"A hungry yearning burning"

One of my West End clients arrived for an emergency two-hour session recently.

She had been invited to audition for not one but two film musical revivals. She needed two songs, ballad and uptempo, suitable for the 40s-60s era. So we needed two songs that we could use for both auditions.

We started with my standby composers for classic book musicals - Gershwin, Cole Porter and Irving Berlin. The Cole Porter songbook seemed to fit the best, and having tried out 8 bars of a few different songs, we settled on Night and Day.

It's a great tune, with a sweeping melody that descends an octave down to (in this key) low G. The casting brief said low voice, so that's what we went for. The song is actually quite easy to learn, and the patterns (albeit chromatic) repeat through the chorus. Even though the song is in reality an up-tempo song (the accompaniment tells you that), the feel is that of a ballad, since the melody line moves slowly and smoothly. It's a useful song because of that.

We decided for this particular show that we didn't need the verse. It's an unusual decision for me, as normally in this style of music, the verse sets the scene (fact), and the chorus contains the emotion (feeling), and I like to include both. Also with many of these "standards", the verse is not well known, so the chorus when it arrives comes as a welcome surprise. In this case, the role she has been invited to audition for has songs that are similar to the writing of this chorus, so it seemed better to omit the verse.

Since the style of singing in this particular show can be slightly exaggerated, we played with singing the song "straight" and a-la-Shirley Bassey, complete with back-phrasing, forward-phrasing and any other phrasing we could think of. Going to extremes often brings a performance to life, even if you wouldn't dream of actually performing it like that.

We then brought the song back to "normal" but kept the feel and fluidity of the exaggerated version. This seemed to fit the character's slightly heightened flavour. The client was happy with the song and the style, so we moved on to the second song.


Visit http://www.vocalprocess.co.uk for the latest downloads:
the Vocal Process eZINE (free electronic magazine)
86 things you never hear a singer say (free ebook)
Looking at a Voice (endoscopy video download)
Constriction and Release (opening the throat on video - the latest endoscopy video download)

Vocal Process is running a day course on Practical Phonetics in November. Click on the link to find out more.