From theme to instrument
Looking inside the programme of Billy Strings’s He-Man night in Baltimore reveals an arranging task alongside the costumes. After the concert, he said he had prepared some Masters of the Universe themes for guitars and written two pieces, Prince Adam and Teela’s Quest. A cartoon world becomes a list of works for musicians to prepare. For me, that conversion is the evening’s musical centre: a theme accompanying characters and scenes onscreen takes on the responsibility of a piece heard in its own right in concert.[1]
Arranging for guitars means choosing which features of an idea made for another setting to carry across. Recognizable melody, rhythmic continuity and the distribution of roles among instruments are possible parts of that choice. Strings’s account confirms that he worked on themes for guitars; it does not by itself tell us how those tasks were resolved in performance. The concrete preparation still matters: a musician adapts repertoire for the instruments at hand and inserts new compositions into it. A world listeners recognize and material written for the occasion meet within one programme.[1]
One evening’s repertoire
The sequence connects to that shared world along several routes. The opening He-Man themes bring in the series’ music directly. What’s Up? by 4 Non Blondes refers to the internet video pairing it with He-Man imagery. The programme continues with Snap!’s The Power, Slayer’s Skeletons of Society, Foo Fighters’ My Hero and Sheryl Crow’s Strong Enough. Their place in one evening gives us more to consider than a common performer. Music from the series, an association formed through an internet video, and a vocabulary of heroism and strength in the titles offer different routes for selecting repertoire.[1]
Bringing such different material into one evening also raises the question of shared preparation. Strings said his band worked hard on the material and expressed appreciation for Molly Tuttle and Sierra Hull joining him and for playing again with old musician friends from Traverse City. Organizing a programme around a theme may help listeners connect different songs. That is my inference; the collaboration among the guest musicians may have supplied the connection independently of the theme. The useful programming idea is to borrow a familiar world and distribute concrete tasks across arrangement, new composition and guest performance. Viewed this way, He-Man reaches all the way to the rehearsal table.[1]