Singing, Writing, and Me
Years ago in Boston on one of my early book tours, I had an argument with another writer. He fiercely maintained that when you do a public reading from your book, you have to stick to the exact text on the page. No deviations whatsoever. If you did change anything, you were cheating your listeners.
My position was that sticking to the text could be boring for you and the audience. Now maybe it was because I’d had a year and a half of theater in college and some years of teaching, but in my opinion a reading wasn’t a reading, it was a performance. It had to be dramatic.
I’ve been to readings where the author is a stiff. She or he reads the text as if it’s an instruction manual for a new vacuum cleaner. One time a friend of mine fell asleep at a boring event like that and woke up totally lost, whispering to me “Wait-what? There was a car accident? Anyone die?” When I said no, she nodded off again. I have to add that the author in question was really very well known, but had no connection with the audience, read in a monotone, and kept their head down the entire very long hour.
With my Boston friend, I said that the text you performed was different from what anyone in your audience might have read beforehand or would be reading in privacy. Your reading for a group was a public event and had to be tinkered with: it was a completely different experience. Long sentences might need to be shortened so your audience could hear better. Dialogue tags could be added to make it clear who was speaking in a scene, something that would be obvious on the page. And it was important to be guided by the energy of the event and your own emotion as you read.
You could even ad lib, add words or sentences that weren’t there or cut something—all with the aim of making the essay, story, or book excerpt more engaging, more engrossing, more electric. This was a gift to your audience, not a theft.
Over the years, it helped that my spouse attended numerous readings of mine and gave me director’s notes when I asked for them and we discussed pacing and many other fine points as if it was a play. I even got comfortable enough to ad lib when I did readings in German from my memoir/travelogue My Germany.
So how does all this fit with singing?
I started voice lessons before the pandemic and over time they’ve become more than a hobby, they are a passion. I record every lesson on my iPad, write down important moments and advice from it in a journal every week, and in between lessons, I play the entire recording of the lesson at least once and listen to shorter sections over and over to cement what I’m learning. I use headphones to capture the nuances I might otherwise miss.
Recently, my amazing, dynamic young voice teacher talked to me about rubato, something I knew from my study of Chopin when I played the piano years ago. Simply put, rubato in music is “subtle rhythmic manipulation and nuance in performance. For greater musical expression, the performer may stretch certain beats, measures, or phrases and compact others.”*
I’ve been working on “The Rose,” made famous by Bette Midler, and last week, I sang the middle verse in four completely different ways, imagining the speaker, the narrator in different moods and situations. This wasn’t at my teacher’s direction. It just happened because I was free to interpret the lines how I felt in that moment and free to imagine who I was singing to. And that was thanks to advice like this that he gave me:
“You should never sing exactly what’s on the page. It’s not a contract, it’s a map of getting there, and you can take different routes.”
“We can’t capture the full spectrum of emotion the piece attempts to address just by relying on the page.”
“The way to be expressive in this art form is to have some element of surprise.”
So one time through, it was like an internal monologue or a Shakespearean soliloquy; another, it was hard-earned advice to a despairing friend who thought love was out of reach, and so on. Different personas, different moods.
The lesson blew my mind, and my teacher and I both agreed I had made tremendous progress in just that one hour. Driving home afterwards, I realized that I now felt as free with the text of a song, whether pop or something by Schubert, as I had been feeling for years performing my own work in nine different countries.
It was not a place I had ever imagined coming to as a singer.
Image by Ri Butov from Pixabay
*From Britannica online
Well done for reading and singing. I hate to read out loud, not because I hate reading out loud, but because I stumble over my words and get the order mixed up because of mild dysphasia. Not a good look if you're peddling your work. If I'm ever lucky enough to be invited to read to an audience, I'll hire someone like to you to do it for me!
I love this! Good for you on your singing and your writing and your performing. You're inspiring.
I'm just getting started for my readings for my poetry collection Tethers End by performing more often at open mic nights locally and online. I have been thinking much about what kind of "extra" information I want to give that lets the poems breathe on their own but provides a theatrical element. For a single poem, unless it's ekphrastic, I typically let the poem speak for itself. Some, if including a very technical or obscure term, might get a bit of preface. I also know that my newer work even more accomplished that what is in the collection, so I plan to include some of those poems without feeling like I'm "misleading" the potential book purchaser.
I was at a poetry open mic recently where one performer more in the spoken word vein, sang the refrain and then went into verses that were spoken. That was an interesting combination that worked for that piece.
When you've made the effort to write affecting or entertaining work, it's worth the time and effort to make sure you can share it in a way that will be memorable.