Musicking

Every field has its deep, philosophical questions. It can be worth the time, when we are engrossed in the details of our practice and our performances, to stop for a moment and ponder some of the more existential questions related to our art. 

In a book titled Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening, author and scholar Christopher Small asks two such questions: "What is the meaning of music?" and "What is the function of music in human life?" Before offering a response, however, he recommends a shift in our thinking. In particular, he suggests we entertain the idea that "music is not a thing at all but an activity, something that people do."

Small explains how, in the Western music tradition, we often equate the word "music" with "works of music" (songs, symphonies, musicals, etc.). Under this understanding, what is most valued is the "created art object" (the song) instead of "the action of art" (singing, playing, listening). This has led to a belief that the goal of performing is to honor, uphold, or serve the music (the created art object) instead of the people "musicking" (singer, player, listener). Small turns this idea on its head, stating, "Performance does not exist in order to present musical works, but rather, musical works exist in order to give performers something to perform." Therefore, as he says, music's "primary meanings" are social. 

With this mindset, the goal of performance shifts away from singing a piece "properly" or "correctly." Instead, we give primacy to how the act of singing a particular song may impact you (the performer) and the people you are singing for. In other words, rather than placing the focus so intensely on the music itself and how perfectly those notes and rhythms are being executed, we can prioritize the communal aspect of the performance. Small writes, "The act of musicking establishes...a set of relationships, and it is in those relationships that the meaning of the act lies. They are to be found...between the people who are taking part, in whatever capacity, in the performance." These relationships between all those who are "musicking" become actual (experienced in the moment) and aspirational, as they serve to represent—or serve as a metaphor for—every ideal relationship we hope to have in life: "relationships between person and person, between individual and society, between humanity and the natural world and even perhaps the supernatural world." 

There is a Swedish proverb that reads, "Those who wish to sing always find a song." Considering the thoughts above, if we have a wish or a desire to sing, it is likely because we have a desire to be in relationship with each other. When that is our wish, the "music" we choose to sing is a secondary concern. Instead, we prioritize the people who are invited "to music" together. 

I'm looking forward to musicking once more with you all during vocal juries and class finals. Thanks for a wonderful semester. 

Watch Yourself! (and invite your inner critics along)

Part of theatre education involves learning how to fairly evaluate performances. In order to do this well, we have to pay attention, thoughtfully take in what we are seeing, and then identify what elements are contributing to, or detracting from, the success of the performance. When doing this, you may imagine what you might do differently if you were the director of the scene or if you were speaking the same text or singing the same notes as the person you're observing. 

Analyzing performances in this way doesn't have to be done with any mean-spiritedness or  schadenfreude. When done with a curious mind, it helps develop the crucial evaluation skills we all need as artists. 

Those same skills can be used for self-evaluation, which takes practice and honing in order to be productive. We all know that we can be our own worst critics. But we can turn that around and use the same observation skills to be our own best evaluators. 

One of the most useful ways to self-evaluate is to video record yourself singing and then watch it as if you are an outside observer. If you're not used to doing that (or have never really tried it), it can be uncomfortable at first since we seem to be conditioned to zero in on our flaws. But honest observation involves identifying areas that can be improved and strategizing ways to work on those parts of your performances. It also, importantly, means identifying the aspects of your performance that are going well that you want to keep or build upon. It takes some conscious effort, but these evaluations can be done without judging yourself or beating yourself up over not being perfect.

In the last blog, I shared some thoughts related to avoidance from The Empowered Performer by Sharon L. Stohrer. The book also has a chapter called "Tell Your Inner Critic to Shut the H*ll Up!" in which Stohrer suggests actually inviting your inner critics to sit with you when you view your videos of practice sessions. As she writes, "The Inner Critics and Judges are part of us. They can help us evaluate our rehearsals and performances, giving us useful feedback. The trick is to harness their wisdom, but avoid giving them power." (p.133)

Once we get to performance time, however, those critics no longer get to speak up. Stohrer once again quotes author Brené Brown, who suggests speaking directly to our inner critics before performances, saying, "I see you, I hear you, but I'm going to show up and do this anyway. I've got a seat for you and you're welcome to come, but I'm not interested in your feedback." (p.134)

As we get closer to end-of-the-semester juries and class performances, try video recording some run-throughs of your songs. Then sit down with your inner critics and put your observation skills to work. Just like theatre critics who write reviews, we can rave about the highlights and take note of the areas for improvement. Then, as performance time nears, we can politely but forcefully remind those critics that it's time to shut the hell up. 

Now go practice. 

