Lucky for you, there's no "right way"

I've been coached a thousand times on my singing and performing by (I would guess) more than a hundred different coaches, and thinking back, I'm surprised how often they have tried to represent their approach as the "right" approach - as if they could lay out on a platter the one true vocal approach, the best possible interpretation plan, etc. If I've learned no other wisdom in the past twenty years, it is that there is no right or wrong in performance. There are only choices and consequences, sometimes difficult to predict! You only have to watch two great performers to realize that each one has their own approach.

If only performance were so simple that all you had to do was learn the correct way!

For example, in working with a group of four voices, the best skill of a coach is to imagine the way they might blend together into a flexible and expressive whole, rather than to make them sound like some kind of "ideal model" of a vocal group. Every actor should be the best actor they can be, doing the kind of work that they do, and not a copy of Sir Lawrence Olivier. That should be pretty obvious! Yet how may actors spend their brief, depressing careers trying to be someone else?

I think when coaches represent their suggestion as the "right" way, they are confusing the need for consistency with the need to target an ideal model. Any audience member who is paying attention can tell if something changes in a way that seems "not on purpose." If you go for a high note, and the tone suddenly becomes strained, everyone will cringe. But (believe it or not) if it was strained the whole time and that seemed "on purpose", the audience would soon come to accept that vocal tone. [I mean, to a point. If you sound like a chicken, you sound like a chicken. But I stand by my statement.]

If you're listening to a whole bunch of barbershop quartets in a row, and quartet number 6 is only half as loud as quartet number 5, you notice it, and then 5 seconds later it doesn't matter any more. Your mind has reset itself to the new decibel level. A watercolor may not be as vivid as oil, but once you've realized you're looking at a watercolor it won't bother you. It's quality that matters in expression, not quantity.

From "inside" the bubble of an art form, it might seem like there is a right way. Every serious cellist probably knows the name of the best cellist in the world (I'm no cellist, but would that b Yo Yo Ma??) and they probably know how they play. And a good many of them might believe that if they could only copy that "ideal model" of a cello style, they would be just as great.

But that can never be authentic and from-the-heart. Even if you succeeded and replicated that fantastic performance exactly, the audience would have witnessed you trying hard to execute your memorized plan. That's "lukewarm applause" territory, for sure.

Do you think Yo Yo Ma does it the same way every time? No matter how he does it, it's right.

What's the message here, you might be wondering? Figure out who you are, and be yourself on-purpose, as truly and with as much passion as you can!