Performing

One of the things I love about coaching is the way that other musicians help you see things you already thought you knew in a new light. A lovely example of this happened when I was up in Edinburgh with MacFour at the end of March. We were talking about the relationship between the manager and the communicator, and how I’d originally started using these terms when thinking about the nature of the task the arranger sets up for the performer. We somehow also managed to divert into one of my favourite rants about the nature of the baritone line.

It was at this point that Elaine Hamilton, the quartet’s baritone, came out with the remark:

Yes, and if the baritone line is illogical, you find that you start to sing a bit behind everyone else as it takes you longer to process it.

The Communicator and the Manager are two characters who have popped up in several previous posts, and who are making increasingly frequent visits to my coaching sessions. So I felt it was time they deserved a post of their own.

I think I first met these two characters in the guise of the Writer and the Editor. When I was on the final leg of my PhD a lecturer friend advised me that the only way to get anything done is to send the Editor off for a cup of tea while the Writer gets on with things. Yes, it will need a good deal of editing in due course, but if the Editor gets on the case while the Writer’s still trying to write, you’ll never get anything done.

I always imagined these two as sitting on either shoulder, like a devil and an angel. Which is slightly strange imagery, since the Writer-Editor (and indeed Manager-Communicator) pair have much more of yin-yang than a good-evil one. You do actually need both, but they need to get involved in different stages of the process.

Magenta engaging in addictive behaviourAs I have mentioned before, taking an evening class in stand-up comedy has given me some interesting new perspectives on the act of performance. Some of what we’ve been learning is specific to the art-form*, but I am also getting reasonably frequent penny-drop moments when something suddenly sheds a new and illuminating light into my regular life of music and musicians, often bringing some half-understood dynamic into startling focus.

One such moment was during a discussion between course tutor James Cook and visiting comedian, Andy Robinson on what provides the impetus to keep going, especially if you’ve had a bad gig.

In my previous post on this subject, we looked at the basic building block of comedy, the set-up/punchline dyad. (Dyad is such a poncy music-theory kind of word, isn’t it? Possibly ‘combo’ is more appropriate here.) Our tutor, James Cook, quite sensibly started us off on the purest, simplest form of joke – the one-liner – in order to make this fundamental structure clear. You know, like when you’re teaching harmony, you build a lot of phrases using I-V-I before you start doing fancy stuff like substitute chords and modulations.

Now, one-liners are great as instant pay-off. They require the absolute minimum from the audience in terms of cognitive engagement over time, as the punchline comes hard on the heels of the set-up. No need for deferred gratification at all. It’s a spend-all-your-pocket-money-at-once style of comedy.

For some reason which I cannot fathom, I find I have signed up for an evening class in stand-up comedy. Given how much of my life I spend chivvying others into scary situations, it is very good for me to do something utterly terrifying, and I am sure everyone I have coached recently will be delighted to know I am well out of my comfort zone; indeed skirting on the borderline between learning and panic.

But in addition to new skills and new friends, the classes are also giving me some new insights into such musical subjects as rhythm, structure and tension-release patterns in performance.

Back before Christmas, Tom Carter came over here and engaged in some really productive debate in response to my post on Stanislavski and Schenker. (Joke on me: I had wondered whether it was going to be an excessively obscure subject, but got probably the most response I’ve had for ages. Shows the limits of my predictive power!) This post is a follow-up to a couple of loose ends that got left dangling.

First, Tom asked:

So, could you talk more about the performances you experienced in which the singers identified local objectives without integrating them into a super-objective? Or those in which they had detail but missed on the global?

The Yerkes-Dodson curve

In my previous post on this subject, I looked at some of the effects of an over-active sympathetic nervous system on singers in performance. This often gets framed in terms of stage fright/performance anxiety, but the fight or flight response can also be responsible for bringing us into a state of peak performance. We don’t want to damp down this response completely; we just need to moderate it so we get the benefits of its stimulation without losing control.

A classic bit of research back in 1908 produced the Yerkes-Dodson curve, which shows that people perform least well at complex tasks if they are either under-aroused or over-aroused, and at their best somewhere in the middle. So, the strategies that follow all work on the principle that you need to keep performers below the optimal level of arousal before they get to the stage. This will allow the flush of adrenaline as the performance starts to lift them into the ideal zone, rather than beyond it.

A discussion over on Choralnet from a couple of weeks back has prompted to me write about a phenomenon I’ve been thinking about for a while. The main subject is about the role of the conductor in performance, and its relationship to the rehearsal process – itself an interesting subject, but not my focus today. Rather it was the passing comments about managing individual voices and balance issues in performance that caught my attention.

What struck me was how the participants in the discussion took it for granted that this would be needed, even in the context of discussions about carefully-prepared performances. And this resonated with conversations I’ve had recently in which people have expressed disappointment at hearing voices popping out in performances by ensembles they thought had a better grasp of choral craft than that.