MX Magazine, Sydney, Thursday March 22 2012
MX Magazine
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J-Wire, March 27
J-Wire
More than 2,000 people of all ages packed Sydney’s Bondi Pavilion complex to experience the musical joys of the 2nd annual Sydney Jewish Music Festival “Shir Madness”.
 Willy Zygier and Deborah Conway enjoy a light moment. The weather was kind and music lovers enjoyed more than 40 acts on 5 stages – both indoor and outdoor – all day and night. Foodstalls filled the pavilion courtyard and the Inheritance arts exhibition was also a hit and kids bopped to the songs of Go Seek. Festival director Nicola Ossher said it was fabulous the festival was ‘pumping’ right to the last act… “Every venue was packed from the start… from Tim Freedman’s amazing set to Old Man River, Keppie Coutts and Deborah Conway and then Israeli legend Mosh ben Ari closed the festival beautifully at night.” The festival featured visiting London all-women group the London Klezmer Quarter and US a cappella group The Western Wind. Other big name musicians included Simon Tedeschi, Melbourne’s Barons of Tang, Dereb the Ambassador and Monsieur Camembert. Click here to read the article at J-wire.com |
Keppie's Workshops - Natural Music in Language
Berklee Press
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"Our brains are built for patterns," Keppie Coutts '09 told a group of high school students at Berklee's summer Songwriting Workshop.
Humans' enlarged frontal cortexes allow for greater pattern recognition, Coutts elaborated. In music, this means that rhythm and rhyme is pleasing. The more a pattern is repeated, the more it will be remembered, so it's important to keep in mind when writing memorable lyrics. It also means that subtle changes in rhythm can change the meaning of what you say. "The best way to convey your idea clearly and directly is to preserve the natural stress pattern of the language," said Coutts, "and make sure your melodic setting doesn't interfere with that." To get a sense of that rhythm, Coutts had students label the stressed and unstressed syllables in various lyrics, such as those of "Eleanor Rigby." She pointed out certain patterns to watch out for: Verbs generally get all the stress in English. Compound words generally stress the first syllable. Pronouns are often stressed incorrectly in songs, as are -ty and -ly at the end of words. Of course, rules are meant to be broken. The important thing is to be able to recognize them and break them intentionally, for a purpose, rather than out of ignorance. Coutts recounted an example of a song that she wrote as a student at Berklee and took into the studio with John Mayer. In "Waiting for the Avalanche," she stressed a normally unstressed word, "for." Along with professor Pat Pattison they tried again and again to change it, but in the end Mayer decided, "There's prosody in this missetting." Reading/Listening Suggestions: * "Musical Language," Radiolab, NPR * This Is Your Brain on Music, Daniel Levitin * The World in Six Songs, Daniel Levitin * Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks * Mother Tongue, Bill Bryson Boston Globe, September 2008 |
Boston Globe Review
Boston Globe
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Keppie Coutts in Kendall Square Drum Media calls Keppie Coutts "a little lady with a large voice" who is "so musically aware that [her] songs sound like they came before she did." Her songwriting earned her top awards at Berklee (she won both the Performing Songwriter and the Songwriter's Showcase competitions), so be sure to steal away for this lunch concert in Kendall for your treat of the week. Coutts's songs marry soul and folk so gorgeously, you'll cheer when they get stuck on endless repeat on the jukebox in your brain.
Boston Globe, September 2008 |
Keppie Coutts
Berklee Media
| Berklee Media profiles a select number of its most outstanding alumni and students. To read full profile, click here. |
"A Songwriter Who never Protests Too Much"
Berklee News
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...For "Goodbye to Georgie," Seeger had guitar principal Keppie Coutts count down Bush's time left in office using a gadget called a Backwards Bush, coaching her to read like a carnival barker. (Seeger is selling the devices and hoped, she joked, to get her music on the creator's website.)
Despite the ideological content, Seeger thought the song was accessible to everyone. "Such songs are not necessarily for a committed audience. I would say 'You don't have to join in on this if you don't want to.'" In general, she said, "You use the word 'we' a lot. You don't say 'you.'" Coutts, who won a Berklee Counseling and Advising Center songwriting contest for songs about substance abuse, had a suggestion of her own. To avoid alienating listeners, she said, "for me at least a really good method has been to just find a story, find an individual, place yourself somewhere in that story but never demand of someone that they react the same way you react." An experience with a friend sparked her melancholy winning song "Last Call." As part of her prize, she got to record it professionally with professors Kevin Barry and Dave Weigert as her sidemen. Like Coutts, Seeger said she likes to go fact-finding when developing a new song. In fact, she burrows in like an anthropologist to get stories. "When you're trying to tackle a subject and you don't know anything about it, one of the best things to do is to go to the person who does know something about it. You just go hold up a microphone in front of them. You're asking, 'What is it like to be you?'"... For the full article click here. |
Folk Funk
Drum Media
| ”Keppie is a Sydney acoustic local who is driving a new wave of folk-funk. A little lady with a large voice and cheeky smile, Keppie has that rare quality of being so musically aware that the songs sound like they came before she did” (Jan 2006). |
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Copyright Keppie Coutts 2011