Embracing the challenge: Dealing with avoidance

Recently, I've been reading The Empowered Performer: The Musician's Companion in Building Confidence & Conquering Performance Anxiety by Sharon L. Stohrer. This is Stohrer's second book on performance anxiety, so she goes into greater depth and provides more extended strategies than she does in her first book. 

One of the sections that struck me has to do with avoidance. Related to how we practice our music, she says, "When we have tricky runs or difficult shifts or places that feel too high vocally, we tend to avoid them. No wonder then, when we continue to struggle with those problem areas!" (p.82)

Have you ever caught yourself doing that? There is a difficult section in your song, but instead of devising strategies to work it out, you pretend that it's not there and just hope that it will get better on its own. As stated in the last blog, "Hope isn't a strategy." Stohrer instead encourages singers to do what is entirely logical: When you go to practice, find the spots in your music that trouble you the most, and address those spots first. Rather than trying to escape or ignore the difficulty, she encourages us to embrace it. 

As far as why we avoid these spots in our music, it could be due to perfectionism. To help explain this, Stohrer quotes author, professor, and researcher Brené Brown: 

"Perfectionism is a self-destructive and addictive belief system that fuels the primary thought: If I look perfect, live perfectly, and do everything perfectly, I can avoid or minimize painful feelings or shame, judgment, and blame...Somewhere along the way, we adopted this dangerous and debilitating belief system: I am what I accomplish, and how well I accomplish it." -Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection

If we believe, even subconsciously, that we have to do everything perfectly because we are what we accomplish, the difficult spots in our music will serve to expose our imperfections. So, to avoid the painful feelings of shame, judgment, and blame, we simply avoid those parts in our music that we can’t yet perform perfectly. Makes perfect sense, right? 

Stohrer comes back to Brown’s philosophies to help us move beyond this mindset: 

"As Brown mentions in her book Atlas of the Heart, perfectionism is not about self-improvement, it's about trying to win the approval and acceptance of others. Striving for growth and mastery should be self-focused rather than based on external factors, 'How can I improve?' rather than 'What will everyone think?' It can be extremely difficult, as a performer, not to rely on external validation. After all, the public won't come in droves to see your performance simply because you think it's amazing. However, do you really think anyone will think your performance is amazing if you don't believe it wholeheartedly first? In order for you to believe you will have an amazing performance, you must look inwards to improve; and in order to improve, you must make room for imperfection and mistakes." (Stohrer, p.75-76)

Stohrer closes this section of the book saying, "Accept your faults and remind yourself often that you are on a journey of self-discovery, of growth as a musician, and as an increasingly-empowered performer. This is a process, NOT a destination." (p.76)

Similar ideas were explored in yet another NPR interview I heard recently. Reporter Mary Louise Kelly was speaking to author George Saunders about his new book of short stories titled Liberation Day: Stories. Here’s an excerpt from the interview: 

KELLY: Are there some [stories] that you work on for days or weeks or months and, at the end, you think, well, that was a crazy idea, and I'm not sure it landed, so let's go and set that one aside? 

SAUNDERS: What tends to happen is I just say, ‘Well, I just haven't opened up to it enough yet. I just have to keep trying, keep trying, keep trying.’...You'll hit a certain obstruction in a story, and it seems like often the key to getting past that is admitting that you're there. And you can't say, ‘Oh, I'm a loser. I'm a terrible writer. I'm a bad person.’ You just say, ‘The story is challenging me in a way I can't figure out.’ 

KELLY: I love that. It's such a good way of thinking about all kinds of challenges, isn't it? Whether it's writing or anything else. 

Next time you hit one of those challenging spots in your music, instead of avoiding it, consider the perspectives above. Acknowledge the difficulty and admit that you’re not yet able to perform that spot the way you would like. Acknowledge that it doesn’t make you a bad singer or a bad person. Think about how you might address that challenge. Then get to work. 

Now go practice. 

Still strategizing

As creative types, we can sometimes find inspiration or insight related to the practice of our art in unlikely places. These last couple of weeks, for me, that came from a war correspondent and a college football coach. 

In the first instance, I was listening to a recent interview on NPR with journalist and author Thomas E. Ricks. In the conversation, he was using his experience as a war correspondent to provide analysis of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. In his perspective, much of the success of the movement seems to have come from the way movement leaders adhered to certain principles of war. Specifically, he cites how activists were well-disciplined and focused on preparation, and how they followed up each demonstration with detailed analysis of how the campaign went and what they could do better in the next event. In short, as he says, "They were a learning organization." 

He goes on to praise the leaders for their establishment of, and follow-through on, specific strategies. "Strategy is essential," he says. "If you don't have a strategy, you have basically a car without a steering wheel." 

He also felt that the steps they took in working toward their established strategies were informed by their self-identity. Movement leaders had to clearly define who they were as a movement and what overarching mission they were trying to accomplish. "From that," Ricks says, "tactics will flow." 

