Keith Chapman

Keith V. Chapman is a television writer and producer based in the United Kingdom who most notably created Bob the Builder.

Biography

He worked for Jim Henson International, designing characters related to the Muppets, before leaving to pursue a career in advertising.

While freelancing as an agency art director in the early 1990s, Chapman worked on his own creations, eventually showing them to Peter Orton, executive chairman of HIT Entertainment. One of the properties Chapman had produced was Bob the Builder, and Orton, sensing potential in the character, acquired the intellectual property rights and created a television show based on the property. The deal saw Chapman retain a share of the copyright and also a contractual clause which sees his name appear on all merchandise related to the character.

Bob the Builder was produced at Manchester's HOT Animation Studio, with Curtis Jobling's unmistakable character and world designs helping propel the character, and the show, onto a global audience. The show became a huge success, generating around £1 billion in international retail sales. Chapman decided to invest his share of the profits in setting up his own television production and rights ownership company, Chapman Entertainment, stating his belief that "the closer involvement of creative talent can get more out of a property over the longer term".

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Wanamaker Organ

The Wanamaker Grand Court Organ, in Philadelphia is the largest fully functioning pipe organ in the world. (The Boardwalk Hall Auditorium Organ has more pipes but fewer ranks and at least 80% of the pipes have been unplayable for most of its existence). The Wanamaker Organ is located within a spacious 7-story court at Macy's Center City (formerly Wanamaker's department store) and played at least twice a day Monday through Saturday, and more frequently during the Christmas season. The organ is featured at several special concerts held throughout the year, including events featuring the Friends of the Wanamaker Organ Festival Chorus and Brass Ensemble.

Notable characteristics

In its present configuration, the Wanamaker Organ has 28,604 pipes in 463 ranks. The organ console consists of six manuals with an array of stops and controls that command the organ. The organ's String Division forms the largest single organ chamber in the world. The instrument features eighty-eight ranks of string pipes built by the W. W. Kimball Company of Chicago. The organ is famed for its orchestra-like sound, coming from pipes that are voiced softer than usual, allowing an unusually rich build-up because of the massing of pipe-tone families. The artistic obligation entailed by the creation of this instrument has always been honored, with two curators employed in its constant and scrupulous care. The organ, with its regular program of concerts and recitals, was maintained by Wanamaker's throughout the chain's history, even as the company's financial fortunes waned. This level of dedication was maintained when corporate parentage shifted from the Wanamaker family to Carter Hawley Hale Stores followed by Woodward & Lothrop, Lord & Taylor, and finally to Macy's.

Chapman Stick

The Chapman Stick (The Stick) is an electric musical instrument devised by Emmett Chapman in the early 1970s. A member of the guitar family, the Chapman Stick usually has ten or twelve individually tuned strings and has been used on music recordings to play bass lines, melody lines, chords, or textures. Designed as a fully polyphonic chordal instrument, it can also cover several of these musical parts simultaneously.

Description and playing position

Imagine creating music on a stringed instrument that is simultaneously a guitar, a bass, a piano, and percussion. Add unlimited electronic capabilities and forward-thinking playing techniques for ultimate expression. Now, design a tuning to make navigation of the instrument amazingly simple, and streamline the look and feel for optimal accessibility. This instrument already exists as the Chapman Stick.

A Stick looks like a wide version of the fretboard of an electric guitar, but with 8, 10 or 12 strings. It is, however, considerably longer and wider than a guitar fretboard. Unlike the electric guitar, it is usually played by tapping or fretting the strings, rather than plucking them. Instead of one hand fretting and the other hand plucking, both hands sound notes by striking the strings against the fingerboard just behind the appropriate frets for the desired notes.

Michael Hedges

Michael Alden Hedges (December 31, 1953 – December 2, 1997) was an American composer, acoustic guitarist and singer-songwriter. He is known for having pioneered percussive fingerstyle guitar, the influence of which can now be heard in the compositions and playing of many guitarists.

Early years

Michael hedges was born in Sacramento, the son of Dr. Thayne Alden Hedges and Ruth Evelyn Hedges Ipsen. Hedges' life in music began where grew up in Enid, Oklahoma, as he flirted with various instruments before focusing on flute and guitar. He eventually enrolled at Phillips University in Enid to study classical guitar and composition under E. J. Ulrich. Subsequently Hedges studied as a composition major at Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, Maryland, where he applied his classically trained musical background in combination with various unusual techniques to the steel-string acoustic guitar.

Hedges covered a wide range of musical styles and was considered an extremely dynamic performer in concert. Hedges made ends meet playing and singing in pubs and restaurants in the Baltimore Metro area during his tenure at Peabody. From 1976 to 1977 he played electric guitar and flute for a local jazzy folk rock group called Lotus Band, which he left to start performing solo acoustic. In 1980, he made plans to move to California to study music at Stanford University.