Hey, If You Want To Sing Louder, Flex Your Back!

Singing is only as hard as you make it.

Don't confuse that with me saying, "Singing is easy." It's not. It takes tremendous energy and the whole body has to participate.

For me, the first step in singing is: Get used to being loud. And get used to using your whole body when you sing.

Next step: Get "loud" under control.

Last step: Practice & Perform.

That's about it.

We don't need to be pre-med students to figure out that if something hurts, we're not doing it right. We don't need to have majored in anatomy/physiology to figure out that lifting 400 lbs. on our first day in the weight room is not an option.

But we do need to keep things simple. Make the "hurdles" physical, not mental. Incorporate the body into the voice first -- not the brain. "Feel" pitch with full energy, you'll never sing flat again.

Simple.

Musical Theatre History 101

If you are studying voice for Musical Theatre, it helps to have a little composer history under your "belt."

The reason being that the Musical Theatre world is not that large and if you're out there continually auditioning and improving your skills, then eventually you will run in to or, even better, work with a composer...who was influenced by this guy:

Frank Loesser was the composer of revered works such as Guys and Dolls, The Most Happy Fella, How To Succeed..., Hans Christian Andersen, Where's Charley?, and many popular songs of his time.

Loesser was a monster musician, tortured soul and hitmaker. There are some great books and, thanks principally to his daughter Susan, a remarkably honest documentary on him, but for a little background, check out this link. It's from The Johnny Mercer Foundation and was meant for kids, but it's a quick and cool little read -- http://www.johnnymercerfoundation.org/FrankLoesserLyricNotes.pdf

You can also go to:

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/broadway/stars/loesser_f.html

And if you really want to take some time:

http://www.frankloesser.com/

What's Your "When....and Then....?"

Ever heard a "Whenandthen-er"?

"Whenandthen-ers" sound like this:

"When I lose 20 pounds, THEN I'll get headshots."

"When I have every song in the universe memorized and perfected, THEN I'll go on auditions."

"When I quit smoking, THEN I'll take voice lessons."

"When I get my teeth fixed..."

"When Pilot Season starts..."

The best "THEN" is the "THEN I'll be happy..."

"When I get that series, THEN I'll be happy."

"When I make my first million, THEN I'll be happy."

"When I get a boyfriend/girlfriend, tour, new car, house, apartment, THEN I'll be happy."

There's no law against being happy right now. There's no credit card for happiness. Happiness is a bill we owe ourselves everyday. It can't be saved up for later. So, practice happiness every minute, every hour, every day. Sometimes you won't be so good at it, but if you practice it constantly, you're bound to get better.

Artistic careers are fluid things.

Artistic growth is like water in a river; it continually flows from the source.

"Whenandthen-ing" dams up the river and puts everything on hold. It's up to us to knock down our own dams and let the river roar.

Be the Mississippi River.

Forget "whenandthen-ing."

Happiness is within this very moment.

Start.

How Stephen Schwartz Changed The Game...

I confess that I am extremely resistant to listening to soundtracks of new musicals.

A hit song or two from a show is fine -- it's what I use to train Broadway singers, but I'm a composer also. I don't want to be influenced by someone else's hooks constantly looping in my brain.

Entire soundtracks do that to me.

And I don't need to write LES MIZ music.

It's been done.

A lot.

By the same guys, as a matter of fact.

Show after show after show...

So, I rarely listen to Original Broadway Cast Albums unless forced.

And that's how I got into listening to WICKED.

Two years back, my five year old daughter insisted on listening to it every day on the way home from kindergarten.

She could read a little bit by that time and her vocabulary really increased by reading and singing along with the WICKED soundtrack lyrics. It was fun to hear her sing in the back seat.

Oh sure, we listened to "Popular" three or four times a day. "The Wizard and I," "Defying Gravity," "I'm Not That Girl" and that guy with the funny sounding pudding-in-the-throat tenor voice on the first track always got a laugh from her.

"No One Mourns The Wicked!"

**gargle**


So, my resistance became futile and, having been a "Son of Sondheim" these last thirty years, I finally had to come to the conclusion that musical theatre had moved on and, with WICKED, Stephen Schwartz had just changed the game for us all;

HIGH FIBER LYRICS

No "chicks and ducks and geese better scurry"

no repetitive "this is the moment," "this, too, is the moment," "and, oh yeah, this is also the moment"

no already drawn "Send In The Clowns" summations.

