The Inner Score

Bizet wrote a complex musical score for Carmen and the librettists produced a lyric and dramatic structure. But for a singer, finding a line through this labyrinth depends, in my view, on having a secret inner score.

This invisible score locates each moment, sentiment or idea in the performer’s memory bank of experience and emotion. When I first started rehearsals, I wasn’t sure if this would apply to singers in the same way as it does to actors on film, where a camera can come in close enough to register thought.

But work with the singers has confirmed my view that thought and feeling are whole body experiences, and when the inner and outer words of a performer are united it ‘reads’, even from a great distance.

In the same way that the modernists in architecture declared ‘form follows function’, the performers’ impulse must come from within. I am experimenting with how far I can push this principle with the chorus.

At times, a large group of people on stage need to present a unified picture – essentially, a choreographic shape – which will frame and amplify (or exist in counterpoint to) the work of the soloist. But there are moments too, when a wave of individual inner work can wash across the stage, especially in moments of mass stillness.

Guiding and tracking this secret score, the subtle invisible work in such a visible and often over-stated medium, is an entrancing task.

Without this map, a performer can get lost, and end up feeling as if they are working in the dark.

The other morning on my way into rehearsal through the labyrinthine building in West Hampstead, I had a similar moment.

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