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The relationship between voice and characterisation is something I usually find myself thinking about while coaching, but it has also recently come up while discussing songs choices with arranging clients. It’s something I’ve explored in this blog while reflecting on coaching experiences, but the recent conversations have had me wanting to look at it in its own right.

Singing technique often presents itself in the abstract, as the optimised use of an essentialised body conceived as existing outside of culture. This is why one hears so much discourse couched in primarily anatomical terms, and why any one school of thought has a tendency to present itself as the prophet of true natural singing, arriving to save us all from the misguided ignorance of our former singing teachers.

Performance, meanwhile, could be seen as the cultural yin to the voice’s natural yang. Whilst one does come across a degree of discourse of the natural in this world too, of course, in the valuing of authentic expression, true to the performer’s self, the craft is largely framed by the specific cultural contingencies of character: time, place, backstory.

The thing, is, though, that it is the same body that both operates (exists as) the vocal instrument and that portrays character. How one inhabits oneself in telling the story inevitably shapes the sound with which one tells it. This provides us with both opportunities and pitfalls.

The opportunities are for creative interest and vividness. A deeply-conceived sense of character gives each song its own individual look and sound, arising from the way that the song’s protagonist lives in their body. Edward Cone’s concept of the musical persona, the virtual character that emerges from the musical materials to give each piece its own sense of identity comes to life here: the character as instantiated in the singing voice(s) is both virtual in that it is an emergent quality, and concrete, in that it is embodied in the physical mechanisms of sound production.

The pitfalls lie in that not every set of choices one might make to live in one’s body as a character are necessarily conducive to good singing. The griefs and stresses of a dramatic backstory can lead us into precisely the sort of physical tensions that our singing teachers try to get us to shed. Likewise, comedic characterisations can inveigle us into forms of over-articulation that disrupt the vocal mechanism.

This means that as we develop our characters as performers, we need to find a way of inhabiting ourselves that is both true to the fictional world we are creating, and true to our own physicality as we sing. Just as the choices of composer and arranger channel the infinite number of ways you can deliver a lyric into a smaller universe of interpretive choices, the ways we want to inhabit ourselves as healthy singers marks out the terrain from which we should be making our decisions about physical characterisation.

And we can help ourselves do this by thinking about it at the stage where we are picking songs. The conversations I was having recently centred a lot on the ensemble’s current skillset and goals to develop it, and we found ourselves realising that some of the potential songs in the frame would support those goals, and others were liable to introduce obstacles. There were some with obvious opportunities for physical characterisation, and even choreography, that would facilitate the kinds of use of the self they wanted to develop, and there were others for which the clearest route to characterisation was likely to interfere with both legato and tone.

I recall hearing a well-established actor talking about building a character starting with the shoes. (I forget which – my brain is trying to tell me it could have been Judi Dench, but my googling is doing nothing to confirm that.) Posture is built from the feet up, and one’s connection to the ground defines how the rest of the body establishes its modes of balance and counterbalance to keep us upright and moving in the world. This also seems like good advice as a means to find a characterisation that will be voice-friendly, since we will immediately be able to tell whether the character we are creating has access to the grouding and poise to support their voice.