These are "high fiber lyrics." They have layer upon layer of character exposition and development.

Each character speaks to, and in many cases, denies/accepts, their own truth. The King in THE KING & I had three hours to debate with himself. The folks in WICKED have about three minutes before making a move.

Inside rhymes are EVERYWHERE. And not the obvious clever composer, "look at my lyric" inside rhymes -- these rhymes are rhythmic, conversational and belong because they are right.

Philosophy: Not every character has their own musical theme (in an opera sense) but each character has a definable philosophy through song. Wagner would be proud.

THE HUMAN VOICE:

Elphaba is a rock star. She belts a high F (as do all my student/client belters), but good on ya, Stephen Schwartz for recognizing that the use of one's true vocal chords can also be "unlimited" for eight shows a week.

THE IMPACT

It's already happening, but in the next five years, a "critical mass" of interest in musical theatre will occur at the junior high and high school levels due to WICKED.

And where the chicks go -- green though they may be -- so do the boys.

So, yeah, Stephen Schwartz changed the game with WICKED; artistically (high fiber lyrics), physically (uh, high fiber belting), and, best of all, he guaranteed those of us who love musical theatre a whole new generation.

Oh, lol, and I still haven't seen the show.

Why We Should Sing "Athletically"

Because when you get out of bed in the morning, you don't wonder if you'll be able to walk, do you?

So why should you get out of bed and wonder if you'll be able to sing?

Athletic singers put the body in charge of the voice.

If you can walk, you can sing.

Unathletic singers allow the voice to be in charge of everything.

That's why they always have to drink this, gargle this, swallow this...

It's counter-intuitive.

Let the body lead the voice.

The voice will follow.

(The voice has no choice!)

Stephen Schwartz

The Dramatist Guild held its first "annual" West Coast membership meeting yesterday at Theatre West on Cahuenga.

I put "annual" in quotes because you can't really have a "first" annual because annual events only become annual when you have a "second" annual.

Go figure.

Anyway, Stephen Schwartz was the special guest and, as he is a member of the Dramatist Guild board, the discussion was mostly around the mission of the DG, assistance they can offer to playwrights, composers, et al, and some of the current issues facing dramatists.

About a hundred members and guests attended the meeting.

As a musical theatre composer, I felt a little outnumbered -- most of the attendees were obviously non-musical playwrights who asked about copyright, copyright infringement and submission policies. I figured many of them would be able to sing "Day By Day," but was confident that only two or three of us actually knew the lyrics to "Lion Tamer."

I didn't get around to asking Stephen whether he writes lyrics or music first or both at the same time.

I kinda wanted to know that.

I also wanted to ask him about "Meadowlark" (from "The Baker's Wife") and how it came to be at such a young age that he composed what is easily one of the greatest musical soliloquies for a woman in the theatre -- next to, of course, his newest greatest musical soliloquy for a woman in the theatre, "The Wizard and I."

And then I wanted to ask him where is the male counterpart to "Meadowlark" and "The Wizard and I."

Of course, afterwards, I didn't ask him any of those questions because I had a more important mission.

I wanted to get his autograph for my daughter Julia Rose (who could sing the "Wicked" score backwards and forwards at the age of five).

For those of you with five year olds running around, you KNOW how much they like to listen to their favorite music in the car....over and over and over and over....

I saw it this way: getting Stephen's autograph for my daughter (now seven) would have been like my dad getting me Richard Rodgers' autograph or Cole Porter's or Willie Mays, Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax. I wouldn't have cared if my dad had talked to any of those guys (he was a bartender in Santa Monica in the early 60's, I'm sure he talked to plenty of athletes and artists) -- that wouldn't have been a big deal.

But what's thrilling to a child is a person of achievement or celebrity taking a moment -- albeit an incredibly quick moment -- to recognize them.

Upon my request, Stephen immediately obliged and signed his name on a lined sheet of paper in my notebinder.

And when I brought it home to Julia

and told her that I met the guy who wrote all the music for "Wicked,"

and that I got his autograph for her,

her eyes got big as she read the lined piece of paper

"To Julia Rose, Defy gravity! Stephen Schwartz"

Then she laughed and jumped up and down and cheered "Oh, wow!"

It's now in a frame on the family piano.

Yup.

Daddy did the right thing!

