Planning

I've been working a lot lately with "the basics" of story planning - the infamous "four things" that you need to understand in order to express a short piece authentically, every time. Those things are:

1. Who are you, in the scene
2. Who are you talking to
3. What is your objective
4. What happens, or what changes

All four elements are interesting, but recently the power of point number one, you might call it "identity", came up in a session in a memorable way. We were working on the ballad "Masquerade." The group being coached had created a story something like this: you have fallen out of love with your spouse, and you want to end the relationship, and right now you're breaking the news to her. Here are some of the lyrics:

Your eyes don't shine like they used to shine
And the thrill is gone when your lips meet mine
I'm afraid the masquerade is over
And so is love, and so is love
Your words don't mean what they used to mean
They were once inspired, now they're just routine
I'm afraid the masquerade is over
And so is love

The first few times through, the group sang those lines with a lot of anger. It was very authentic, because they were committed and they had a strong story, but it occurred to me that nobody wanted to see this angry story! So I suggested that instead of being angry, they might try being compassionate towards their former love. After all, you're breaking off the relationship and you might be breaking her heart! She is no threat, and she's a good person.

The effect was immediate - instead of looking like jerks as they sang the song, they came across as compassionate and wise, and deeply conflicted, and the presentation of the song instantly had more depth. It was very compelling!

So the moral of the story is, since you can pick any identity you want, consider picking an identity that you can be proud of.

Have you ever had trouble remembering what's coming up in your own performance?  There's nothing quite so gut-wrenching as realizing that you don't know the words for the next phrase, or that the whole piece you're about to perform has somehow slipped away...

I remember one time one stage, while taking applause between two songs, when I realized I had no idea what the first words were for the next song.  I leaned over to my quartet-mate and whispered under my breath, as subtly as I could, "what are the first words?"  He thought I was kidding so he leaned over to me and whispered back, "yeah right!"

Not too helpful!

But anyway it's not surprising that memory can be a challenge.  After all, each piece has hundreds of words and hundreds of notes that need remembering, as well as other elements of plan like dynamics, changes in tempo, special treatment of important words, different vocal qualities, perhaps choreography... it can be quite a lot, especially when you consider that your immediate memory can hold only about 7 things.  That's why local phone numbers were held to just that many digits, for example.

It's even harder if you're in charge of making sure that everyone in a large group remembers everything at the same time, with some kind of reliability!

So what can you do?

Well it turns out that every bit of information in your brain is held as a series of connections between neurons.  And to make a long story short and simplify things beyond scientific recognition, the more connections a neuron has, the easier it will be to recall whatever it's holding.  So if you want to remember someone's name, you can play a trick like finding a rhyming word and connecting it with a picture.  So if you're meeting a "Cindy" you might pick "windy" for a rhyme and then make a picture in your head of Cindy on a windmill.  You'll never forget her name after that!

The same thing is true of all the little details of a song.  As long as they remain a more-or-less random sequence of instructions in your head, you'll have trouble recalling them when you need them.  BUT if you have a strong story about your performance piece (who are you, who are you talking to, what do you want, what happens, etc.), all the little details find a comfortable home in that framework, and then when you're "in" the performance, it all comes back.

I was coaching a large choral group recently and the director was complaining that they always forgot a certain dynamic instruction.  And I wondered to myself, do they know why they're supposed to do it?

Depending on your personality type, the idea of designing a whole performance plan in your head might be very appealing!  Wouldn't it be fantastic to just sit down at your desk and conceive the whole master plan in your head, write it down, and be done?

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work that way.  Performance plans that come fully-formed from the head of the director are always lacking, for various reasons.

Firstly, two heads are better than one.  Unless you have special magical powers, adding in a second and third point of view will create a better, more compelling and believable story than you could do by yourself.  Just the process of talking it through with someone will crystallize your own ideas, by forcing you to put them into words.  Talking it through is like a very early version of trying it out for an audience - you'll learn a lot from the reaction you get.  Thinking of it another way, you'll never really know what it's like to communicate your piece until you at least have to communicate your plan!

Ideally you will also involve the rest of the performers, if you're not planning to do it alone.  If you are a musical leader of a large group, don't come to them with a fully formed, inflexible plan.  You might think it will save time, but in practice it just causes problems.  First, they may not buy into the plan if they had nothing to do with its creation.  And you need their buy-in, because without it you'll never get the best out of them.  You might even get sabotage!  People can be... complex.

