Developing the emotional foundation (example)

If you want to have a great performance, you need to understand your material and you need a performance plan - not just technical elements like dynamic markings, but something truthful, passionate and emotional; something vivid enough to keep you and your audience engaged the whole time.

So how do you create such a plan?  Can you write it all ahead of time?

In method acting, they acknowledge that the development of the emotional foundations of a stage play is an iterative process - you take a good look at the script, do your research, make a "first draft" plan, and start developing it from there in rehearsal based on how it feels to the actors and the director, how it hangs together artistically, and so forth.  Then you get it in front of people and iterate it all again based on their direct or implicit feedback.

So why should a song be different?  You're accomplishing the same thing - creating a vivid emotional story that supports the song and keeps the performer completely and appropriately engaged.  Applying method acting principles to choral singing is exactly what Tom Carter will tell you he's doing in his book Choral Charisma.

Anyway I've touched on all these concepts many times in the past few months, so let's do an example.  Realtime is working on a beautiful ballad called "Little Boy Lost" for our upcoming third album.  We heard it sung by the Voices In Harmony, and it was arranged by our good friend Greg Lyne.  Here are the lyrics:

Little boy lost in search of little boy found
You go a wandering, wandering
Stumbling, tumbling 'round

When will you find what's on the tip of your mind
Why are you blind to all you ever were, never were
Really are nearly are

Little boy false in search of little boy true
Will you be ever done travelling
Always unravelling you

Running away could lead you further astray
And as for fishing in streams for pieces of dreams
Those pieces will never fit
What is the sense of it?

Little boy blue, don't let your little sheep roam
It's time come blow your horn, meet the morn
Look and see can you be far from home

The song is from the musical "Pieces of Dreams" so that's where we started.  The plot of that musical is that an American journalist is stationed in Paris during World War II.  He falls in love with a French woman there, but when the Nazis invade he is sent to the front.  While he is there, he hears that she has been killed.  Later on, he hears that she had his child before she died, and he starts to look for the child.  He comes across an orphanage, and the nun there tells him she has his son.  He takes the boy and they begin to live together as father and son.  Later he finds out that the nun lied - the boy was not his son, but she had promised to find every child a family.  His quandry - what should he do with this boy whom I love, who has become my son?  And should he keep looking for his real son?

It's a wonderful and complex story, but it only got us so far.  As is so often the case, taking a song out of its context changes things a lot.  We could used a set-up in performance to bring back some of the context, but in this case it's quite a complicated story so we decided it wasn't really feasible.  I remember the late Larry Ajer telling me that he didn't like broadway tunes done in barbershop, because they don't make sense without the rest of the musical.  (This, just two minutes before I sang "Old Man River" while he was in the audience... sheesh!)

Then the feedback.  Performing this song with the "real" scenario in mind just didn't work.  Without the context, we couldn't follow the plot.  Based on the audience response, I'd say we left them confused as well!

So starting with some of the ideas from the scene of the musical, we went back to the lyrics. For us they evoke strong images of father-and-son scenes.  Sometimes the "little boy lost" seems to be the son, and sometimes it seems to be the father!  Sometimes, such as in the first few lines, we choose to be the father speaking to the son.  But when we get to "and as for fishing in steams", we choose to be sharing wisdom with the audience directly.  That focus swich is something that actors can't usually do because their context is fixed, but as a singing group we have that kind of flexibility.  We continue with that "direct communication" mode through the lines "little boy blue, don't let your little sheep roam" which is all about taking care of your loved ones.

Once you understand what's happening in each "unit" of the piece, who you're singing to, what your objective is, it's relatively quick and easy to construct the technical plan because it all falls into place naturally.  It seems to grow organically from the shared understanding of the emotional foundations of the piece.  No more arguments about whether to be mezzo-piano or mezzo-forte in bar 29.

This kind of work is what I enjoy most, when coaching performers.  It's like magic, watching their performance come together once they have a clear and vivid emotional foundation for their scene or their music.