Mandy Patinkin and "Leading The Fun"

L.A. Times February 4th -- Daryl H. Miller reviews Mandy Patinkin at the Kodak Theatre.

One passage of the review seemed particularly apt for An Uptempo and a Ballad:

"Yet what was increasingly apparent was how comfortable in his skin Patinkin appears to be nowadays. He is a prickly perfectionist, but he seems finally to trust himself and his material. He doesn't oversell, as he did in the days that earned him a spotlight parody in "Forbidden Broadway" as "Super-Frantic-Hyper-Active-Self-Indulgent-Mandy." Aside from occasional indulgences in showy, chesty, buzzing-with-vibrato fortissimos, Patinkin spent most of the concert in focused stillness, suspending notes -- softly, tenderly -- in his impossibly high, pure upper range."

Keyword: Stillness -- if you have a spare minute, take a look back to my October posts.

For the last few months, I've been telling students to "lead the fun" in performance.

If your mantra is, "I am the leader of the fun," your audience will pick that up and trust your leadership. If they're going to heckle, they might as well leave, right?

If you abdicate your leadership of the fun, choosing instead to "push the fun up a hill from behind," it all becomes work, obvious work, and no one has any fun at all.

"Pushing the fun up the hill from behind" is a performer waiting for the audience to start having fun first.

It's a long wait...

It doesn't matter if you like to sing big and loud (omg; "showy, chesty, buzzy"!) or soft and quiet ("impossibly high, pure upper range").

Mandy Patinkin was just leading the fun.

Own yourself, you own the stage.

Lead the fun, the audience follows.

"I'll Do It After The Strike..."

I've been a member of SAG since 1979 and have witnessed several big strikes since then.

And after all this time, I can tell you the one mistake we performers constantly make (and will continue to make) during a strike;

We treat it like a vacation.

Which it isn't.

It's an opportunity.

It's a chance to go to the gym more.

It's a chance for us to get in that dance class, voice class, acting class and improve our skills.

It's a chance to READ more and become more literate.

It's a chance to volunteer in something meaningful instead of waiting for the union to set up a Blood Drive.

Write a letter to the editor.

Meditate in an open field -- even when it's raining.

Do something instead of nothing.

Or do nothing.

But don't blame the writer's strike for it!

Our Demo Tracks...

Every gig we do is a learning experience.

And if it's not, then we're not paying enough attention to what we're doing.

That's why, when my students/clients/pals record these vocal samples, I only give them three takes straight through the track to deliver.

My reasoning is thus:

1) With digital recording, three complete vocal takes should give me plenty of material to "comp" the vocals, which means that I simply take the best phrases -- sometimes, even, the best word -- and put them all together in a single vocal take. If there are too many takes to choose from, or if we start "punching in" single words, etc., the performance gets lost because we are seeking perfection over performance. I'll always take performance first because it's real and real humans are seldom perfect;

2) With three full takes on one song, the singer has to "go for the gold" each time. It's a good practice to get in to. The singer is pushed to get to what that song means pretty quickly. No "warming up" for five or six takes and then expecting magic. Music producers come in all shapes and sizes with different demands and a singer has to be prepared for a session that could last fifteen minutes or five hours. If a singer goes for the gold on each take, giving it his or her all each time, then a producer is less inclined to throw out entire takes and ask for another one while also respecting that the singer is there delivering a high quality, fully energized product (the vocal line) in as efficient a manner as possible (studio time costs money -- be a hero, not a diva).

Finally, digital pitch correction.

I don't use it. The demos you hear are demos. Some major artists now touring are using pitch correction software in their live shows.

We don't call that art. We call that "cashin' checks"!

Featured Singer: Amy Langer Schwartz

A few years back, Amy Langer Schwartz did a national tour of "A Chorus Line" where she sang the 11th hour standard "What I Did For Love."

Only thing is, on that tour, Amy had no confidence in her voice, no real vocal technique, and, to top it off, she used to ask the sound guys to turn down her microphone whenever she hit the high notes.

That's what I love about our featured singer Amy Langer Schwartz. She is brutally honest, tremendously dedicated, funny, engaging, phenomenally talented and to top it off, she's now a bona fide belter, baby!

Click on the little widget above to hear what I'm talking about.

Amy Langer Schwartz.

Even her name sounds like a trustworthy product.

V.O.: "Amy Langer Schwartz...a ton o' talent in a tiny package...available now at finer theatres everywhere."