Arts

Sound Barrier

The first Broadway show I ever saw was “Hello, Dolly!,” which had recently been recast with Pearl Bailey and Cab Calloway in the lead roles.¹ It’s hard to recapture how thrilling it was to experience a fully staged musical for the first time. The sets! The lighting! The costumes! Singing and dancing! A live orchestra! I was totally transported.

Well, almost totally transported. There was something weird about Pearl Bailey’s voice. At first I thought that she was lip-syncing to a recording. She was, in fact, performing live, but she had apparently been fitted out with a primitive wireless microphone hidden in her costume, and her voice seemed to be coming from everywhere but her mouth. Her audio was piped through a set of loudspeakers flanking the proscenium, producing an effect similar to hearing the principal give a speech at a school assembly.

What I had witnessed was the early encroachment of amplification into stage performances. Nowadays, every performer in a Broadway show is miked, and there’s little effort made to hide the headsets and transmitters. Shows have sound designers, and audio technology has improved, so there’s no longer any “Hello, Dolly!”-style artificiality. In fact, I’m sure that most people don’t notice the amplification, or if they do, don’t mind it. Perhaps they even appreciate it, since it makes every performance sound as smooth and balanced as the cast recording they can buy in the lobby.

But something has been lost in the process — the raw immediacy of the live performance. In what sense is the performance “live” if what the audience hears is not the sound coming directly from an actor’s mouth, but instead an artificially mediated facsimile? The actor’s voice is being converted to electric signals, amplified, processed electronically in any number of ways (volume, tone, reverb), mixed with the output of the orchestra and the other actors’ voices, and pumped through speakers that are nowhere near where the actor is. (In fact, one of the sound designer’s jobs is to make the voice appear to be coming directly from the actor’s mouth, even though it isn’t.) Add to that the fact that every note is precisely timed — the orchestra is almost always playing along with a metronome-like recording called a click track — and what you have is a performance that might as well have been prerecorded.

In fact, in some cases it is prerecorded. It took me a while to realize it, but the musicals I’ve seen on cruise ships are performed almost entirely to digital tracks. The only voices that are live are those of the male and female leads. None of the other performers are miked, and the voices we’re hearing are not necessarily those of the people we’re seeing onstage. The fact that none of this was immediately apparent — that the experience of hearing canned performances is pretty much indistinguishable from hearing live ones — is less a compliment to the quality of the recordings than it is a knock on what we’re now willing to settle for when we go to the theater.

I must admit that the introduction of amplification has brought some advantages. For one thing, it has greatly expanded the range of styles that are considered suitable for a musical. Songs no longer have to be belted, Ethel Merman-style, or loaded with vibrato; they can be crooned, or whispered, or rapped. The type of rock-and-roll musical that Andrew Lloyd Weber pioneered with “Jesus Christ Superstar” wouldn’t have been possible without amplification both of voices and instruments. I’d hate to have to sacrifice “Hamilton” on the grounds that it’s technologically impure.

I’ll even grant that amplification has made the experience of the audience more equitable. Very few theaters have perfect acoustics; there are always going to be some seats from which actors’ voices can be heard better than from others. Modern audio technology allows everyone in the theater to hear pretty much the same thing. Not to mention that — as I can tell you from personal experience — having a mic makes the actor’s job much easier. I don’t blame Pearl Bailey for wanting to have that advantage.

Still, I can’t help but lament what’s been lost. There’s something qualitatively different about hearing sound waves that come directly from the vibrations of human vocal cords or a musical instrument. It’s an experience that we rarely have anymore outside of an opera house or a symphony hall.

For the past ten years, I’ve been working to preserve that experience by holding acoustic concerts in my living room. (I’ve had to suspend them since the COVID-19 outbreak, but hope I can bring them back when it’s over.) The concerts are obviously on a much smaller scale than Broadway musicals — the performers are folk musicians, jazz ensembles, ragtime pianists, classical duos and trios, a cappella groups, and the like — but they all have one thing in common: no amplification and no electric instruments. It’s an opportunity to hear music the way it’s meant to be heard.

