For April Fools Day….A Barbershop Myth Debunked
My first instinct this morning was to write a funny, bogus post only to proclaim “April Fools” at the end. Then I decided that this site hasn’t been around long enough to build the kind of credibility it takes to pull something like that off. I didn’t want a new visitor to stop by, read a few lines of a post and decide that I wasn’t in my right mind.
So instead, I’ve decided to debunk a barbershop myth that I hear quite often when coaching barbershop quartets and choruses.
Barbershop Myth #1: “It doesn’t really matter how I perform in rehearsal, it only matters how I perform on stage. I’ll “turn it on” when I’m in front of an audience”
There are two fundamentally wrong things about this particular statement. First, there is the truth behind the idea that “practice makes permanent”. We all know that the contest and performance stage bring a lot of unknowns to every performance. When nerves play into the mix and there are the distractions of bright lights, or the amplification sounds strange, these distractions can throw a wrench into your plans. In order to perform your very best when these things occur, you need to have practiced exactly what you want to put on stage. Almost as if you could perform on auto-pilot. This applies to both the physical and the musical parts of the performance. I know there are many people, myself included, that can come off of the contest stage and not remember most of the performance. So how did I do my plan? My body literally has muscle memory of how I want to perform because I practice it that way every time. As mentioned in a prior post, you can relax in between songs, or when your director or coach is giving you instructions. Then when it is time to sing, you should be “on” all of the time. It is the only way to assure that you will be ready no matter what distractions are thrown at you.
The second part of the statement about turning it on for an audience is almost more laughable than the first. Ask anyone who has ever been contestant #1 how it feels to perform to a mostly empty audience. Especially during the chorus contest when most of the people are waiting in the traffic pattern to perform with their chorus. The judges don’t care that there isn’t a deafening applause when the curtain goes up, so neither can you. I can speak from the experience of being in very large chorus that we have had performances that we were hired for where we outnumbered the audience. It’s a little awkward, but you still have to hit them with all that you’ve got. How about some other scenarios, the quartet gig where you “stroll” around and are basically singing to no one, or the one where you perform at a nursing home and some of your audience members fall asleep. You can’t count on an audience to help you perform. That is not what they are there for. They are there to be entertained by you, even if they are not as large, energetic, or interested as you would like for them to be.
And that’s no joke!