Weekly Voice Insights #111 — How Do I Become Comfortable with the Pause?

After my presentation in Madison last week someone asked, “How do I become comfortable with the pause?”

I’ve been preparing the role of Sharpless in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. Much of his music is woven into the orchestra. He doesn’t have many large solo moments where everything stops and the voice takes over. His words have to enter the music and move with it.

From the house Pinkerton has rented high above Nagasaki, Sharpless sees the city, the sea, and the port. The rests separate each observation; the following measure suggests his excitement at the view.

When I first look at the score, that can seem daunting. The notation has to show pitch and meter, with markings above each syllable. Dashes connect words; punctuation is there, though the shape of the language can be difficult to see among all the musical information. A score is a written version of the data. The performers use it to prepare, but the listener experiences the music by hearing it and seeing the action on stage.

I’ve heard a score compared to an Excel document. There’s a useful similarity in how information is arranged: rhythm moves across the page, while pitch is shown vertically. The layout helps a performer see a great deal at once. But a performance isn’t meant to be read like a spreadsheet. The information has to become sound, and the listener has to be able to follow it as it passes.

So I work on a section at a time. I may take the text away from the music and read the words on their own. Puccini often follows the natural rhythm of the language, and I want to hear that shape before fitting the words back into the score. Then I return to the music and work out how the text belongs within the orchestra.

The rests are already written in. My task is to make them feel like part of the natural movement of the speech, even though their timing has been composed. The orchestra may also carry a musical idea while Sharpless is silent. In opera, recurring themes can help a listener recognize what is present in a character’s thoughts between spoken or sung lines.

I see a connection to presentations. We often go into a meeting with a long list of things to cover and a short amount of time. Last week’s question was, “What can we eliminate?” The natural temptation is to fit every point into the time we have. But if the information comes too quickly, the listener can’t take it all in or tell what is most important first. It can pass by like music played too fast to follow.

Preparing a presentation doesn’t require writing out a score as complicated as Puccini’s. It does require decisions. What information needs to come first? What can be left out? Where might the listener need a moment before the next idea arrives? Then we have to practice delivering it so the information can be absorbed.

The pause is part of that preparation. We can practice saying one thought, letting it finish, and waiting before we begin the next one. We can listen to how the sentence sounds, whether we’ve left space for its meaning, and whether the next idea follows clearly. The practice can happen outside the consequential moment—in rehearsal, while preparing a presentation, or by reading a few lines aloud and noticing where the thought naturally settles.

This kind of preparation is important when the situation changes, too. A new software program, a different workspace, someone else leading a presentation, or a stakeholder introducing information that changes the direction of a project: each one asks us to work with something unfamiliar. We may need to stop, listen, reconsider what is relevant, and decide what to do next. Practice gives us a way to rehearse that process before we need it in the room.

Margaret Harshaw taught that singing is largely mental: we will the voice to do what we choose for it to do. I think about that as I prepare Sharpless. The intention has to be clear enough for the voice to follow. In a presentation, the same preparation can help us decide what to say and when to leave room for it to land.

This connection also applies to updates delivered to a group. A 25- or 30-minute update can’t simply be everything we decided to say read aloud. It needs to be clear as it unfolds. If it’s all put into an email with too many paragraphs, people may stop reading. And when the sound of the voice, its tone, and its intention help connect the message to the people receiving it, an email may not be the best way to deliver that update.

In both settings, preparation includes choosing what to say, where to leave space, and practicing how to deliver it so the listener can take it in.

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