Choral Music Magazine
March Issue
Years ago, Larry Bird did a commercial which showed him practicing lay up after lay up. I don’t remember what he was advertising, but I do remember what he was saying about basketball that you drill the basics, the fundamentals, until they are second nature so that when it is game time, you are free to play creatively. Preparing music is similar. A great musical performance is not as measurable as a basketball game, there are no statistics and no score, but it does transcend its own technical details. Great performers, ensembles and soloists alike, have one thing in common with each other as well as with truly great athletes; they make it look easy. This is because their technique is so well ingrained as to be second nature. One is tempted to conclude that with enough technique, anyone can achieve a great performance. Technique is important, but in itself it is not enough.
While a great performance cannot be measured, it does have certain characteristics: It uplifts, transports, and even transforms the listener. This happens most easily when all of the fine details are perfect, when intonation, balance, blend, rhythm, dynamics and articulation are just right, but, mysteriously, there is no direct correlation. It is possible for a performance to thoroughly move the listener when some or all of these elements are less than perfect and it is just as possible for a technically brilliant performance to lack soul and heart. As a choral conductor I am aware that the nature of a great performance is both elusive and fragile. Expressing music authentically is like nurturing a delicate living thing. The composer, the conductor, the performers and the audience all share in sustaining the life of that mysterious essence that dwells inside a piece of music. That life needs discipline, but it also needs a sense of discovery and wonder. Music lives in an atmosphere of trust, vulnerability, risk, hard work and playfulness.
As musicians, we cannot control everything that goes into a free and inspiring performance, so we must turn our attention to the things we can control and trust that given the right atmosphere the rest will emerge. We are like gardeners who till the soil and sow the seed trusting that their crops will appear. So the question is not how to give an inspiring performance, but what are those things that inhibit it?
The first, of course, is a question of technique. As our Assistant Conductor, John Rowehl has said, "Singing in an ensemble is like being in a relationship; you have to take care of yourself before you can be any good to someone else." In other words, individual choir members must pay attention to their own vocal technique and bring it to a level where it is second nature so that, like Larry Bird, they can concentrate not just on the fundamentals, but on the game.
Similarly, individuals within an ensemble must know the music well. There is a difference between knowing music well enough to recite it back and actually performing it. Vocalists must sing every phrase as if they had written it themselves. Again, this means knowing the technical details of notes and rhythms so well that they are second nature, freeing the singer to express the music’s subtext – that emotional reality that lies behind the actual sound.
Singers must be invested in the music they are preparing. Being invested is a big topic in itself, worthy of its own article and treated at some length by Ben Zander in his book The Art of Possibility. Here, I will simply say that a conductor, no matter how talented or engaging, can unwittingly stifle his singers’ performance. For a performance to have true freedom of expression, each singer must have his or her share of discovery and control. This can be a real balancing act for a conductor who has definite ideas and a limited time to put them in place, but it is essential. A choir composed of automatons, just doing what they are told without any real ownership may give a technically flawless performance, but it will surely be sterile and uninspired. When, as a high school student, I played in a youth orchestra conducted by Mr. Zander, he spent as much time getting us to think about the various alternative choices a composer could have made as he did instructing us in his own interpretation of phrasing. The result was invariably a performance brimming with life and energy. It is possible that those performances could have been more polished had we devoted all of our time to technical perfection, but the trade off would not have been worth it. One can hear the same investment in his professional recordings of Mahler today.*
Both personal investment and knowing the music are as vital as technique, but I believe that the biggest and most insidious barrier to freedom in performance is students’ focus wrongfully being drawn away from expression and towards approval. I call this the “getting it right” syndrome. I find that college students are most susceptible to this problem, especially those in as success-oriented an institution as Cornell University, and conductors by the very nature of what we do, reinforce it to the music’s peril. The purpose of music is not to show off, nor is it a blue book exam where everything learned is repeated back for a good grade, yet by our teaching process this is the exact message we are giving. We spend hours correcting details and essentially training our choirs to depend on our approval. They sing, and we smile if it is satisfactory, and stop and correct them if it is not. I think that this is the only reasonable way to train a choir, so I am not suggesting a radical departure from this model, but I am saying that singers need constant refocusing so that they are not seduced into believing that approval is the point. This issue is most pressing as the date of a public performance nears.