In fact, Ricks believes that some of the early failures of the movement stemmed from both a lack of planning and from focusing on goals that were too big to have easily identifiable next steps. It was after these mistakes that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was brought into the movement. As Ricks describes, "King sits down and says, 'OK, what are we going to learn from this?' And he stews on it a lot. And the lessons are, let's be more focused in our goals. Let's not try to change everything at once." Ricks believes it was this willingness to be honest with themselves about what they were doing and how they were doing it that allowed them to develop the necessary strategies to find success. 

The second instance of inspiration has much less historical significance. Even so, it allowed me to make a connection to our work as singers. 

I was reading a preview of the Utah/UCLA football game, which took place on October 8th. The lead-up to the game included a fair degree of hype since it involved two nationally ranked Pac-12 conference rivals. Utah was ranked #11 and was favored in the game despite UCLA's surprising 5-0 record and #18 ranking. With UCLA coming in as the underdog, head coach Chip Kelly was discussing his team's approach to the game. "We know if we're going to beat Utah, it's going to be because of our preparation during the week," he said. "Things don't just happen to you; hope isn't a strategy." 

As I have discussed in a previous article (inspired by a blog by voice pedagogue Matthew Edwards), strategies and goals are different from hopes and dreams. Of course, it's perfectly fine (and probably important) to have hopes and dreams. But without smaller, achievable goals along the way—and strategies for how those goals will be achieved—those hopes and dreams can feel so vast and far-off as to be more frustrating on a day-to-day basis than they are rewarding. 

In both of the instances above, we can see how much value is placed on the direction we get from having specific strategies whenever we are working toward a desired end result. How can you bring more strategizing into your practicing this week? Look back at your goals from the start of the semester. If your progress toward any of these goals has stagnated, let's devise some new strategies. 

Now go practice. 

Exploratory Practice: The Games I Play

The first two blogs of the semester have involved reminding ourselves to establish a technical purpose when singing and then focusing on what is working instead of focusing on the problems. 

Unsurprisingly, this tactic isn't just for your vocal technique. It applies just as well to your artistry. The more clearly you identify and commit to a character objective and an emotional intention when you sing, the more clearly those choices will read to your audience. Like we discussed in the first blog, once you have decided on and implemented a strategy, you can then assess that strategy. Was it successful? Could it be improved? Give yourself a few repetitions with the same strategy, then try a different strategy (a new character objective and emotional intention) and see where that leads. 

This is the key to exploratory practice: choose, implement, repeat and refine, choose something different, implement, repeat and refine.

There are two ways you can try this when you are practicing: playing the higher stakes game and playing the opposite game. 

To play the higher stakes game, you have to specifically decide how your characters are feeling and what they are trying to accomplish. Are they annoyed? Angry? Infatuated? Are they trying to dissuade? Chide? Flirt? After singing your song from that perspective, then raise the stakes and take that emotion up a level or two. Instead of being annoyed, try being deeply disturbed. Instead of being angry, play it infuriated. Instead of feeling infatuation, be passionately enamored with the fire of a thousand suns. Instead of dissuading someone from doing something, try actively preventing them from even considering it. Instead of gently chiding someone, try cruelly mocking them. Instead of subtly flirting, try aggressively seducing. This may start to reveal the wide range of emotions and perspectives that exist. 

Next, you can play the opposite game. It's similar to the higher stakes game in that you have to clearly identify what your characters are feeling and what they are trying to accomplish. But, as you might guess, instead of raising the emotional stakes in the same direction, choose the exact opposite. Instead of being inviting, play it as defiant. Instead of searching for love, play it as if a relationship is the last thing you want. Instead of being upset, play it as though you are completely at peace. As actors, this is a fun exercise that can uncover a variety of interpretive choices you may not have considered. Even if these choices are not appropriate for the piece you are working on, they may have applications in some of your other material. Surprisingly, you may also hit upon some choices that could be effective with the piece you are working on, even if they originated as being the opposite of what you were intending. 

Play some games this week with your songs. Raise the stakes, try the opposite, have fun, and see what you discover. 

Now go practice.

If it ain't Baroque...

In the last blog, we talked about singing with a specific purpose or goal in mind. In that discussion, I referenced author W. Stephen Smith and his suggestion to sincerely commit to an action when you practice and to then zero in on how to improve the way you perform that action.

