Owning The Stage

Ran across this neat article about what yawning does for you, and how it might help a performer.  Thought it was cool because years ago I developed the habit of yawning before going on stage.  I knew it was some kind of coping mechanism, but I didn't really understand how it worked.  Enjoy!

http://www.upenn.edu/gazette/1109/expert.html

Ran across this amazing TED video that shows video clips of several orchestral conductors, each with their own style.  Fascinating stuff!  Every choral conductor should watch this and absorb it, because more than hand-waving skills or musicality, sorting out the relationship between director and chorus is the hardest nut to crack when you're shooting for the best music you can make.  The techniques can be learned, but unless you have the right philosophy and understand how to empower your singers, you will always plateau at a lower level than you desire.

Take a look:

If you're a director, which one are you most like?  If you're a singer, send this video to your director!

If you've been around the performing arts for a while (or just around performing artists for that matter), you have no doubt been exposed to the idea that visualization is good.  Visualizing a positive outcome on stage can help make it come true!  That might seem like magic, but it isn't.  And it works!

So why does it work?  Well your brain is complicated.  It has many pieces that evolved at different times, so some of the primitive parts in the middle, for example, we share with animals that don't converge with the human species unless you reach back hundreds of millions of years.  The "amygdala" for example, we share in common with lizards.  The cerebral coretex on the other hand is relatively new, and we humans have more of it than any other animal.

Had some great conversations last week at Harmony University about how adoption a story-centric performance philosophy would change rehearsals.  Some surprising conclusions!  Read on.

As I've written many times already, having a great story underneath your music is probably the most important thing you can do if you want your music to be meaningful and compelling.  The audience will forgive you for making mistakes, but they won't even pay attention for more than 30 seconds if your product is hollow.

So great, let's all write stories.  But we want them to be great stories, not just mediocre and certainly not counterproductive.  How can we tell if we're on the right track?  Here are some guidelines.

Harmony University was awesome!  That's an event that brings together some six hundred ardent a cappella singers from around the world for a solid week of first-rate education and instruction in the a cappella arts.  This year of course they asked me to offer Owning The Stage as a 12-hour class, and I think it was a huge success.  Both the morning and afternoon classes had a great time, and covered some really interesting ground.  I believe they all walked away with a better understanding of what it takes to put a great performance on the stage.

Even better, I've been inspired - I've got more than 30 article ideas in the hopper now, which I'll be writing and posting over the next few months.

This past week in Anaheim I sang with about seventy of my fellow past barbershop quartet champs in a group called the “AIC” or “Association of International Champions.” We put on a great show every year featuring the champ quartets that are still active, and a chorus of past champs that learns a half-dozen songs in a couple of days, and then sings them on the show. It’s a blast!

As part of that AIC chorus I had the pleasure to be directed and coached by a half-dozen different high-level musicians in the hobby like principal director Jay Giallombardo, and assistant directors Clay Hine, Tony DeRosa and Royce Ferguson.