Once when I was in South Africa, I observed a very talented young conductor working with her youth choir just before a big performance. The choir was invited to sing at a festival and it was clearly an important opportunity for them to be heard by a large and discriminating audience. The students adored their conductor; it was clear to me that they would have walked through fire for her. As they ran through their music in the hall just hours before the performance, the conductor was in high gear. She stopped them for every detail. As she did so, the students became more vigilant about those details but they also grew subtly tense. They picked up on their conductor’s anxiety and they didn’t want to let her down. The performance went well. Almost all of the details were attended to, and the choir sang well in tune with expressive dynamics. Their final number was a joyful celebration song, and it received a good response from the crowd. Truly, by most standards it was a fine performance. Then something curious happened; a friend of the choir had been videotaping the performance but had run out of tape before the last song. He asked the choir if they would return to the stage and repeat the final number so he could record it. When the students sang again in the now empty hall, they did so with a sense of release and celebration. It was like a dam had broken. The passion of their singing was palpable and the joy contagious. In that moment I saw and felt what the music was really about. Their singing wasn’t just enjoyable, it was inspiring. This kind of free performance is elusive, but it is not impossible to achieve. When the students sang the second time, they were expressing something that was underlying the music, but missed in their original effort to get it right. They were not just singing correctly, they were expressing the subtext of the music. I often tell my singers, “Nobody in the audience listens to music thinking, ‘Wow that is so correct!’ They are either moved by it or not.” Sophisticated listeners will point to the artful phrasing or shades of timbre, but in the end, music must communicate passion and cause the listener to empathize with it. If not, then music is just pretty sound. In this way music performance is much like acting. An actor doesn’t just walk about the stage for no reason, or just because the director told him to. He finds motivation. A good actor is so deep into character that the audience believes and empathizes. When a poor actor recites lines, he may do so correctly, even beautifully, but the effect is hollow. A poor comedian goes for the laugh, and then counter intuitively fails to achieve it. The same is true when musical performers are primarily interested in approval and fail to find motivation for musical expression.
Choirs must not just practice technical details; they must actually practice performing. Good teams don’t just do drills and walk through defensive and offensive patterns; they scrimmage. They do all they can to simulate an actual game. When actors have learned their lines and completed all of the blocking, they do run-throughs and dress rehearsals, doing all they can to simulate actual performance before opening night. What makes us believe, as musicians, that we can bypass this important step? Dress rehearsals are good for reducing error, but they are vital for focusing on what a performance is really about. For the actor, it is being in character and telling a story. For the athlete, it is about exerting dominance over your opponent, and for the musician, it is locating and expressing the subtext of the music. This will not just happen at the appearance of an audience and a stage; it must be sought along the way and developed, and this is the conductor’s responsibility just as surely as is every technical detail.
Technique is important, and we are wise as musicians to invest time and effort into having so much technique at our fingertips that when called upon, it is automatic. Like Larry Bird, we want to be free to play creatively. As choral conductors, we are required to spend a lot of time teaching technique and polishing details, but because we train our singers to be dependent on us, we must take the added step of directing them away from mere technique and towards the more vital issue of expression. We must allow our singers to be inspired by the subtext of the music and thus to inspire. As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry put it, "If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."
*Benjamin Zander’s recordings of Mahler Symphonies 1,3,4,5,6 and 9 can be found on the Telarc label.
Professor Scott Tucker is an Associate Professor and the Priscilla Edwards Browning Director of Choral Music at Cornell University where he conducts the Men's Glee Club and Women's Chorus. Prior to Cornell, Tucker was the Choral Director at Milton Academy in Milton, Massachusetts. He also served as Assistant Conductor of both the Harvard Glee Club and the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum, and has conducted the Clark University Choir, the Worcester Consortium Orchestra, and the Regis College Choir.
Professor Tucker received a Master of Music degree in Choral Conducting from the New England Conservatory of Music in 1986 and a Bachelor of Science Degree from Tufts University in 1981. Professor Tucker is currently on sabbatical for Spring 2007 and will return for the Fall 2007 term. www.gleeclub.com Photo Credit: Gleeclub.com
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