Which version of the song is right? The Jar of Emotions Exercise

Today I was talking to one of our Accreditation Cohort23 teachers, giving advice on how to encourage artistry in a student.

This student is very responsible, detail oriented and always prepared for his lesson. He understands context (he’s able to say what the plot of the musical is and where the song fits), but he doesn’t always understand the song lyrics themselves.

He is also concerned that going into an audition the director might want to change his performance and ask him to do something that he’s unprepared for. So the teacher was asking what we could do to help him prepare for the unknown.

I suggested the following exercise for helping people with a strong inner cataloguer to expand the abilities of their inner artist (see my article Feeding Your Inner Artist AND Your Cataloguer).

Jar of emotions

We’re using the jar of emotions – something that one of our Registered Teachers introduced us to.

1. Have a jar filled with pieces of paper – each piece has an emotion or mood written on it. Get him to pick a piece of paper from the jar.
2. Ask him to sing with this emotion – that is his primary focus. It’s likely that the emotion isn’t what the song is about, but any song can be sung with a different emotional slant.
3. Once he’s sung it, then challenge him for the story – what story did that emotion produce/bring up for you or the character?

This has two effects – one is that it helps him realise that the emotion colours the story. The second is how easy it is to change the performance of the song with a simple emotion instruction and still keep within the “envelope” of the song.

You can also reverse this – Give him a new backstory – sing with this new back story then challenge him for the emotion that it produces.

A word about song envelopes

Each song has an envelope – that’s to do with style, expectations and context of the song.
You can change a great deal and still stay within the envelope of the song – speed, feel, rhythm, melody (ie riffs or small changes), even lyric repetitions (eg looping phrases in jazz).

It only doesn’t work when you stray too far outside the envelope of the song, and the song gets pulled out of its original shape. That can happen when you’re unconscious of what you’re doing.

Having said that, when you’re CONSCIOUS of what you’re doing, you can deliberately introduce different style features, creating amazing style fusions that can set new trends.

Here’s what Gillyanne and I have noticed after 40+ years each of working in the classical and the theatre worlds – “Actors” and “singers” think differently about music. “Singers” focus on sound, phrasing, emotion, architecture. “Actors” focus on lyrics, meaning, storyline and moment-to-moment occurrences. This student needs to think more like an actor for this particular challenge where he’s worried about the director changing his performance. By the time he has completed the jar of emotions exercise a few times he will have “performed” multiple versions of the song that all stay within the envelope, and that all work as performances. It frees your own creative inner artist without destroying the rules of your cataloguer or librarian.

Why does this work? You as a teacher are helping him make new rules for the song. The important thing is to keep the structure he already has for the song, and just change one thing. For this exercise, remember to revert to the original version each time (original plus one).

Once he’s comfortable with a single change each time, you can progress to keeping the first change and adding a second (original plus one plus one). It’s a surprisingly powerful exercise and one that will reap many benefits for the short amount of time it takes.

Try it out and let me know what happens!