52: How Speaking Can Enhance Your Performance
With Michael Webster
Hello. I'm delighted to be offering my first post on YCA Career Catalyst having to do with public speaking, which has become more and more important during the past decade or so.
I attended a concert just about one year ago when Russia had just invaded Ukraine, and the Houston Symphony made the wise decision to have Sasha Potiomkin, our bass clarinetist, offer some words before the concert because Sasha is Ukrainian. And they followed that with a performance of the Ukrainian national anthem. Needless to say, Sasha was quite emotional, and we were all emotional, but it helped the audience to hear the words of a Ukrainian speaking about the devastation that his country was about to go through and is still going through. And so the audience made a direct connection with Sasha and through him a connection with all of the members of the orchestra, 90 members or so, 90 of them, each one a person, each one someone that the audience would like to get to know and spend time with.
We can do the same thing in our recitals and chamber music programs by offering a little bit of information about the music we're going to play. Perhaps if you were a shy kid who grew up expressing yourself better through music than you did through words. I was a little bit that way. In fact, there is a word for fear of public speaking.
It's called glossophobia. And in a 2019 survey, it beat out spiders and zombies. Four things people are most fearful of. And there's a wide range of gray between glossophobia and various shades going toward feeling completely comfortable on stage and speaking. And you can develop that comfort speaking on stage if you put a little bit of work into it.
There is an excellent book that I have here. It's called “The Music Teaching Artist Bible” by Eric Booth, consisting mostly of articles that appeared in Chamber Music America magazine in the early 2000s. Among the chapters are a few that I use when I teach public speaking, and the one with my favorite title is called “Speak Up or Shut Up?” (with a question mark after the “Shut Up”), the point being, you don't have to speak, you can just be quiet and play your music, but if you do speak, you have to have a good reason for speaking. And he lists over a dozen reasons why you might want to speak with an audience.
I'm choosing two to share with you right now. The first is to make a personal connection with the audience, such as Sasha Potiomkin did with that HSO audience. The second is to illuminate a critical aspect of the piece or program that you're about to play.
An example from quite a few years ago was when I was playing the Elliott Carter Eight Etudes and a Fantasy for woodwind quartet on a program that also included Hilary Hahn playing standard violin repertoire. Playing the Carter with me was John Steinmetz, the wonderful bassoonist, composer, and writer from the L.A. area, and John realized that the large audience that had clamored into this church to hear Hillary would be perhaps a little bit perplexed by Elliott Carter.
So he got up on his feet and described to them what they were about to hear. And he said, You're going to hear eight short etudes that show various aspects of the woodwind family and then a large fantasy which quotes those etudes and is held together by a fugue theme, and I'm going to teach you the fugue theme, it goes like this, [sings] “This fugue is so cool. I can't believe it.” And he had them sing it with him. He said, I don't care if you get the right pitches. (I came close to getting the right pitches). But he had the audience singing the fugue from the Elliott Carter. And then when we played it, it wasn't so difficult for them to approach.
The most important thing, if you're going to speak to an audience, is to be prepared. The way to prepare is to start with getting a lot of information about the piece or the program that you're playing lots of information and write it all down and then condense it into maybe three points that you want to make about the piece.
Remember that your little introductory speech shouldn't be longer than the piece itself. So somewhere between two and three minutes is just about right. And then once you've done that, you plan your talk and write it out. Sometimes some people, myself included, like to write the whole thing out in text form, but then I never read a text to an audience. It's not a lecture. It's telling a story. Practice speaking it aloud, practice it a few times, practice it without a text, and then you'll be comfortable when you go on to stage.