Sing Big

For us, November means masterclasses, additional class performances, and preparation for December’s juries and performance finals. As such, we start looking beyond the notes and rhythms of our songs and beyond vocal technique and memorization. Once that work has been done we can delve fully into finding the most expressive and communicative way to tell a story thorough song.

I recently read the book Acting the Song by Allison Bergman and Tracey Moore (highly recommended, by the way) and this was one of the many quotes that struck me:

“The hierarchy demands that whenever a character is singing, something is going on that is too big for the spoken word. That is one reason why singing in the musical theatre requires a high level of energy and a deep, personal investment in the situation: What’s going on is big. So don’t allow your students to bring things down to the level of everyday life. What’s happening can’t be casual: Someone is singing.”

It’s no wonder so many songs are about love (finding love, losing love, wanting love). If you’ve got something to say that is “too big for the spoken word” then why not choose the mother of all subjects? I think this is why auditions focus on song cuts instead of full songs—we want to get right to the “hot spot” to see if you can jump in with, as they say, “a high level of energy and a deep, personal investment in the situation.”

In our practice, we can find this investment in many different ways. One way is to start small with our interpretation and gradually get bigger and bolder as we see how our telling of the story grows. Another way is to begin with what we believe are the extremes of our expressive capabilities right away, going way overboard just to see what happens and determine if there is something from that performance that we can use in the final product.

This is the time to explore, to try something different and see what you get. Don’t go for consistency in your performance yet, experiment with lots of options and make unusual choices. As Bergman and Moore say, we must “dare to be bad” as our studios and classrooms become laboratories of discovery since, “[t]he objective of the musical theatre classroom should not be to find the “right” or even the “best” performance but to try all kinds of things in an effort to increase the skills of the individual actor.”

Explore. Discover. Create.

Now go practice.

Performing Songs vs. Growing Songs

In a recent article of the Journal of Singing, author, singer, and master teacher Robert Edwin makes some important points about knowing which songs in our repertoire are performance ready and which are still in the learning or growing stage.

“A singer needs to function on two basic levels—a performing/audition level and a growing level. The performing/auditioning level needs to be comfortable, repeatable, accurate, and trustworthy enough to function under as intense pressure as can be experienced or imagined. On the other hand, the growing level is where we try out new and different things which, in turn, make us uncomfortable, erratic, inaccurate, and certainly unable to withstand intense pressure and scrutiny.”

As he says, performance-ready songs should be comfortable enough and predictable enough that you can reliably anticipate how your audition will go before walking in the room.

Ideally, for auditions you can choose songs that you have performed—from memory, of course—in studio class or singing class, in masterclasses, in dem lab, in a jury, or in other performance situations so you know how they play before an audience. It is never ideal to perform a song for the first time in an audition—even if you like the song, even if you sing it well.

Edwin goes on to give a more specific example:

“Your C5 belt note is solid and meets all the requirements of the performing/auditioning level. The D5 in the song you’ve chosen is still a work in progress, under construction, growing. Are you going to tell them that you can sing the D5 about 25% of the time, but you can’t predict when that 25% will occur? Would you cast you with those odds? If they need a singer with a D5 belt, you’re not that singer…right now. Sing the song with the C5!”

As I say in class, there are enough intangibles in play when you go to audition (nerves, an unfamiliar pianist, singing in a new space, etc.). That’s all the more reason to choose music that is tested, comfortable, and in which you can be confident that the panel will see who you really are. Don’t let anything get in the way of that.

Since we are just getting back from fall break, I would anticipate that some of you may not have been practicing regularly this week. Perhaps instead of writing about your practicing you could evaluate how the first half of the semester has gone. Look back at the goals you made in the first blog of the semester. Are you making progress toward those goals or do you need to change your routine to better facilitate improvement?

Now go practice.