#ragtime

This Day in Buster…May 3, 1935

Goody, goody gun drops! “Tars and Stripes" is released by Educational Pictures.

new uquiz just dropped: which musical theater micro-genre are you? composed entirely of genres i made up myself. rb and let me know your results in the tags!

I’ve been thinking a lot about echo and reverb lately (natural as well as artificial), and how those can influence one’s performance and the voice’s effect on the listener (in this case, audience member). This has nothing to do with a certain rock opera. Sometimes, the effect created is absolutely stunning and enhances the voice’s natural beauty, but sometimes, it makes it sound… slightly off. That being said, singing in spaces with natural echo or singing with artificially added reverb is a great challenge (or so I’ve been told).

The video below (non-embeddable, click the line just below the video showing the channel name) was recorded in the hall on Ellis Island, which was never meant as a performance space. Following the Ragtime concert, many people complained about the awful echo that posed a challenge to the performers and was responsible for the unpleasant sound overall.

However, I personally think that this is an excellent example of a singer who masters that echo wonderfully - she’s singing with the echo, not against/despite it. And she has to - the setting is dramatically different from a usual theatre stage and requires adjustments.