On Stage

 Years ago I had a hot debate with a fellow performer.  We had both noticed that in some performances, the performers were able to create strong emotions in the audience.  Sometimes, under the right circumstances, the appearance of sadness in the performer would make the audience cry.  The performer's joy could make the audience joyful.  He was trying to convince me it was magic, as in "could not be explained by science."  That rubbed me the wrong way, so I argued that it had to be something to do with what the performer actually did, and what images and sounds made their way from the performer to the eyes and ears of the people watching.  But the actual mechanism remained a mystery.

Some people seem to have more charisma than others.  You know the type – they walk into a room and everyone watches them.  The whole geometry of the room will adjust to make that charismatic person the focus of attention.  And those people, often, are the ones who have a gift for stage performance.  It’s easier for them to command attention, and they have a natural charm that gives them a big boost in developing rapport with an audience.

Since I started writing this blog, I’ve spent an awful lot of time thinking about authentic performance.  What is it?  How does it work?  Is it necessary, or can you get away without it?  My mind churns on these questions almost constantly.  So when I get a chance to watch a whole bunch of performers in a short period of time, I always learn something interesting.

Got a great question from a performer a while back, and I'd like to share my reply with everyone.  If you have a question, I'll be happy to do the same for you!  Anyway here we go:

One of your posts suggest that people try NOT to give it that extra 10% on stage because you might make it worse. It you want to give 110% give it first in practice then duplicate that on stage; don't surprise the rest of the quartet with something they haven't heard before. We went on stage with that goal; to bring our best on stage, no more, no less. In spite of that the energy of performing did something positive. This is obviously one of those Zen issues with contradictory goals. There is clearly a right and a wrong way to use performance energy and tension. Used wrong it can lead to over singing or breaking the unity of the group. Used right it can be great, but what does that mean?

Have you ever wondered why some performances affect you and some don't? Personally can get choked up when I least expect it. For example certain female voices get me every time, for some reason that I can't explain - why this voice, and not others? Sometimes when I'm reading bedtime stories to my kids, something about the story will start to choke me up, but I won't be able to put my finger on it.

And that I think gives some insight into how people are wired up. Everything that comes in through our senses gets bounced against our memories, past experiences, attitudes and beliefs, and sometimes the combination gives us an emotional reaction that is surprising!

So if as a performer you are interested in giving people experiences like that, you might be wondering how you can head in that direction for as many audience members as possible.

Now some audience members are naturally more receptive than others. The least receptive ones are constantly "on guard" and evaluating what is happening with their analysis engines revved up. No wonder - I bet they trained up by watching ads on television, and constantly having to remember that the creator of the ad doesn't care about them personally, but simply wants their money! We live in a funny world that way.

So what can we do, to break through those cynical barriers?

That's where subtext comes in. The lyrics of a song might be written down in black and white for everyone to evaluate, but there are other channels open even in the most cynical observer, and some of those channels are wide open, impossible to guard. They are the channels furthest from the analysis fortress of the brain.

But to use those channels, we need to be in an emotional space ourselves! The kind of mental space we as performers can only achieve if we put ourselves into a vivid and compelling story of our own making, with layers of human understanding and creativity over and above the black and white notes and words on the page.

That is the secret weapon.

A few weeks ago I was in the shower. I've been in the shower many times since then (really!) but this time was unusual for a few reasons. First, I was in Auckland, New Zealand, and secondly while I was in there I had a huge insight about a song.

I was in NZ at that time working with the very fine Greater Auckland Chapter of Sweet Adelines, a chorus of some 120 very good singers under the unstoppable leadership of Melody Lowe. We were working together on Time After Time, among other songs. Together we figured out what that song was really about, and created a vibrant and impactful story that really allowed the ladies of the GAC to shine.  With groups that good, more often than not that's what I do so they get the most bang for their buck.

Anyway I'm in the shower, singing as usual, and I find myself singing Time After Time:

Time After Time I tell myself that I'm so lucky to be loving you
So lucky to be the one you run to see in the evening when the day is through
I only know what I know the passing years will show you've kept our love so young, so new
And Time After Time you'll hear me say that I'm so lucky to be loving you

And I start to choke up, thinking about my wife Kari back in Vancouver, and how I don't tell her enough how much I love her.

And that, in a nutshell, is what makes music important. It catches you off guard and teaches you things about yourself and about the world. It gives you a chance to experience more things than you could hope to experience in a lifetime without it. That should be all the reason we need to make absolutely sure that music gets the support it needs to be and to stay a thriving, vital part of our society. It should be one of our most deeply cherished values, right after food and shelter.  And in some places, like Hawaii, you barely need shelter!

Anyway, I thanked the ladies of the GAC for their part in bringing me this experience, and promised them I would sing it for Kari. This past week we were in Hawaii together for our 10th wedding anniversary, and I surprised her on a crowded tour bus with just that serenade. Just the look in her eyes was worth it, but as a bonus everyone on the bus went home with a nice story.

More on the specifics of why I like Time After Time so much, in an upcoming post.

