Tin Pan Alley, The Brill Building and the key players of its rise and fall.By using the key words surrounding the picture read the following notes and fill in the missing words. Any words marked (find meaning) look up the definition using your ipads or dictionaries and then write another word with the same meaning next to it to help you remember what it means.

Mecca (find meaning)

Brill Building

Music business

Music publisher

Songwriter

11 floors

20th

Tin Pan Alley

Mills Music was the first to move into the brill building in the early 1930s and Mitchell Parish was a for Mills Music. After Mills Music moved into the building it didnt take long for other music publishers, booking agents and anything else connected to show business to fill the rest of the offices on the. This made it the of songwriters.

Music publishers were an important part of the and this dates back to the early century. Before the there was , Songwriters would have contracts with music publishing companies and they would earn their living from the sale of the music.

Tin Pan Alley was on 28th West Street in Manhattan. The name is said to have come from The New York Herald many pianos playing at once sounded like the of a lot of tin pans/pots in an .

Just like in the Brill Building there were a number of music publishers down , but they worked out of the small all along 28th Street. There was no at this time, and like the publishers and songwriters of the brill building error the would play their songs to anyone who came into a publishers office in an attempt to make a.

Alleyway

printed sheet

living

banging

Tin Pan Alley

radio

living

songpluggers (find meaning)

officesTin Pan Alley

Since The Beatles came into fame and to this day, the rock has always been about artists who write their music. The idea that the music is more: real authentic and when a band or singer writes the songs became very important to. But before these ideas songwriters were merely or employees to the powerful and music publishers of Tin Alley.

By the mid the Brill Building was at its and had developed an industrial process to manage every aspect of the music business. The songs that came out of The Brill Building between the 1950s and 1960s were all managed as if they were on a line, but for the first time there was a change in the audience the songs were aimed at.

Elvis changed the music business and the of the songs. Because of his Elvis Presley was a magnet to the songwriters and they would continuously go to The Brill Building to try and have their songs by Elviss publishers. After World War II song writers no longer targeted adults and instead wrote lyrics aimed to be popular with the new audiences.players20 years Number 1 hits

ownpeak teenage Panthemselves

production

industry (find meaning)

signed

growingmoney making

potential

popularityoriginal

1950s

tools

quality (find meaning)

Brillscene

Freddy Beinstock was the music publisher at the Brill Building who recognized the of rock n roll at a time when most music publishers and writers the wild sound. Beinstock approved all of the songs for Elvis Presley and he spent in partnership with him from 1955 until Elvis died.

Some of the main names at the Building who were in charge of publishing Elviss music were the writers: Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, Doc Pomus, Ben Weisman Leiber/Stoller, Pomus/Shuman, Otis Blackwell, Mort Shuman and Doc Pomas.

Ben Weisman was a staff writer for the publishing company run by Beinstock and he saw the change of when Elvis came in. Weismann and his fellow staff writers became the key in the Brill Building success story because of their vision and ability to seize the opportunity. This team of writers provided Elvis with a list of number of.

Lesson Plan

Working together in pairs you are going to fill out the missing words on this worksheet using the provided key words surrounding the diagram.

It is important to think about the missing word in its context.

Context means setting, background, environment or the circumstance.

So when looking for the missing word you are thinking about the context clues, your background knowledge on the subject, grammatical word order clues (what makes sense, what type of word is it e.g. a noun, verb, is it in italics:

Generally, we italicize the titles of things such as books, songs, tv programmes to distinguish certain words from others within the text.

Or is it in quotation marks. We use quotation marks [ ] for quotes or spoken language. Quotation marks also set off the titles of things that do not normally stand by themselves: short stories, poems, and articles.

Give an example John Key

alien

Draw Picture of John Key

New Zealands Prime Minister has been forced to publicly deny rumors he is a shape shifting .

Last month, Auckland man Shane Warbrooke put in an OIA request to the prime minister's office, asking for "any evidence to disprove the theory that Mr John Key is in fact a David Icke style shapeshifting reptilian alien ushering humanity towards enslavement". David Icke is a British author who believes many world leaders are actually part of a plot to enslave the human race, driven by reptilian shapeshifting aliens.

Mr Key's chief of staff Wayne Eagleson replied to Mr Warbrooke, saying that the OIA request was declined under a section of the act because "the document alleged to contain the information requested does not exist or cannot be found".

Mr Warbrooke, a writer and musician, says he put in the OIA request as a joke alongside some other more serious requests as part of his research into UFOs.

1. music publisher2. songwriter3. 11 floors4. Mecca (fing meaning)5. music business6. 20th7. Brill Building8. Tin Pan Alley9. printed sheet10.Tin Pan Alley11. banging12. alleyway13. Tin Pan Alley14. offices15. radio16. songpluggers (find meaning)17. living18. industry19. own20. original21. themselves22. audiences23. tools24. money making25. Pan26. 1950s27. peak28. growing29. production30. quality31. popularity32. signed33. teenage34. potential35. resisted36. 20 years37. Brill38. scene39. players40. No 1 Hits

Carole King described the atmosphere at the 'Brill Building' publishing houses of the period:

"Every day we squeezed into our respective cubby holes with just enough room for a piano, a bench, and maybe a chair for the lyricist if you were lucky. You'd sit there and write and you could hear someone in the next cubby hole composing a song exactly like yours. The pressure in the Brill Building was really terrific because Donny (Kirshner) would play one songwriter against another. He'd say: 'We need a new smash hit' and we'd all go back and write a song and the next day we'd each audition for Bobby Vee's producer." quoted in The Sociology of Rock by Simon Frith (1978, ISBN 0-09-460220-4).

In your pairs or groups and using the ipads, look up 3 songs that came out of the brill building and then write down the theme of each song. See if you can notice anything about the lyics, are they all very different, or similar, what do they talk about and how does the music make them feel, happy? Sad?