Deadly Sin #3 - Creating a Lousy Story

You've got to have a good story. A lousy one, might be worse than no story at all!

So let's back up a second - what is a story anyway, and why do you need one? Well it's a word that hasn't been used a lot in this context, in fact I heard it first when thinking about marketing, not performance, but I think it's the best word to use for this purpose. The story encapsulates the meaning and the emotional impact of a piece, and bridges the gap between the technique and the plan.

For example, if you're an actor, you start with a script, which is pretty bare-bones - the playwright will have written down the dialog, perhaps some rudimentary blocking and notes, and that's it! Not much to go by. It's the director's job to read the script, understand the humanity in it and the emotional impact, all the objectives and motivations and what Stanislavski would call the "super objective" a.k.a. the "point", and then make sure the actors are acting accordingly.  Without that story, the play may as well be read by robots.  Needless to say, nobody would attend.

In a music performance, you start with even less than a script - just some notes on a page, and maybe some lyrics. Then, if the music is to live, someone has to figure out what it's all about! I bet you've seen many, many performances where nobody bothered to figure that out, and what you saw was an incoherent collection of musical devices.  At best, the musician was able to make it work through sheer force of musicality and intuition.  But it's awkward to have to count on musical genius - it's not so easy to find sometimes.

One great thing about a story - it's yours to write! You are free to use all your musicality and creativity to dream up a believable, high-impact story. Of all the things I do when I'm coaching, this is probably the activity that gets the most mileage, because it makes a night-and-day difference. A good story underneath the song changes everything.

To put it another way, a shared understanding of the story will let you decide which musical devices make sense, and which ones don't. Shall we have a crescendo or a decrescendo? Shall we keep tempo, or slow down, or speed up? Shall we use a focused tone, or a more breathy one? It all comes from the story. If you're having trouble deciding how to approach a piece of music, I bet it's because you don't have a good story yet.

I recall a class given by Geri Geiss at what was then called Harmony College - the big one in Missouri every Summer.   She explained how a great story (which she called a "scenario") made the song "Softly As I Leave You" come alive for the Alexandria Harmonizers.  You can find many recordings of the song online.  I won't get the story completely right because I'm working from a ten year old memory here, but basically there is a woman dying in a hospital bed, and her husband is at her bedside.  He falls asleep for a while, and when he wakes up, he finds that she has written a note to him, while he slept, and that she has passed away.  The note was as follows:

Softly, I will leave you softly
For my heart would break if you should wake and see me go
So I leave you softly, long before you miss me
Long before your arms can beg me stay
For one more hour or one more day
After all the years, I cant bear the tears to fall
So, softly as I leave you there

(softly, long before you kiss me)
(long before your arms can beg me stay)
(for one more hour) or one more day
After all the years, I cant bear the tears to fall
So, softly as I leave you there
As I leave I you there
As I leave I you there

These of course are the lyrics of the song.  And with that story in mind, the emotional impact was crystal clear for the performers.  It held their attention from beginning to end, and all of their music fit into that emotional framework.  I bet it wasn't necessary to argue about volume levels, or tone qualities, or tempo, or anything else, because with a strong story all that stuff just falls into place like magic.

Now Geri's scenario was not the only possible story for that song.  The lyrics could easily have been written about a person leaving their lover.  And that's another really important thing to understand - if you want to have a big impact on the audience, and really give them something worth remembering, worth talking about, then you should pick a high-impact story!

Stories are not just for tear-jerking ballads, but for every kind of performance.  People are wired up to understand and remember stories.  Our ancestors used to memorize thousands of lines of poetry, and pass them down through the generations.  It's not so obvious in this age of reading and writing and lately computers, but those skills are still intact.

So if you want your performance to have life, you had better figure out the story!