Public Speaking as Performance

Last week in studio class, my voice professor mentioned that I stand apologetically when I sing. She was trying to infuse my performance with greater presence. Now, in the other half of my life, the business side, I don't typically have trouble with presence. My high school forensics coach drilled presence and strong public speaking skills into me. I owe so much to him. And all my time in consulting reinforced that. So I had an idea. I asked my professor whether we could find ways for me to transfer what feels so innate to me on the public speaking side to the voice performance side.

To do that, I gave a speech today in studio class. I dressed in a business suit, and I gave a business-focused talk: "The 5 C's of Managing a Nonprofit in an Economic Downturn". (Cash, Contingency Plans, Communication, Costs, and Creativity. If you're curious about what's behind those 5 words, ask me and I'll explain later. It's not all as intuitive as you'd expect.)

What was interesting was that my classmates saw totally different qualities in me as a result of the speech. Some commented that my energy was "powerhouse", focused, urgent. Others said that they felt like I was talking directly to them, that I engaged them completely. Another noticed that my gestures were more fluid, my posture more relaxed, movement and gesture were integrated with what I was saying, not planned. All of these qualities are things that I need to transfer over to my singing performance.

So what's the problem? Why can't I just step into this same spot?

Part of it is confidence. I am very comfortable in a public speaking role. I have less experience seeing myself as a singer, as an artist. My professor phrased it this way: "You've proven yourself in the business world. You can do the same thing as a singer; it will just take some more time."

Another reason is that public speaking has traditionally felt like a different medium to me, an easier medium. If I miss a word, I can restate. I am in control of the words I say. I control the pacing. But in art song, the words and their duration are written for me. I can control tempo within a range, but if there's a half note on the word "the", I have to sing it for a half note, regardless of whether "the" is an important word or not. This may be where subtext needs to come in. (Subtext is literally the "text underneath". It's what the character is thinking while saying what's written.) Subtext can give impetus to the note, regardless of the written "the".

And finally, I tend to overanalyze when I sing. While I've gotten better at silencing the critical voice in my head (the "Self 1" from The Inner Game of Music -- the one that says, "What was that note? Ugh! Should have brightened that. Should have smoothed that word." etc.), I'm still often thinking too much. I sing from an intellectual place, one that thinks carefully about the diction I need to make sure I remember, the upcoming phrase, the vocal technique, the language and meaning of each word, and what my character would be seeing at any moment in time. The trick is that you need to let go of all of these things when you perform. They are for the practice room. In performance, you need to become so knit to the music and the piece, embodying it so much that it is like you are composing it on the spot. It's like my favorite type of public speaking: extemporaenous. I never write out a speech; I always just write an outline and run the speech a few times. Every time I give my speech, it's slightly different even though my macro points are identical. I compose on the spot. I need to get to the same place with singing.

All that to say that it was an interesting parallel in class today. And it worked. After I gave the speech, I sang "Pierrot", one of Debussy's Quatre Chansons de Jeunesse. It was much more present. Yet I still had focal points away from the eyes of my audience, and it showed. So my voice teacher had the students come up towards the piano and sit cross-legged on the floor like kids. She told me to let go of all technique and just tell them the story. So I did.

It was a breakthrough experience :) After class, three of my classmates gave me hugs with wonderful, warm encouragement.

Now if I can just figure out how to hold on to that epiphany...

~Hope