One of the things that comes up often in conversations with, say, businesspeople, is the question of whether one is a “big picture” person or “detail-oriented.” And while I think it’s true that some people tend towards one or the other, I think the real trick for most of us is just knowing which kind of thinking is important when. In most areas, I am what is considered to be a “big picture” thinker. I tend to approach plans and problems with a view towards larger strategy. But as an artist—especially an interpretive artist—all the truth is in the detail. And this goes double as a teacher of young artists.
I’m not suggesting that a wide view of a student’s training or performance isn’t important, but without real attention to detail involved, both the process and the performance are essentially useless. We’ve all experienced this at one point or another, haven’t we? My memories of these experiences are still woefully vivid—a college choir, for instance, whose director was so professionally fatigued that instead of stopping and forcing us to really tackle the difficult middle passages of Brahms’ Schicksalslied, he would simply (and speedily) muddle through them every rehearsal, aiming for the later sections that we knew much better. You can imagine how wonderful that performance was. That director—a renowned organ professor—was gratefully relieved of choir duty later that year.
Attention to detail in every aspect of a piece of music—pitch, rhythm, dynamics, tempo, enunciation, interpretation, breathing—is essential to not only creating a compelling performance, but also to developing one’s musicianship and artistry. I repeatedly tell my students (in the manner of a broken record, I’m sure) that a good composer tells us everything we need to know about a song’s emotional trajectory right there on the page—something I learned from the man who took over that college choir, actually. And then I’ll ask them to go over a single line again and again, until they’ve discovered all they can. It’s worth the time, though, I promise them (and you!). A great performance is built from that detail. It begins in the detail and builds itself out from there, until the complete, gorgeous picture finally emerges. This applies to singing in any genre.
I know my father’s acting training is similarly focused on detail, in just about every way possible, and this weekend, I had an opportunity to watch our students put some of that training into practice—and in an particularly fun way, too!
It was an off week for me in this month’s Professional Track class schedule, but I stopped by Saturday’s scene study class to try to snap some photos for our archives. In the end, I got very few usable photos, but quite a lot of insight into the minds of our most serious young students.
The kids were handed a short scene, broken into groups of three, and given thirty minutes to develop a complete story (and backstory) for the scene. The two groups handled their extreme time limit differently.
One group spent the bulk of their time talking through the details of their story; the other assembled a story quickly and spent their time focused on the physical details of the scene. Neither group had enough time to render their creations fully-formed, but I loved their contrasting approaches to the assignment and enjoyed watching them work through their respective details, like this group’s robbery scene involving laser beam security over which they went repeatedly to ensure that they were all putting the invisible lasers in the same place.
As a relatively new teacher, I’m still constantly wowed by the depth and creativity our students are able to bring to their work, and their rapidly progressing abilities. Hopefully they’ll never tire of our relentless push for detail.