My wife tells me that I’m the only one who cares about the no-amplification rule — that people come to these concerts because they like the musicians I book, not because they get to hear them unmiked. That’s probably true. But if nothing else, I’m exposing people to the now-revolutionary idea that music doesn’t have to be linked to audio engineering. Sometimes it’s just enough to put musicians and listeners in a room together, and let the sound waves propagate.

Posted April 27, 2021 by Mark S
Category: Arts

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Double Acting

My first training as an actor came in high school, from a teacher named William A. Lawrence. Though he was nominally an English teacher, his first love was the theater: He directed the school’s drama club, and he often staged one-act plays in his classes.

Bill (as he insisted I call him after I’d graduated) had great fondness for the traditions and lore of the theater; he was the kind of guy who would refer to Shakespeare’s “Scottish play” because it was considered bad luck to utter the name “Macbeth.” But he had no patience for people who put on airs. He had once served in the Merchant Marine, and he wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty. He drove a sturdy old pickup truck, which he often used to haul props, scenery, and even actors.

For Bill, theater was an honorable profession, and acting was an honest day’s work. An actor’s job was to memorize the lines, hit the marks onstage, learn as much as possible about the character he or she was playing, and above all, do justice to what the playwright had written. He often made fun of directors who went on and on about a play’s subtext and a character’s motivations, when all an actor wanted to know was, “Should I say the line louder or softer?” When in doubt, Bill would simply say, “Do it like this,” and he would read the line in such a way that the character came immediately alive.

In the late 1960s, Bill had founded The World of Mime, which — so far as I know — was the only mime troupe in the country consisting entirely of high school students. As a child, I had seen occasional mimes perform on television, and I’d also seen comics such as Red Skelton and Jackie Gleason do hilarious skits without saying a word. I grew up imitating them, and it became second nature to me to pull an invisible rope or do a pratfall. So when I got to high school, I naturally became part of the troupe.

We’d tour after school or on weekends, performing at schools, fairs, and community centers around New York. We’d sometimes travel to performances in full white makeup, riding in the bed of Bill’s pickup truck and giving quite a scare to drivers along the way. We never knew what the venue would look like until we got there, and we often had to improvise to adapt to unusual locations (such as a courtroom that had a fixed bar in the middle of the “stage”). After three years of this, I came to consider myself a relatively seasoned performer.

My other influence as an actor was a unique institution called The Fiedel School, on the north shore of Long Island. During the year, Fiedel was a country day school, but during the summer, it ran a creative arts program for kids of all ages — sort of an artistic day camp. I was fortunate enough to attend Fiedel for a few summers, first as a student and later as an apprentice in the drama department.

Fiedel was an anything-goes kind of place, combining a fanatical devotion to creativity with the touchy-feely ethos of the 1970s. Though students ostensibly signed up to study something specific, such as drama, music, or creative writing, the lines between these departments ranged from thin to nonexistent. Fiedel was a place where actors could dance, dancers could sing, and musicians could make jewelry in the silversmith’s shop. Getting formal instruction was desirable, but not essential — any of us had the opportunity to pick up a stray banjo or an upright bass and figure out how to make music with it. The Fiedel approach to acting was completely opposite to that of Bill Lawrence: It wasn’t about study and discipline, but rather about inner experience and improvisation.

I was never a great actor, but I was competent, and by the time I graduated from college, I even managed to find ways to get paid for it. I worked as an actor and mime (among many other things) throughout my 20s — the last few years as part of a touring children’s theater troupe. But when I married Debra and moved to the west coast, my acting career ended. I had no theater connections in the Bay Area, and was too busy trying to establish myself as a freelance writer and producer to pursue any.

Still, the lessons I learned from Bill Lawrence and the Fiedel School have supported me in everything I’ve done since. At Fiedel, I absorbed the attitude that anyone can learn to do anything, that no special training is needed — a mindset that I’ve brought to my teaching and to my own work life. And from Bill, I got the principle that the important thing in any endeavor is to do the work, get it right, and not be pretentious about it. (I imagine that he would have had the same qualms that I have about applying the word “art” to one’s own output.) When I began to lead mime workshops in the 1970s, I synthesized their two opposite approaches to acting, combining exercises to bring out submerged feelings with a vocabulary of technique in which to express those feelings.

