Planning like an engineer

I've been having a great email conversation with a friend of mine and fellow quartet singer.  His group has been trying to come up with a dynamics plan for "Love Letters Straight From Your Heart" and he's been going about it in a really interesting way.

First you have to understand that my friend is a total geek, an engineer by trade, and so he's approaching the problem in a very left brained way.  Basically he has loaded several versions of the song into an audio editing program (Audacity), and he's looking at the waveforms to see how these other quartets sang their dynamics.  He loaded in the recent version by Men In Black, and of course the iconic Dealer's Choice rendition from the 70's.  Then he chose his favorite phrases from each rendition, and assembled a complete plan showing the phrases and lyrics with a stream of dynamic markings 1 through 10, and sent it to his quartet.

I know, I know, not one in a thousand people would ever really do this - that's what makes it so fascinating!

If you follow this blog, you can probably guess my initial reaction to this scheme.  His dynamic plan seemed eeriliy familiar to me, probably because I've been down many of these technical roads before.  And I've run into an equal number of dead ends trying!  I have come to believe that all aspects of the plan need to come from an authentic, emotional source rooted in the meaning of the song, and that anything else is likely to come across as false.  If you create a long stream of dynamic markings and try to memorize them, you're going to look like a person trying to recall a long sequence of dynamic markings as you sing.  I mean go ahead and do it, but do you think anyone will want to watch?

However, what's really interesting is what happened when he brought his plan to quartet rehearsal.  It may have been an incredibly left-brained, engineer-geek think to do, but it spurred the quartet into an energetic discussion about the phrasing and dynamics.  In order for the four of them to agree on an approach, they wound up having to discuss *why* each given device was good or bad, and that forced them to get into the purpose and meaning of the song!

So I guess what I take away from this is that sometimes it doesn't matter what path you take - if you throw your energy into making a great performance, you have a good chance of getting there.