agreed with her statement that the theme song of a show sets the premise for the music in the rest of the show. Through watching different children’s shows I have seen how the music seems to flow very well together and has a similar sound. She explained how they came to pick between 6 theme songs they were presented with for cat in the hat. When I first heard them I realized they were all different but I didn’t know which made one better than the rest. Then I realized this once she explained how they had to choose one that was better tailored to their target age group. It had to be one that pre-schoolers would better associate and react to along with sounding unique from all their other shows. This made me think back to the reading when the text talks about how companies are constantly changing and creating new ideas to reach a certain age group more effectively.
This is one of the shows Helen works on and one that she showed us many examples of.