fourth wall

Been a while since I blogged - I missed it!  Been very busy with Groupanizer and Realtime's third album, so Owning The Stage has been on the back burner.

However, I've been coaching quartets a lot and I continue to be amazed at how effective it is to coach through the vehicle of story. I don't choose that vehicle with every group, but if they have a baseline level of skill and they have been working at their craft for long enough to acquire some bad habits, I always start with story - not for any philosophical reason, not because I have a point to prove (although I do), but because in my experience it's the most efficient and pragmatic way to get a singing group to the next level.

What's the difference between an actor and a musician?  Most people who can play an instrument beautifully refuse to call themselves musicians, and most people who call themselves actors don't act!  Fascinating!

Besides that tongue-in-cheek comparison, I have realized a few more differences.  Perhaps they are common sense, and I'm just easily amused... you be the judge.

Actors are doing a good job when their focus of attention is on the scene, and not the audience.  The audience at a play fully expects to be ignored, unless there is a Shakespearean "aside," and that doesn't happen very often.  For an actor to play to the audience is a disaster - the art is destroyed for the sake of exhibition.

Musicians on the other hand are usually better off to pay attention to the audience.  People like it when they are played-to, or sung-to.  A concert is something "real" - nobody is asking you to pretend you're not sitting in a theater.  There is probably no elaborate set, to suggest an alternate location.  To stand on stage and sing and ignore the audience is an invitation for people to get up and leave, physically or mentally.  So it's a completely different game.

However, rules are made to be broken!  I love to experiment with musical performance that incorporates a bit of the theatrical mode, to introduce some variety.  Often Realtime will put up the "fourth wall" between ourselves and the audience, and focus our attention to the stage as we pretend to be a band, or even a singing group on a corner, singing for our own pleasure.  As long as the ignoring doesn't go on too long, people get it, and they can enjoy watching us interact with each other instead of communicating straight to them.  After all, this is the TV generation - we have a lot of practice being passive observers, voyeurs of entertainment.

Actors in musicals do something similar in musicals, when the "scene" is put on hold while the people on stage sing to the audience.  And audiences don't seem to have trouble with that.  When the song ends, the actors go back to focusing on and interacting with each other.

When Realtime is working on a piece and planning the performance, the ones that require the least work are the ones where we're being ourselves, singing about singing!  Tunes like "Come On Get Happy" don't need a lot of creative, out-of-the-box development!   You can see why:

Hello World hear the song that we're singing
Come on get happy
A whole lotta lovin' is what we'll be bringing
Come on get happy
We had a dream to go travlin' together
We spread a little love and then we keep movin' on
But somethin' always happens whenever we're together
We get a happy feelin' just a singin' a song

Not a lot of creativity required there.

Where it gets complicated is when we take on a new persona as part of the performance.  With "Birth Of The Blues" we start off as ourselves in the introduction ("I asked my Daddy but he said he didn't know..."), then we become nightclub singers at the chorus, in a "rat pack" kind of style ("They heard the breeze through the trees..."), and then when David Wright's arrangement really goes crazy, we turn into the band, only to return to being ourselves at the end, having come full-circle.

Playing with that focus of attention dynamic is a lot of fun.  You should try it!