Philosophy

 Wow - I'm completely spoiled by the quality of the average TED video, but this one is a MUST WATCH for anyone in the performing arts community.  Times they are a changin'!  And Ben Cameron absolutely nails it, and asks all the right questions.

Ran across this amazing TED video that shows video clips of several orchestral conductors, each with their own style.  Fascinating stuff!  Every choral conductor should watch this and absorb it, because more than hand-waving skills or musicality, sorting out the relationship between director and chorus is the hardest nut to crack when you're shooting for the best music you can make.  The techniques can be learned, but unless you have the right philosophy and understand how to empower your singers, you will always plateau at a lower level than you desire.

Take a look:

If you're a director, which one are you most like?  If you're a singer, send this video to your director!

There's something odd about competitive art.  You don't see competitive watercolor painting or competitive clay scupture weekends (as far as I know!) but often you see competitive singing - there are lots of festivals where choirs, choruses and ensembles are judged, and a winner is chosen.

In barbershop, for example, one of the central activities is the contest.  Many quartets and choruses go to incredible lengths, expending a huge percentage of their time and energy to put two songs onto the contest stage several times a year.  The barbershop organization does its part by supplying judging category descriptions, highly trained and selected judges, medals, plaques and trophies for the winners, etc.  It's a lot of work!

I can understand how one might assign a score to a performance based on its technical elements.  A judge can estimate how often a group is in tune, or how well the arrangement follows the barbershop rules.  Sweet Adeline judges in the Showmanship category probably find it pretty easy to determine if everyone was wearing a matching outfit.  Judges can even take a blind stab at the level of artistry and impact in a performance, although I feel they're getting on thin ice with that kind of thing.

But what strikes me is that all the truly human aspects of a performance, the authentic, personal truths underneath the music that infuse it with meaning, are completely beyond judgment.  How can we say that one person's joy warrants an 80 where another person's joy is only a 65?  What's the best way to measure real anguish?  How can we assign a meaningful number to excitement, or pain, or love?  It just doesn't make any sense.  We can't.

So when groups refuse to play the technical game, strange and wonderful things happen.  Emotional things happen.  In circumstances like that, judges tend to forget themselves just like any other audience member - they get carried away, and only remember after the fact, when the applause has died down, that they were supposed to reduce the performance to a number between 1 and 100.

And that, i believe, should be the goal.  Put enough real life up on stage that everyong forgets to monitor the technique for a while.  It will do them good.

Recently I read a book entitled "The Listener's Guide to Great Instrumentalists" by David Hamilton, and found another perspective on performance that dovetails beautifully with what I believe, and adds a perspective unique to the performing musician.  Let me quote from the introduction.

A musical performer engages simultaneously in several activities.  Although, as with any such abstract schematization, the boundaries are not always clear-cut, we might distinguish three such activities: execution, interpretation, and projection.  The relate, respectively, to the instrument, the musical work, and the listener.  The performer must have sufficient command of the instrument to execute the music that has been written for it.  He must understand that piece he is playing, must have (at least instinctively, not necessarily in a verbally articulate form) a conception of its shape and its sense.  And finally, he must communicate that conception, and a sense of his own involvement in the whole process, to the audience.

I think that's a pretty good summary of what's involved in stage performance - essentially technique and virtuosity, understanding at the level of emotional meaning, and the ability to project that meaning (or in some cases that technique) to the audience.

My general belief is that performers should "swing for the fences" and communicate something important or at least enjoyable at an emotional level, but the book reminds me that this is not the only option.  It's quite reasonable for a performer to show off their virtuosity and be appreciated for that skill alone.  Not every mode of performance allows this kind of approach.  Nobody cares if they are watching a "great actor" - in fact that concept can only distract from the great acting that (we hope) is going on.  But in the musical realm, there are lots of people who would pay twenty bucks just to see someone who has an amazing command of an instrument.  Chiefly I'm speaking of people who also play that instrument.  :)  It's like being impressed with a guy who can bowl a 300 game - it may not touch you at an emotional level, but being impressed is still an experience that has value.

There is a name for a piece that is written to show off skills.  It's called an "étude" which translates to "study" in English.  Chopin produced many such pieces, each focusing on a particular piano skill, like the ability to play a lot of notes very quickly, or to play chords that are spread beyond the reach of a normal hand, or to play a different time signature with each hand.  That can be amazing to watch!  However I believe that for enduring listening pleasure, we gravitate towards works that have more depth.  I'm not a person with an encyclopedic knowledge of piano pieces, but I love to listen to "Claire de Lune" or Chopin's "Raindrop Prelude" because those pieces seem to deliver the emotional depth that I crave in performance.  Rachmaninoff's "Prelude in C# Minor" is another of my favorites because of it's passion.

For me, this TED talk by Benjamin Zander really speaks to the power of performance.  Very much worth the 20 minutes if you can spare it.

Lives are improved by music, by stage performance, by art.  There is a huge gap between the value of these things, and the importance they are given in our culture.  We suffer from this, and we will continue to suffer from it until we get it right.  Perhaps the absence of this kind of culture is enough of a disadvantage that some other culture will take us over before we have a chance to fix it!  I'm OK with that - either way, truth and beauty and passion win in the end.

