passion

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!

I’ve been to a lot of contests over the years, and there have been a few performances that I will never forget. Watching Gas House Gang sing “Bright Was The Night” and “Shine” was one such moment. So much vocal artistry and commitment to the scene. I don’t know what kind scene they planned for the lines “Saw her standing there, moonbeams in her hair” but they reacted to that scene with tangible awe at the sight of this future bride.

Since then I have seen many quartets sing that same song. Of course few of them can match Gas House in terms of vocal skill, but what I really miss is that commitment. Most quartets, I find, haven’t tried to create a story behind their song at all. Some have done just a little bit of planning, but not enough to keep themselves interested for the duration. Maybe one quartet in ten has a clear scenario, and most of them shy away from choosing a scenario with much impact.

Plan a scenario for each number that will push you into taking emotional risks; that will force you to be passionate. A flawless performance of an uninteresting scene is still just an uninteresting scene!

[Before you go further here, it's going to be easier to read this article if you're familiar with the song "Midnight Rose" which I use as an example.  One of my all-time favorite quartets, the Bluegrass Student Union, sang this song, and I bet you can find it on iTunes if you don't have it already.]

Michael Shurtleff, in his classic book “Audition” captures this idea in one of his twelve rules.  And an audition is, of course, another kind of contest!  Rule number 1 is to consider the relationship between yourself and the other players, and the trick is to find the love. The relationship in the scene is always more dramatic if there is love involved, whether it’s a romantic scene or a fist fight. People don’t come out to see ordinary life: they expect something more, and it's not fun to watch two people interact if they feel nothing for each other, or nothing but hate. Going back to one of my favorite examples, sing “Midnight Rose” like the prostitute is your ill-fated favorite sister, rather than some unfortunate stranger.

Another important rule for every performer to give them conviction is conflict.  Shurtleff's rule #2.  What are you fighting for?  What do you want?  If you aren't fighting for anything, you are uninvolved in your own plan.  Nobody wants to see that.  In Midnight Rose, presumably you are trying, with all your best efforts, to win your favorite sister back to the safety of a more mainstream lifestyle.  So try, and try hard!  This is the stuff of passion on stage.

Another kind of conflict in every great plan, also from the Shurtleff book, is internal conflict - conflict within yourself, which he calls "opposites."  Try to maintain the principle emotion of each scene, and its opposite.  At some level you should feel conflicted about your actions and choices.  A character with absolute conviction is a boring character, because they are absolutely predictable. The “Midnight Rose” example works here too, because if the prostitute is your sister, you’re going to have a lot of conflicting emotions towards her – love, fear, disgust, anger. If she were a stranger, you would be stuck somewhere between pity and reproach, which is not nearly so interesting to watch.

Conflict is great for creating variety and change in the plan too, as your character flips between reactions. Back Midnight Rose for a moment: The difference in attitude between the phrases, “you suppose that your heart is glad” and “but tomorrow you may find it sad” can add a lot of interest to the performance, as you flip between gradations of love and fear.

You might be thinking that not all songs lend themselves to deep and interesting interpretations, and you’re right!  Not every song has an at-risk sister or a dying mother in it.  Not every song is a tear-jerker.  But you need to find the passion in the song, or why bother to sing it?  Why will anyone be interested in listening, except maybe in an elevator, or as background music while they sweep their kitchen floor.

Most importantly - be true to the song.  Don't try to build a gut-wrenching plan on top of a song that can't support it.  For example, some songs are all about fun.  Get passionate about the fun!  Be as expressive as you can be.  Just make sure that whatever you do, in a contest or an audition, has a sense of purpose and passion in it.

If you belong to an acting or dance outfit or a chorus or choir, unless you are in the very highest league, you have probably noticed that it seems to be getting harder and harder to attract the public to your shows.  The problem is reportedly worse in "big market" cities than in smaller towns, and I've heard many people explain it away by pointing out how many more entertainment choices people have these days.  But that seems a pretty weak theory.

Are they really staying home and watching TV?  TV is a lousy medium for conveying art, and the programming is just getting worse, the commercials more frequent.  People still go to theaters to see movies, because the big screen is more immersive and one step closer to reality, but the burden of suspending disbelief is still pretty high because let's face it, everyone is flat and projected on the screen.  Live performances can be so much more compelling.  Imagine - real people!

Is this true for your group?  Look out in your audience - is it entirely full of F's?  I mean, Friends, Family and Freebies?  That's not a good sign.  If everyone in the audience who paid had to have their arm twisted, you have to ask yourself if you're really giving people what they want and need from performance.

Art and performance are much older than civilization.  They have been present in every single culture the world has seen, and that means performance serves some kind of useful purpose that is common to humanity.  So if it's so healthy and useful for us culturally, why are people "staying away in droves?"

Perhaps we have forgotten what they want and what they need from art and performance.

Failing performance groups are failing to understand the first rule, which is that you've got to give people what they want, and that the purpose of performance is to give people an experience that they can't get elsewhere, to transport them outside of themselves for an hour or two, and maybe teach them something about themselves.  That's the goods.  If you do that, they will love it, and they will come back, and they will bring their friends.

Sadly in the musical realm, it seems that more attention is paid to "getting it right" than to delivering the goods.  But if people just wanted to hear perfect music, they could save a lot of money by buying a CD and a set of headphones.

Here's an example that proves the point.  I spend a lot of time in the barbershop harmony world, and there are two kinds of quartets that get lots of gigs: International Champs, and comedy quartets - you have to be really good, or funny.  Comedy quartets get a lot of gigs, even though they tend not to be the best singing quartets, because they are entertaining.  And they are entertaining because of their huge advantage, which is that they know they are there to entertain, not to be perfect or impressive.  So they're pretty much the only ones playing what I think is the right game, and from a "getting shows" perspective, they eat everyone's lunch.  Money talks.

So if you want to get people clamoring to come to your shows, do you have to be funny?  Of course not - funny is just one path; one thing that people need.  It's just that most groups have forgotten to consider the audience at all.

I know some choirs who hardly ever sing for the public.  So it's more like a bowling league.  Just getting together, trying to throw strikes.  How sad, for performers to be so ignorant of their potential.

Success and growth for your organization will only come from giving the audience what they want out of art, which is truth and passion, not perfection.  Truth and passion are all about them.  Perfection is all about you.