CASA - The Contemporary A Capella Society

When singing becomes detached from its reason for existence, it no longer nourishes either the singer or the audience.   Historically, as in ‘from the dawn of time’, people have sung when emotions both good and bad grew too big for mere speech and then needed to be expressed in a form able to carry more emotional weight.  When a song becomes subordinate to a singer’s ego, when the singer doesn’t connect with either the words or dominant feeling of the song, then it’s just a whole lot of noise and no heart.  Virtuosic noise can be exciting, but it doesn’t feed the soul.  Both artist and audience are robbed of the deeper levels of experience that could be available to them. 

The singer in a performance situation has two simultaneous tasks, aside from the obvious job of singing.  One is to stay connected to herself, the feelings that the song is about and the feelings that the song brings up in her, and the other task is to connect emotionally with her audience, and to remain in that connectedness for the duration of the performance.  Each of these tasks requires separate skill sets and each places different demands on the performer. Preparation and practice are the keys to keeping these two emotional loops in play.

Loop I, Internal: Connecting your heart with the song.

Most song lyrics are focused around a single dominant feeling and can usually be summed up in two words, like ‘new love’ or ‘total despair.’ Sometimes you might need a short phrase to encapsulate the feeling tone of a song, like ‘At last I have found true love’ or ‘I hate everything in the world.’  Frequently the dominant feeling is synthesized in the hook of a song and there’s no need to dig around for it.  Songs can be regarded as expanded pieces of feeling, and it’s the singer’s blessed task to bring that feeling to life.  In your process of learning a song, spend some time with the words apart from the music. 

Good lyrics are poetry.  Let them sink deep into your bones.  Discover the places within you that resonate, literally and figuratively, with the feeling of a song.  If there’s some personal experience of yours that links you to a set of lyrics, try to reconstruct the experience and all the feelings surrounding it.   Why is this important?  Because the voice is an exquisitely sensitive instrument, and it reacts automatically and swiftly to feelings both subtle and grand with shadings and timbres that enrich the lyrics and make them vivid and tangible for the listener.  Staying emotionally connected to the song is an internal loop that feeds on itself and sustains the intensity of the feeling connected to the song.

The more layers of feeling you bring to a song, not only will hearing it be a more interesting experience, but you as an artist are far more likely to touch many more of your listeners hearts, since most of us have much more in common emotionally than we realize.  It is the commonality of the human experience that draws us together, and song is often a pure and powerful expression of feelings that we all share.  Memorizing lyrics isn’t simply a rote task.  It is the reconstructing of emotion on a gut level.  And if you feel it, and I mean really feel it in your deepest recesses, (as opposed to the superficial, theatrical miming of feeling – drop to one knee, clench the fist, grab the chest, point the finger heavenward) the chances are good that you’ll transmit that feeling to your listeners.   

Loop II, External: Connecting with your audience

Staying connected to your audience requires a basic understanding of the energy that constitutes a performance.  It helps to think of the performer as a lens that focuses energy.  That energy is a tangible, shared medium that goes back and forth between the performer and his audience.  In reality the exchange is nearly simultaneous, but it’s useful to imagine it as, say, a volleyball game, except that the ball keeps on getting larger as the performance progresses. 

The audience sends the performer a large quantity of somewhat disorganized energy.  I use the term ‘disorganized’ because it’s a lot of energy coming from a lot of different people, all of whom are in their own emotional ‘space.’  The performer, through the medium of his artistry, organizes and focuses that energy and sends it back to the audience, which in turn beams it back to the performer, who amplifies it again and sends it back to the listeners, and in a good performance, it continues to grow throughout the length of the show.  Everyone then feels tuned in to the same energetic frequency, the same ‘vibe.’ 

This is the external energy loop that exists between singer and listeners, and it feels like magic when it happens.  It requires a commitment from both sides of the stage.  When you finish a performance exhausted, and feel as though you were pouring your energy down a bottomless pit, it’s because that commitment was never secured.  When everyone walks away from a performance energized and happily buzzing, it is because the commitment was made and the shared energy expanded to fill everyone involved.  

I believe that the secret, if there is one, to having this kind of experience as a performer, lies in the attitude one carries into performance.  ‘Presentation’, the feeling of having to do something in order to get something, as in, “I will now perform for you and then you will appreciate me” carries with it the energy of a one-way transmission.  Behind that attitude lies an unspoken quid pro quo, a demand for approval that you may or may not get depending upon the audience’s willingness to give it to you.  Between the performer’s demand and the audience’s level of willingness, there forms a tug-of-war rather than the freely shared, constantly expanding energy of a successful performance.  The performer is, in this case, saying, “Give it to me,” and the audience is saying, “Maybe.” 

Going into performance with the attitude that you are sharing your gift is, I believe, the crucial element, the piece that allows the magic to happen.  It does not carry the unspoken demand.  It allows the audience to join with you, to open their hearts and share the gifts of their presence and willingness with you as you are sharing your gifts of genuine self and song with them.  In this sort of emotional atmosphere, everyone gets a present.  It’s kind of like an energetic Christmas party.

Keeping it all going

It takes time, practice, and adequate preparation to keep both of these vital connections alive in the hyper world of live performance.  Your pre-concert ritual is an important and frequently neglected element in the performance process.  It is tempting to take the excitement and anticipation, and sometimes jitters that accompany the buildup to a performance and to expend that energy in nervous activity, such as yakking it up backstage.  To foster and maintain your connection to yourself and your audience, you need to be focused and clear about the task before you. 

Runners often start doing deep breathing a half-hour before a race, so that when the gun goes off it isn’t a shock that locks up their breathing and slows them down.  I recommend that singers do the same thing.  Walking out onto a stage can be the equivalent to the starter’s gun, and often has a similar effect on the unprepared performer.  Spend some of your last fifteen minutes before a show getting in touch with yourself.  Check in.  Breathe.  See how you’re feeling.  Try to leave behind the stresses of the day, your personal cares and worries, and begin to focus on the music and your level of willingness to share, to open your heart to your audience and invite them in.   The more of your real self you are willing to bring to the show and share, the more your audience will give back to you.  When you are connected to both your own heart, the internal feedback loop, and to your audience, the external one, it feels like magic.  Maybe that’s because it is.