planning

Had some great conversations last week at Harmony University about how adoption a story-centric performance philosophy would change rehearsals.  Some surprising conclusions!  Read on.

If you’ve been reading this blog for more than a week, you already know that my approach to performance involves understanding the song (or the piece or the scene), at least well enough to keep yourself interested in it from beginning to end.  So if you’ve got some songs and you buy my approach and you’re trying to win a contest, you’re suddenly faced with this unfamiliar task: how do I understand and plan a song?

By the way, I believe that understanding and planning belong together.  It’s not easy to completely understand a song and then move on to planning the performance of it, because we learn to understand the song more deeply as we plan and perform it.  Sometimes we discover a completely new and better angle when we’re half way done with planning, that requires us to go back to the beginning.  Sometimes getting a song in front of a live audience for the first time will reveal something new.

I always start by asking the most important question – why would anyone care to listen to this song?  Sometimes the answer is obvious, sometimes it’s not, so if you don’t have a great answer off the top, don’t worry – you may discover it as you go.

There are a few other really important questions to get you started:

• Who are you in the song?  Yourself?  A specific character?
• Who are you singing to?  The audience?  Another unseen character?  Yourself?
• What is your relationship to that person?
• What is your objective?  Do you intend to seduce?  Convince?  Share a secret?
• How does the scene change as the song develops?  How does your character change, and your attitude?
• What is the climax of the song, and what scene change does it enlighten?

The answers to these questions will start creating a scenario that you will run in your head as you perform, and the images you convey to the audience will take them on an emotional journey.  If the scenario is compelling, it will resonate with the audience and excite them, just like singing a middle-C near a piano will cause the middle-C string to sound.  (Seriously – try it some time.)  Sometimes it’s not obvious why a scene causes a strong reaction.  Recently I was coaching a quartet singing “There’s A Brand New Gang On The Corner (since that old gang of mine went away)” and it became clear that the pattern of the song, which on the surface was about quartets, mirrored the pattern of life.  Anyone looking back on a life would get the message at some level, whether they had ever sung in a quartet or not.  Much of music works this way, and sometimes you won’t even know exactly why!

I'd like to do a few examples, but rather than use canned songs of my own, how about you suggest one and we plan it together?  Just comment on this post.