72: Short & Sweet: The Keys to Nailing Your Next Speech
With Michael Webster
Hello. You've decided to take the plunge and introduce some of your repertoire from the stage. You've gathered a lot of information about the piece, the composer and the social and political climate in which it was written. And you may have discovered that that information has helped enhance your performance. Now you have to condense all of that information into a 2-to-3-minute talk.
The best example I can think of, of being concise happened exactly 160 years ago this year at the Soldiers National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The featured speaker on that occasion was former Senator Edward Everett, who gave a two-hour oration about the valor and sacrifice of the men who died to preserve the union. Following that, President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address, 271 well-crafted words taking about 2 minutes to speak.
Afterwards, Everett said to Lincoln, “I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the importance of the occasion in 2 hours as you did in 2 minutes.” The Gettysburg Address may be the most famous speech in the history of the United States, but I would put Martin Luther King's “I Have a Dream” right up there.
It was delivered exactly 60 years ago this year. There is a 17-minute video that I encourage you to watch because at the 12-minute mark of that speech, MLK takes his eyes away from his prepared text and lifts them and focuses them directly on the audience for the entire 3 minutes of “I Have a Dream”- what happened?
It turns out that his friend, the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, was sitting close by and she called, “Martin tell them about the dream!” because she had heard him use that phrase in previous speeches. The end result was that by gaining eye contact, getting out of his text, he rocketed that speech to its brilliant conclusion. So we learn from Lincoln the importance of being concise and from MLK, the importance of eye contact with your audience.
In his invaluable book, The Music Teaching Artists Bible, Eric Booth has a chapter called “The Entry Point Question” stressing engagement before information. In a speech entitled “How to Start a Speech,” Connor Neill says that the best way to get his daughter’s attention is to say, “Once upon a time,” because she then expects a story. There are adult ways to say, “Once upon a time,” and I'd like to share one with you from a recent student of mine at Rice University.
She was about to sing Debussy's song, “La Romance d’Ariel.” Instead of going into information like, it was written in 1884, he was 22 years old, it's based on a poem that it relates to Shakespeare's play, The Tempest. Instead of that, she found this way to begin, “Perhaps it's because I love gossip so much that I'm always interested in the love lives of famous composers.” Slight pause. The audience is now eager to hear her story and the story talks about the very young Debussy forming a love triangle with an older woman, Marie-Blanche Vasnier, a famous coloratura soprano, and her even older husband, Henri, and especially how Debussy wrote 27 songs for her during that period of time. And only then did she get into any information about the song, the text, the poet, and Shakespeare.
Her final sentence was, “Hating the moment when Prospero gave him his freedom, Ariel sings this song.” So to summarize. Do your research. Find a fascinating entry point. Tell a concise story. Engagement before information. Practice aloud several times. And finally, memorize your first and last sentences. My least favorite last sentence is, “I hope you'll enjoy it,” because it expresses some doubt as to whether the audience will enjoy it.
And it has become a terrible cliché that I have heard dozens and dozens of times. Next time, I'd like to talk with you about the five aspects of body language that will help you connect with your audience and enhance their emotional response to your music making. Why don't you come up with your own list of five aspects of body language and we can compare them?
Thank you.