[Editor's Note: Liz has put together a much more detailed article on Flow than the simple review that I wrote.  Enjoy! -Tom]

As Tom writes about here, a ‘flow’ state is one where you are completely immersed in an activity, losing all sense of self-consciousness, with action and awareness completely merged. It’s what athletes mean when they say they are ‘in the zone’. We should care about it because it relates both to high levels of personal satisfaction in what we do and to the development of high-level skills. Happiness and expertise go hand in hand, it seems.

Flow was first explicitly documented by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who derived it from accounts by expert practitioners in all sorts of fields, from artists to airline pilots, from musicians to mountaineers. He found strong common themes in their descriptions that allowed him to identify five key conditions that allow you to get into a flow state:

• There needs to be a balance between challenge and achievability: if the task is too hard you become anxious, if it is too easy, you become bored.
• The task needs to be clearly defined, so that you can tell if you have achieved it or not.
• Related to this, there needs to be direct and immediate feedback, so that you can adjust what you are doing in real time.
• You need to have a sense of personal control over what you are doing.
• The activity itself needs to be intrinsically rewarding, that is, it is an end in itself, not merely a means to an end.

So, it’s clear that musical performance has a very high flow potential –not surprising, given that this was one of the fields Csikszentmihalyi studied to develop the concept. And anyone reading this blog has already experienced it first-hand, whether in an occasional peak experience, or as a regular part of what makes music-making addictive.

But of course, not every performance achieves flow, so it is worth interrogating these points a little to see what implications they have for how we understand what we do.

1. Challenge level. This relates strongly to Tom Metzger’s recent post on choosing the right material. A major reason for anxiety in performance can be doubting your capacity to deliver.Conversely, material that lies so well within your grasp that you could perform it in your sleep can also prove an obstacle to flow, since it doesn’t require your full attention to produce a well-controlled performance. And unfortunately, music performed on autopilot can feel as anticlimactic to audiences as it does to performers - so it is important to maintain a degree of challenge. This is particularly an issue for professional performers who may perform the same material many times – either as part of a run, or as core repertoire they return to year after year.Fortunately, music is a complex thing, and we can continue to find new things to stretch us long after the technical issues are under control. We can seek to deepen our interpretive insight with each repeat performance, or to allow ourselves to become more emotionally vulnerable in our connection with the audience. But we need to keep growing with the music if we are not to find ourselves becoming cynical old hacks.
2. Task definition. It is the nature of music that it can be performed well or it can be performed badly, and – notwithstanding inevitable debates about taste - there is a good general consensus as to which is which. This is one of the things that makes flow possible: if it were a case of ‘anything goes’, then there would be no opportunity to get in the groove and really nail it. So, we have to accept the risk of bombing as part of what makes the artistic heights attainable.Of course, what counts as ‘bombing’ varies according to the level of the performer. For less experienced performers, this may be technical control; for more skilled performers it is more likely to be an artistic issue. Just last week, I heard one of our advanced piano students play Beethoven’s Op. 111 Sonata in a Performance Class. It was a captivating performance - technically impressive and imaginatively authoritative. Still, from her perspective, she hadn’t nailed it: ‘There wasn’t enough passion,’ she said, ‘it’s the end of the day, and I am tired, but it needed more passion.’ She gave her audience a compelling experience, but had not herself, on that occasion, entered into the depths of flow.(Incidentally, as a Music Category judge, this is the primary reason I value the relative strictness of the barbershop style definition for contest purposes. You can’t have a ball playing at the edge unless you know where the edge actually is.)
3. Feedback. In musical performance, we are constantly getting feedback on what we do: from our sound, from our co-performers, from our audience. And so, we are constantly responding, and adjusting what we do as we go.It is worth making the distinction here between self-talk (‘ooh, I was a bit sharp there’) and responsiveness. The former is unhelpful, because it is far too mono-dimensional and slow to feed usefully into what you do. By the time you’ve finished thinking that thought, the music has moved on, and you’ve missed a whole phrase because you were busy talking to yourself about tuning. The latter is glorious, giving that sense of being immersed in and contributing to an experience unfolding in real time – of being in the now.And the extra richness of feedback is why live performance is a heightened experience compared to rehearsal, and why so many performers cherish their work in small ensembles as particularly satisfying. (For a wonderful fictional evocation of the interpersonal magic that is chamber music – as well as an unbearably moving love story – try Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music)
4. Personal control. This one is interesting, because the same activity can give quite different impressions about levels of individual control, depending on your relationship with it. Musical performance has a lot of constraints, things you are expected to do as a matter of course – not just to do with notes and words, but expectations of performing traditions too. If you add in a strong musical leader (within the group, or coaching them) who takes most of the interpretative decisions, it can feel like you’re just a puppet operated by the will of others. But that’s not why people go into music – we all want, at some level, to express ourselves. And however dictatorial our genre’s conventions and our musical peers may be, they can never entirely determine what we do; we always retain the opportunity to use our own hearts and brains to contribute to the performance. And the more we choose to use that opportunity, the more chance we have of finding flow.
5. Intrinsically rewarding. Well, musical performance just is. If you’re here reading Owning the Stage, you don’t need me to make a case for that! Besides, Tom already did.