Quite often I get questions from blog readers in email, and sometimes they seems like good fodder for blog posts. I figure if I answer in a post, everyone can benefit. Here's what one fellow asked:

I’d like to know how to get to the level of intimacy with the audience to be able to make myself vulnerable to them.  To me that is where the connection is.  I am willing to go there, I just don’t know where “there” is.

Very good question!  It's also great to see that this reader realizes there's something he doesn't understand, and that he's willing to learn.  We would all do better to cultivate "beginner mind" so we can keep on learning!

So how do we develop intimacy with an audience?  First of all, what's intimacy?

The Wikipedia definition of intimacy is a bit complex, but in a nutshell emotional intimacy involved breaking down the barriers between yourself and someone else, so that you are willing to disclose "previously hidden thoughts and feelings."  Telling someone your secret dreams and thoughts, and listening to theirs, forms the foundation of an intimate relationship.

Of course, in the every-day world, this can take months or years, and as a performer if you're shooting for intimacy you don't have that kind of time.  Also even if you achieve intimacy with an audience, you probably can't say you have a relationship.  (Even if some of them might think you do, and then come up to you after the show and talk to you like a long-lost close friend even though you have never seen them before... but I digress.)

So for a performer, just what does intimacy mean?  I'll take a stab at it.  Achieving intimacy with an audience means that at least one person in the audience feels that they got something honest from you.  For at least a little while, they feel that they have a connection with you, based on that honest communication.  It might not be a real relationship, but at some level it *reminds them* of one, and they come to associate your face, your voice, your presence with an emotional state of closeness.

Do you agree?  I think that makes sense.

So how do we get there?  First and foremost, you have to understand your material at a human level.  You can't convey anything if you've got nothing to convey.  Secondly I believe that because of the super-developed human bullsh*t radar, your best and perhaps your only chance to have them believe you're being honest is to actually be honest.  I don't think you can fake it, or if that is possible, it's much harder than just being honest.

This is where it gets hard.  Being honest at an emotional level means that you're going to feel vulnerable.  You're not *really* vulnerable, of course.  Nothing bad is going to happen to you because you told someone else how you really feel.  Quite the opposite.  But most of us get stuck to some degree in the kindergarten mentality that says we must keep our feelings to ourselves, or someone in our peer group will taunt and make fun of us.  It's true - kids can be cruel.  Five is a hard age.  But growing beyond that level, emotionally, is a prerequisite if you're going to be honest and not get massive stage fright about it.

If you're having trouble being intimate with audiences (or your spouse for that matter) because you're afraid to open the kimono and tell them the truth, you're not alone.  When you were five and the other kids made fun of you for having a pink lunchbox, you might have thought you would die, but you didn't.  As I told my five-year-old yesterday, "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me."  You've got nothing *real* at risk, by being honest on stage.  And if you're putting up a facade, you have very little to gain from the experience.

So how do you do it?  You already know how.  Some part of you might have been inventing reasons why you can't be honest on stage.  Tell that part of you to shut up for a while, and try it!

I've been coached a thousand times on my singing and performing by (I would guess) more than a hundred different coaches, and thinking back, I'm surprised how often they have tried to represent their approach as the "right" approach - as if they could lay out on a platter the one true vocal approach, the best possible interpretation plan, etc. If I've learned no other wisdom in the past twenty years, it is that there is no right or wrong in performance. There are only choices and consequences, sometimes difficult to predict! You only have to watch two great performers to realize that each one has their own approach.

If only performance were so simple that all you had to do was learn the correct way!

For example, in working with a group of four voices, the best skill of a coach is to imagine the way they might blend together into a flexible and expressive whole, rather than to make them sound like some kind of "ideal model" of a vocal group. Every actor should be the best actor they can be, doing the kind of work that they do, and not a copy of Sir Lawrence Olivier. That should be pretty obvious! Yet how may actors spend their brief, depressing careers trying to be someone else?

I think when coaches represent their suggestion as the "right" way, they are confusing the need for consistency with the need to target an ideal model. Any audience member who is paying attention can tell if something changes in a way that seems "not on purpose." If you go for a high note, and the tone suddenly becomes strained, everyone will cringe. But (believe it or not) if it was strained the whole time and that seemed "on purpose", the audience would soon come to accept that vocal tone. [I mean, to a point. If you sound like a chicken, you sound like a chicken. But I stand by my statement.]

If you're listening to a whole bunch of barbershop quartets in a row, and quartet number 6 is only half as loud as quartet number 5, you notice it, and then 5 seconds later it doesn't matter any more. Your mind has reset itself to the new decibel level. A watercolor may not be as vivid as oil, but once you've realized you're looking at a watercolor it won't bother you. It's quality that matters in expression, not quantity.

From "inside" the bubble of an art form, it might seem like there is a right way. Every serious cellist probably knows the name of the best cellist in the world (I'm no cellist, but would that b Yo Yo Ma??) and they probably know how they play. And a good many of them might believe that if they could only copy that "ideal model" of a cello style, they would be just as great.

But that can never be authentic and from-the-heart. Even if you succeeded and replicated that fantastic performance exactly, the audience would have witnessed you trying hard to execute your memorized plan. That's "lukewarm applause" territory, for sure.

Do you think Yo Yo Ma does it the same way every time? No matter how he does it, it's right.

What's the message here, you might be wondering? Figure out who you are, and be yourself on-purpose, as truly and with as much passion as you can!