“Just make up the notes?” We were undergraduates in an acting for singers class at the North Carolina School of the Arts when our professor, Martin Rader, asked us to improvise singing the dialogue in the scenes from plays he had assigned us. As I recall, much of what we sang sounded like Mozart recitative—which made sense, as we all sang lots of Mozart. Suddenly, we were much less stiff. We were in our element: as opera-singers-in-training, singing our lines came naturally to us. Too bad, I thought, that as a classical singer, I wouldn’t get the chance to do more of this.
Years later, as a voice teacher, I find myself increasingly using improvisation as a technique to free my students’ voices and their creativity. I recently discovered that I am not alone in this. Ann Baltz, founder and artistic director of the highly successful training program OperaWorks, uses improvisation not only as a tool for her students but also to create new works for performance, even incorporating audience participation. Baltz, a featured presenter at the Classical Singer Convention this May in Los Angeles, spoke with me on why improvisation is important for singers and what we can gain from it.
Her introduction to improvisation, while in grad school, came when she was asked to improvise an accompaniment during a masterclass. “It was painful for me,” Baltz remembers. “What I was playing sounded just awful to me, but the guest artist kept singing. A professor of mine slipped in next to me while this was going on and said, ‘Play something pointilistic.’ That freed me up because, in my mind, playing pointilistic meant no one could tell if I was playing wrong notes!”
Later while working as an apprentice coach at the Merola program, Baltz played for director Wesley Balk’s improvisation classes. “Working with him had a profound effect on my interest,” she says, “and led to . . . the method and curriculum which I developed to help other classical musicians move away from the Right-Wrong paradigm of music making.”
Classical music, Baltz points out, lags behind the other art forms in teaching improvisation. Though improvisation may not be appropriate for all styles of music, what improvising teaches can inform every aspect of a performer’s life. “If even 25 percent of our training and practice were devoted to improvisation or simply ‘messing around’ with composed music as a creative exercise,” Baltz says, “musicians would probably feel less stressed and more creative and enjoy the process of music making more.”
This sounds like a lot of fun, but does it really benefit a singer to spend that much time “playing” when being a classical singer requires so much work? To answer this question, let’s look first at the exercises Baltz uses and then at singers’ reactions to participating and experimenting with improv.
Baltz uses improvisation in a variety of ways. In OperaWorks, she has singers use her “attitude cards,” which might include feelings like “sarcastic,” “confident,” “terrified,” etc. A singer may be asked to sing the aria he or she has prepared, but with several of these attitudes. Not all of them might work for the piece, but the singer can learn from experimentation, observation, and feeling the difference each attitude makes. Perhaps a new insight will occur about the piece or the character. Is Musetta really as confident as she appears, or is she insecure about her own attractiveness?
Other exercises developed by Baltz include a cappella trios. Three singers sit on chairs in a circle with their eyes closed and improvise together using only vowel sounds, following the others or doing something contrasting. (You can watch footage of these improvisations at operaworks.org/media.) Hearing singers with beautiful voices create something new and spontaneous—collaborating, sometimes imitating, sometimes harmonizing, sometimes lingering in haunting dissonances—is inspiring.
Baltz also has the singers improvise entire arias while she accompanies at the piano, instructing the singers to sing “gibberish” instead of words. When watching this online, I was struck by how gripping these performances were. But why shouldn’t an experienced singer, who knows how to use his or her voice to display the deepest human emotions, be able to do this without singing notes on a page, freely improvising in conjunction with an accompanist who can lead as well as follow? One of the performances nearly made me cry as the singer expressed a deep sorrow, no doubt something she learned from singing an aria like “Senza Mamma”—but in this case, the music, and the emotion behind it, came purely from within.
Kristina Driskill, a mezzo-soprano and OperaWorks graduate, took part in these improvisations and has since performed in many improv concerts, including one with the award-winning Lux Aeterna Dance Company in Los Angeles. Baltz improvised and recorded the piano accompaniment ahead of time, so the dancers would have something concrete to work with, but the singing was created on the spot during the show. Two singers stand upstage of the dancers, floating lyrical phrases—no doubt influenced by the movement of the dancers—sometimes dreamy, later almost frantic as the movements of the dancers become more angular. The result is a vibrant collaboration between voices and bodies. (The improv performance of “Beached” with Lux Aeterna is available on YouTube.)