And even if you work with a bunch of very easy-going performers (is that a contradiction in terms?), you'll spend more time explaining your plan than it would take to develop it jointly.

This does mean that you have to give up on the idea of a plan that is *all yours* but you probably recognize, at some level, that it isn't important.  That's just your ego talking, and you should never let your ego interfere with your goals, like creating the best performances you can.

Most of the time, when I work with a vocal group on a piece, they don't yet have any plan for it.  Not even the basics.  And still, by going through the lyrics and paying attention to the clues that the composer and the arranger have provided, we can usually rough-out a plan in less than a half-hour.  And creating a plan as a group means the group are all going to be on the same page, and better yet they will probably never forget that plan!  In any case their retention will be much better than if they had been given the plan as a fait accompli.

Keeping everything in mind at once about performance can be tough!  There are so many things to consider when you're working up an authentic performance that it can be daunting, and frankly pretty time-consuming as well.  The practicalities of having to get your product to the people quickly mean that you may need to practice ruthless prioritization, and do only the most important things.

So if you live in the real world, as I do, you'll like this.  Here are (in my humble opinion) the most important things.  Really, these are the four basic things you need to understand before a performance can be made authentic and real.  There are many, many other things to consider, but if you have these four you are getting eighty percent of the bang for just twenty percent of the buck.

The four things are: who are you, who are you talking to, what do you want, and what happens.

Who are you?

This is pretty self-explanatory.  Are you yourself?  Are you an old man?  Are you the Queen of England?  Are you a golden retriever?  It makes a big difference!  Every aspect of your performance comes from your assumed identity.

You might want to try on a few personas, to see which one feels right, or creates the most compelling scene.

Sometimes of course, you are you!  This may be the easiest kind of scene to play, or it might not.  Some people have a much easier time being someone else.

Who are you talking to?

Once you know who you are, you have to figure out who you are talking to.  You haven't got a chance of coaxing your subconscious communication skills into action without a clear "other" in the scene.  The image of the other is the biggest part of the vision - still or movie - that you'll be holding in your head as you perform.

What is your objective?

Once you have an identity for your self and the other, the next thing to figure out is what you're trying to accomplish.  Are you convincing them to go out with you, or to go away?  Are you trying to explain your innermost feelings?  Are you trying to extort money?  You need to know this.

What happens?

Since the typical attention span is pretty short, you've got about 20 or 30 seconds before something has to change in your scene and therefore in your performance before people start to wander off.  Not only them, but you as well!  You have to keep your own attention, to stay in the scene and crowd out technical thinking and things that induce stage-fright.

Perhaps not by coincidence, the form of a typical song divides it into chunks of about 20-30 seconds in length!  How convenient!  So make sure each major musical section has its own idea.

The great thing about this approach is that it's very quick.  When coaching, I can get this much information out of a group in just a few minutes, and we're well on the way to an authentic performance.  At the very least, it gets everyone on the same page!

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.

I got an interesting email from a reader the other day, and I bet that her thoughts will resonate with a lot of people who follow Owning The Stage.  She is a musical director in a choral group.  Here's an excerpt:

My problem is with 'the plan'.  Surely no-one sets out to do a lousy plan? I'm soooooooo scared of doing the wrong thing. I've analyzed our new songs to death and I feel really strongly that the way forward is NOT to copy someone else's performance to the letter.. but it's really hard to know what to do!!  Our marks in contest last year had us teetering on the edge of an entirely different level- so i know it's more crucial than ever. I feel like a complete novice and I'm supposed to be one of the ones in the know! it's almost as though the more i read, the more nervous i get...

There's no question about it - when you sit down and try to make a whole plan appear from nothing but your own intuition, it's a daunting task.  How do you make all those decisions about how to approach a song?  How can you be sure it's going to work?

As I've written previously, there are some sure-fire ways to screw up a plan, like trying to create one without creating a story first, or trying to create one that's fully-formed and rigid right out of your head, or even plain stealing copying someone else's work!  But here's the good news - if you avoid these pitfalls, pretty much anything you come up with will be good.