Alas, the Fiedel School shut down in 1984, and its visionary founders, Ivan and Roslyn Fiedel, passed on in the late 1990s. William Lawrence — who eventually left teaching to become a professional actor — passed away last year, at the remarkable age of 95. I remain in their debt.

Posted November 12, 2020 by Mark S
Category: Arts

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Ars Gratia Occupatio

Oddly for someone whose work and hobbies always revolved around creative endeavors, I never thought much about art. I grew up drawing, painting, writing, and making music, but it wouldn’t have occurred to me to call any of those things “art”; they were basically ways to get approval and attention. In high school, college, and young adulthood, I was an actor, director, playwright, and mime, but I saw those as means of entertainment (for the audience) and emotional development (for me). In my twenty years as a freelancer, I did scriptwriting, graphic design, animation, and video, but that was just work I did to make a living. If you’d asked me what all these things had in common, I would have said that I was simply making use of skills that I was lucky enough to have.

That all changed in 2003, when I was hired by Chabot College to lead a new Digital Media program, teaching students how to use creative software such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, and Dreamweaver. I became a full-time faculty member in a division that was known at the time as Fine Arts, and my colleagues were painters, sculptors, illustrators, and photographers. The visual arts faculty didn’t know what to make of me; they thought of me as “the computer guy.” (Of course, when I got to know people in the Computer Science department, they thought of me as an art guy.) Having had no professional training in either computers or the arts, I just made things up as I went along.

Toward the end of my second year at Chabot, it was announced that there would be a faculty art show in the division’s recently opened art gallery. Assuming that it had nothing to do with me, I paid no attention — until I received official word that as a member of the Fine Arts faculty, I was expected to participate. This threw me into a panic. “I’m not an artist!” I said. I didn’t know what I could possibly do that would be considered art.

“So, what is art?” I asked my friend, the art history professor.

“Generally, art is anything that’s made by an artist,” she said. We both agreed that wasn’t very helpful in my case.

The division dean gave me more practical advice. “Just do whatever you normally do, and call it art,” he said. So, since most of my recent career experience had been in video production, I made a video, which ended up being displayed on a computer monitor in the art gallery. People liked it. (In case you’re curious, it’s been preserved on YouTube, at https://youtu.be/Zrpje8NpdqE.)

Making the video was a strange experience, because every video I’d previously made had been an education or training program for a paying client. This one was being made for no reason at all. Based on this experience, I formulated a functional definition for myself: Art is anything I make that has no practical purpose.

That definition has served me well over the years, as I’ve continued to make visual images and videos with no practical value. I still hesitate to call them art, though. Real art, I think, has an emotional impact — it makes you want to look at it, and then leaves you changed in some way afterward. I have no reason to believe, or even any way to know, whether the things I make have that effect or not. So for lack of a better term, I refer to them as “art projects.”

(I have to admit that I have an underlying wariness of people who call themselves artists. That seems a bit self-aggrandizing. I’m more comfortable when people describe the activities that they actually do: “I’m a painter” or “I’m a dancer” or “I’m a musician.” Then it can be left to other people to decide whether those paintings or dances or musical performances qualify as art.)

I’ve retired from my tenured faculty position at Chabot College. I still teach an occasional course there as an adjunct instructor, but I feel less and less comfortable doing so. I always thought of myself as teaching a set of skills that the students could apply in any way they wanted — they could use them to do work for employers or clients, for example, or they could make art. The person who took my place as head of the Digital Media program has a different view; she’s very insistent that “these are art classes.” If, as my art history professor friend said, art is something made by an artist, then I have much more to learn before I can teach. Or I can just emulate Miss Bliss, the preschool teacher in Richard Thompson’s comic strip “Cul de Sac.” As her four-year-old students begin to go wild with glitter and glue, she cautions them, “Remember, creativity plus neatness equals art.” That’s my favorite definition by far.

Posted October 24, 2020 by Mark S
Category: Arts

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Sound Barrier

Double Acting

Ars Gratia Occupatio

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