“When Ann explained to the singers that she was going to start playing something and we would each get up and just start singing something, I was terrified,” recalls Driskill, who the Los Angeles Times called “resplendent.” “What if it didn’t sound good? What if I looked stupid? It was through OperaWorks and my subsequent work that I began to realize how much this mindset was stifling me—not just as a singer but in life in general.”
Through improvisation, singers can learn to turn off the critical voice and just be in the moment. “It may sound tonal or atonal, have words or just made-up sounds, be serious, be funny,” Driskill continues. “Once the fact that there is no threat of failing was acknowledged, the process became almost childlike, where whatever you feel as a person at that moment can just come out without consequence. And because of that, some really amazing things happen. Spontaneous works of art are created, and the voice does things that it didn’t know it could do or easily does something about which it normally worries.”
Soprano Susan Holsonbake, another OperaWorks participant, recalls her first experience with improv. “When my time finally came to participate in class, I dove in. It was so exhilarating! (I’m pretty sure I exclaimed that it was ‘better than sex!’) What a joy to be so ‘in the moment,’ so hyper-focused! This is the way I wanted to feel every time I performed. In fact, this is the way I wanted to feel every moment of my life. This one exercise has since become a blueprint for me of the way I want to live my life. It was that profound.” Holsonbake has gone on to create roles in contemporary operas including the world premiere of Mark Adamo’s Lysistrata with Houston Grand Opera.
Tenor Robert McPherson, hailed by the New York Times for his “robust voice, agility, and confidence” and another OperaWorks graduate, points out that improvisation can have some very practical aspects. “Rehearsals are getting shorter. It’s a financial reality, so there is less time to explore the staging. Also, a lot of the time it’s a remount. You end up walking someone else’s blocking. You are told to go here on this phrase, then walk over here and pick this up and end the aria down stage center. There is so much ‘in between’ left up to us. At times you can feel a little abandoned. But what if we look at rehearsals as a big improv exercise? One where we are given the specific parameters and then improvise the rest! No one wants to see an aria with three moves. But within those three moves there is a world of infinite possibility.”
“Life is an improvisation,” Baltz adds. No matter how well rehearsed we are, singers have to deal with the unpredictable all the time. What if a singer forgets a line, or something goes wrong with a set, or suddenly the tenor is sick and you’re on stage with a stranger?
“One of our alumni was a soloist in a Baroque oratorio performance when the orchestra suddenly started playing music that had been cut in the rehearsals,” Baltz shares to illustrate how improvisation can help a singer during a performance. “In performance, she improvised about 16 bars of music and words until she recognized what the orchestra was playing again. She called me afterward to say that without the improv classes, she would have panicked. She was also proud that after the concert no one seemed to know that she had improvised at all!”
Improvisation, Baltz says, makes students more aware of choices composers have made in the pieces they are singing, such as shifts in keys and tempi, the overall architecture of the piece, or how the accompaniment can be used as subtext. Once you have created your own music, you have something in common with the composers you regularly sing. “For many performers, the impulse to sing was what led them to pursue singing as a career choice,” Baltz says. “Through improvisation, I have seen countless singers rediscover their joy of singing, that initial impulse to express through music without the limitations that notes on a page can imply.”
Not only does improvisation offer benefits that inform the non-improvised works that most classical singers perform on a regular basis, it is also a valid artistic expression for its own sake and can be enjoyed by audiences as well. I recently wore out my laugh muscles at a performance by the comedy troupe Second City in which audience members shouted out the names of objects or places that would then become part of an improvised sketch. Baltz and her collaborators, including Driskill and Holsonbake, have also involved audiences in improvised material. Driskill remembers improvising in front of an audience using nouns that audience members had written down and dropped into a fish bowl. She recounts that the audience listened intently to see how the story would unfold and when and how the chosen words would be used. Holsonbake and Baltz have created songs in recital on subjects suggested by the audience and also collaborated on a musically improvised one-act opera from a memorized script.
Now—more years than I care to count since that college acting class and a year since I led my first improv workshop—like Baltz and these singers, I continue to see how improvisation can lead to creativity, thinking outside the box, and reaching new heights as both performers and as human beings going through that improvisation we call “life.”