Yes, you heard correctly - it's hard to go wrong!  Why?  Because you are a human being and a musician, therefore you have access to a lifetime of experience with this world that gives you insight about the human condition, and you know good music, so once you know what you want to say to your listeners (a.k.a. your "story" for the piece) you will be able to make good choices.  And for heaven's sake, it's ART!  It's entirely subjective!  The value in art is in the mind of the beholder, and if you're making good musical choices and not getting in the way, the art will work its magic.

So here's the recipe, if you're worried about doing a lousy job:

1. Establish a great and truthful story that supports the piece.  For this, you need little other than your humanity.  If you get stuck, get together with a few friends and talk about it.  Good things will emerge.  It never fails, because stories are what humans do!
2. With that story in mind, look at the piece.  See how it fits with the story.  Try it out in your head a few times.  Note the inflection points in the story, and how they fit with the music.  Paint the moods arising from the story, with a broad brush, onto the form and phrasing, as well as the choreography.  Don't get it too perfect (see 3, below).
3. Try it out, and see what works, just a few times.  If you're in a group, engage the group in the story to make sure it's vivid and clear.  See what they do with it.  Refine your plan organically, and it can only improve.
4. When the plan comes together, and you have the feeling that it's good and right, you can start to rehearse it for real.  But remember, it will never be "done" - only the pace of change will slow down as the group finds the groove.  Every performance is unique - be open to new ideas.

Most of all, don't worry too much.  If the plan comes from a place of truth within you, it can not be an awful plan.

It may be easy to make a real bad plan, but it's hard to make a real plan bad.  :)

One thing is for sure, you can't have a great performance if you have no idea what you're going to do when you hit the stage.  You need some kind of a plan!  This is pretty obvious for musicians and actors, but even a seasoned public speaker with a reputation for "winging it" will have thought through what he's going to cover ahead of time.  The exception that proves the rule here is improvisation, but then the whole point is to make it up as you go along.  So to put it another way, unless you're planning to improvise, you need a plan.

Then the obvious question is, if I need a plan, how do I make a good one?  Let's start by describing some "deadly sinful" planning strategies that you should avoid.

First, you'll want to avoid the deadly sin of copying someone else's great plan verbatim.  It might have come from the original artist's authentic inner self, but when you do it it's just copying, and everyone can tell because you look like a person trying to remember a plan, instead of a person living one.  The result is a hollow performance - the shadow of a great plan.

Another great way to get a hollow plan is to have no story (see Deadly Sin #3).  If you don't know what you're trying to convey, the planning process always tends toward chaos, and you'll wind up assembling a plan from random bits of cool technique.  "Let's put a crescendo here and let's really chew on the word 'love' in bar 63 and let's use a nice smokey tone quality in the bridge."  The whole house of cards collapses the first time someone pipes up and says, "why?"  (I always encourage chorus singers to reject technical directions that seem to come out of nowhere, in the hope that it will encourage directors to let their singers participate in the creative process, rather than asking them to blindly replicate a sequence of artistic devices.)

Yet another sinful way to approach the plan is the make it too rigid.  Every performance is different, and if you can't go with the situation because you're determined to stick with the plan, you are no longer in communion with the audience.  The feedback from the audience might be subtle or it might be like a bonk on the head, but they do hold up their end of the conversation, if you're willing to listen.  A rigid plan also means your focus is to "get it right", which has all kinds of negative consequences.  First, trying to be right takes your attention away from your story, giving you that glazed over, inside-my-own-head look.  Second, if you believe that the pinnacle of performance is to be "right", you're really going to beat yourself up when something doesn't go according to the plan, even though the audience will neither notice nor care.  Don't try to be right - be present instead!

So enough of that, how can you create a great plan?

The first critical element of the great plan is the great story.  If you understand the piece or the scene, it might not give you a plan on a silver platter, but it will let you choose elements of plan based on whether they support the story or not.  So no more arguments about technical details - make sure you all share the story, and then let the story decide.

Once you've got the great story, just like a painter you need a rich palette of techniques to create your masterpiece.  The more choices you have, the more expressive you can make your plan.  If you are new to the art form of your choice, get a good coach!  They will be able to help you to bring your story to life through good planning.

However, I believe there's a lot to be said for the trial-and-error approach.  Get crystal clear on the story, do a rough plan, and then try it!  See what works.  Try it in front of some people and see what works for them.  Not only will you be able to make a better plan incrementally in this way, you may learn something new about your story, as storytellers often do during the telling.