brain

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?

Lots of groups that I coach struggle quite a bit with 'left brained' vs. 'right brained' focus in rehearsals. It's not uncommon to hear within a practice, 'we're going to work the left brain today and clean up that music!', or 'we're three weeks from the show/contest, let's go right brained from now until then'! I think that we tend to underestimate our own abilities to multitask, and also to *learn* and that this idea of working one side of the brain at a time is actually creating more of a problem than it is solving!

I liken this to an analogy of tying a shoe. If we think of a shoe as representative of the two sides of the brain, and each lace is working within that side of the shoe/brain, it's very easy to see how we can get into a bit of trouble. Let's say you lace up one side of that shoe perfectly, and are careful to get it nice and snug, while leaving the other lace lying on the floor until you finish that first one. Obviously you have to lace up the other one as well, as the shoe will not work without both sides tied - that much is clear. I think we all agree that musical mastery includes using both sides of the brain as well, so our analogy fits.

Now, back to our present picture - you have one lace neatly laced up, snugged and ready to tie to the other half (which is still laying on the floor, waiting to be laced). The first thing that happens is that to tie up the other lace, you actually have to undo pieces of that first side that you tied. You can't actually get your fingers in the holes well enough to tie it up, as the first lace is so 'completed' that it leaves no room for the other lace to 'get in there'. How similar to our singing! For lots of groups, they spend so much time on that one side of the shoe/brain (often technical/left brained), that by the time they have gotten the product 'ready' for some right brained work, they have either run out of time before the performance, find that it's too difficult to cram the emotions back into the song without compromising all the work they did on the left side, or in the case of a few groups who are committed to it, they go back and undo some of that left brained work in order to get that right brain laced up. Ouch! That's a lot of wasted time!

But wait! What about that structure in our brains called the Corpus Callosum? This awesome broad band of fibers, containing millions and millions of nerves rests between the two hemispheres in our brain and facilitates the communication between the hemispheres. As if to prove its own importance to us, studies have shown that the Corpus Callosum is significantly larger in musicians than in non-musicians! Hello! So, what can we learn from this?

Well, to start, how about we challenge that we have to work one side of the brain at a time? When I work with choruses these days, we specifically work on the development of this amazing structure. Specifically, I challenge them to work both the technical and emotive halves of the brain, all at the same time. Now, let me just say, I absolutely realize that this is difficult work at first. Much harder than the time-honored "pat your head and rub your tummy" exercise. But trust me, as you work this more and more, the integration becomes more complete, and you are able to perform this more and more easily. I have had great success in groups working both technique and emotion, and moving audiences significantly as a result. This is like tying both laces at the same time - right, left, right, left, etc, until you get to the top, and tie off the final product. By creating new neural pathways through the Corpus Callosum, we are able to access both the technical and creative aspects of our music all at once, and work both congruently.

But what about 'leaving it behind' when you go on stage? When a group is really prepared, the music supports the emotion. The work that you do on the technical (while working emotion!) actually becomes less and less present as you work a song. A lot of that work becomes 'muscle memory', requiring less attention from you as it becomes integrated with the emotional message of the song. I think that it is less of a conscious decision to 'go right brained' before a show, in a group that has really developed this dual-hemisphere connection. Sure, there is a choice in deciding not to self-judge, not to listen to the technical pros and cons of the music as it goes by when on stage, and to fully dive into the emotional message of the song (work that has hopefully been going on since the beginning anyway!). I also think there is a greater commitment when you go on stage to move yourself and move your audience at the same time, and that pushes out that last bit of technical as well. Because of this, I like to see groups in the last 3-6 weeks of rehearsal practice singing to the audience (imaginary or real), to prepare for a big event, and really commit to the 'moment', or in Eckart Tolle language 'live in the now'.

In my next post, I will discuss exactly how we develop the Corpus Callosum during rehearsal, and the overall process of breaking free of the technique (and focusing on the music instead). Stay tuned!

Context is critical for people, because that's how we are wired up.  Psychologists and neuroscientists will tell you this.  Whole strategies for memorization are built around this fact, because the brain can access information most effectively if it's in the same state as it was in when the information was stored.  This has ramifications for the way we learn music and memorize lines, but that's a whole different article - this one is about the audience, and how to prepare them for the greatest impact.

A quick story.  Years ago I was participating in a "top gun" school, where the best a cappella quartets in my area were all being coached by experts that were flown in.  Part of the weekend was a show, and the coaches were all in the audience.  Earlier that day, a legendary coach named Larry Ajer told me that he didn't like hearing broadway tunes done in a show set, because they just didn't work outside of the context of the musical.  Then I got up and sang "Old Man River" and saw Larry in the front row, giving me a knowing look, and realizing that it was a broadway tune.

And he was right - Old Man River just doesn't make as much sense without the events and the setting of Showboat, the musical.  We can see in the lyrics a shadow of the meaning, but a lot is left to the listener, and not every listener is going to take up the challenge.  So we will get unpredictable results.

To get around this, if you can't actually mount the whole musical, you need to do something to put the audience into the right starting frame of mind, so they can take the journey that is the song and wind up where they are supposed to wind up, emotionally.  And that is the purpose of a set up.

One of the most requested songs that Realtime sings is the Scottish folk song Loch Lomond.  It's a beautiful arrangement (by fellow Vancouver musician Jonathan Quick), and Mark sings it very well, but I think the biggest reason for the amazing response it gets is that we do the following set up to put the audience into the correct context, and to create powerful images in their mind's eye.  In fact this set up is written right on the stock sheet music that we bought:

"1745, after the failed uprising at Carlysle, two of Bonnie Prince Charlie's men have been captured.  One is to be executed, the other set free.  According the Celtic tradition, the spirit of the condemned man will return home via the "low road."  He will reach his homeland before his comrade, but he will never see his true love again."

Then the song begins: "By yon bonnie banks, and by yon bonnie braes..."

By the time we get to the chorus and sing "Ye'll take the high road and I'll take the low road..." the audience is dead silent, except for the occasional sob, as the meaning of the lyrics sinks in.  After we sing this in a show, more often than not we will have people of Scots descent come up to us and say that their father or grandfather used to sing that song, but they never really understood what it meant before.  It affects them deeply.

What do you think - would it be so effective, without the setup?

Now ask yourself, which of your songs come out of nowhere from the audience's perspective?  Maybe you can make them work better, with the right set up.