Smith highlights an additional concern he finds in many singing students as they practice, which is that they try to fix their vocal problems. That shouldn't be a bad thing, right? Isn't the point of practicing to fix our problems so we can get better? As Smith explains, 

"Focusing on fixing problems means you're focusing on problems, but a positive mind-set gets much better results than a negative one. So I don't think fixing problems is the thing you should go for—if you do an action, then try to do that action better and better, in that process problems do get fixed, so focus on what you need to do to sing better and not on fixing problems that seem to be in the way of your singing better." (quoted in The Singer's Audition & Career Handbook by Claudia Friedlander, p.44)

I explored this idea in a 2021 blog titled "Motivation: Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive." Back then, I asked students to examine their approach to practicing and then wrote: 

"Do you tend to pursue what is working or do you dwell on what is not working? If you try something five times and only get the intended result once, do you pick apart the negative attempts or do you focus on recreating the one that went well?" 

As it turns out, the Mayo Clinic suggests several of the same strategies for maintaining a healthy lifestyle. In the article "Accentuate the positive to make lasting health changes," the authors recommend setting clear goals, starting small (focus on the next step, not the overall end goal), focusing on the times you did achieve your goals rather than ruminating on the times you didn't, and concentrating on what you can do instead of on what you can't. Lastly, and importantly, the authors advocate letting go of negative thoughts. Certainly this is easier said than done, but they clarify the statement by saying that doesn't mean just ignoring negative thoughts. Rather, they encourage reevaluating your response to negative thoughts and choosing to actively focus on positive feelings and accomplishments instead. 

Many of you have seen the "Operating Instructions" I wrote on my studio whiteboard at the start of the semester, the first of which is, "I am not here to fix you or your voice, because neither are broken." How would your practicing be different if you took on an attitude of enjoying and improving—rather than repairing—your voice?

Now go practice.

Purpose: Choosing and Implementing Strategies

Purpose. According to the character Princeton in Avenue Q, it's "that little flame that lights a fire under your ass." Or, as the puppet further philosophizes, "It keeps you going strong like a car with a full tank of gas." 

What we learn as the song continues, however, is that poor Princeton knows how important it is to have a purpose while also realizing that he doesn't yet have one of his own. "Everyone has a purpose," he bemoans. "So what's mine?" 

I guess we all ponder from time to time what our purpose on this earth might be. Like Princeton, we may put some thought into looking for purpose this semester...when we practice singing. 

Author and voice pedagogue W. Stephen Smith writes, "It is important that [students] always practice with a purpose, that there is always an agenda, a goal, something they're trying to achieve through their practice" (quoted in The Singer's Audition & Career Handbook by Claudia Friedlander, p.44). He goes on to say, "Your brain should always be engaged in committing to an action when you're practicing—not just testing things out, but really committing to an action and trying to improve the way you perform that action. I think most people just make sounds, then evaluate and critique the sounds without really being aware of the action they were taking in the first place."

In my studio, I sometimes talk about this in terms of strategies. I find that students often open their mouths to sing without a clear idea of what they're trying to accomplish and how they're going to accomplish it. They just seem to internally say, "Well, let's see how this goes!" In those cases, when the singing goes well, that's great, but if you didn't sing with a purpose, you probably won't be able to identify why it went well. Similarly, if the singing doesn't go so well, you won't know what to change in order to make it better.

Smith believes that every vocal exercise should have a purpose and, like all cognizant voice teachers, he chooses exercises intentionally to address specific technical issues. "The exercises that I work on with [students] each have a built-in agenda and I make sure they know the objective," he says. "...They need to know why they're doing it and how well they're doing it, so that they are empowered to work on it on their own." 

So what happens if you have a clear strategy or purpose and you still don't get the sound that you want? That's when we evaluate whether we may need to adjust the strategy or just the implementation of the strategy. In the same way that not every toss of the dart is going to land in the bullseye, you aren't going to perfectly land every phrase that you sing. Therefore, in some cases, especially if you are building a new skill, you may just need lots of repetition with the same strategy to see if you can get closer to the target. 

If you commit to a strategy for a period of time and it still isn't leading to improvement, then it may not be due to your implementation; you may need a new (or slightly altered) strategy. Then, once again, you will need lots of repetition of the new strategy to see if that will get you on the desired track. 

How do you know if you need a new strategy or just more effective implementation of a chosen strategy? That can be difficult to decipher. Luckily, you're not alone. I can help you evaluate with the benefit of an outside set of eyes and ears. Also, if you practice mindfully, you will start to develop the ability to know for yourself when you're on track and what adjustments you may need to make along the way. Instead of just running through exercises while your mind drifts off to more interesting places, you can work to stay focused on what you're doing so you notice the subtle changes as you go from repetition to repetition. 

As we get started in this school year, identify some goals that you're interested in pursuing this month, this semester, and this year. Then, in our lessons, we can devise strategies that you can use in your practicing to get on a consistent road to progress. 

Let's have the wonderful year that we all deserve. 

Now go practice.