Learning

As promised, here is the follow-up to my recent posts about memorising music specifically focusing on lyrics. I considered this some years ago and and again more recently, and recommended lots of specific practice strategies, but it feels worth revisiting to reflect on the reasons why those strategies can be useful.

So, the general points about approach I made in the previous two posts remain true: the key to effective memorising is in developing depth of understanding, not in mechanical repetition. But words are processed a bit differently from music in the brain, and quite a few people (me included) find them harder to memorise.

My previous post on this theme came to the conclusion that the secret to memorising music lies in deepening one’s understanding of it. In music we find difficult, we can’t manage it at all without working in depth, but in music that comes more readily, we need to find ways to get inside it, in order that it might then get inside us. This post (and the follow-up dedicated to lyrics) is about ways we might go about this.

At the heart of all of these ways is the process of analysis. Molly Gebrian makes the point that all music practice is, at bottom, a process of creative problem-solving. This is as true of internalising music as it is of figuring out how to execute it. Studying our music should be a process of asking questions, hypothesising answers, and then seeing if the music detail supports our hypotheses: ‘What’s going on here, then?’, ‘How does this work?’, ‘Why is this note used here rather than that one?’

I’ve been having a number of conversations recently about memorising music, with both piano friends and choral friends, and reflecting on them has helped bring a number of things into focus for me. This post and the next cover general themes that apply across both worlds, and I’m planning a follow-up that specifically considers lyrics, since language is processed by the brain somewhat (but not entirely) differently from music.

For some people, a lot of the memorising process happens during the process of simply learning how to execute the music, without any specific attention to memory per se. For people who find memorising hard, this can seem like unhelpful information: that’s all right for them, you might think, but it doesn’t help for those of us that struggle.

However, as someone for whom that is sometimes, but not always the case, I think there are things to be learned from what’s going on when memorising comes readily to inform how to go about things when it doesn’t.

Usually my first blog post of November is about LABBS Convention, but this year it has been queue-jumped by a question from a conductor I’ve been working with, namely the use of members of the music team to lead short spots in rehearsals. This post is partly for him, to help him work with his team, partly for his team to help them understand what this would entail and why, and partly for anyone else in the world who has rehearsals to run.

There are two things to clarify here: why it is valuable to have different people lead short spots in rehearsal, and what you might do in them.

In my title I’ve termed them ‘refresher’ spots; in other contexts I’ve called them Music Team spots, or ‘wildcard’ slots. All three titles capture elements of what they do: refreshing attention, making use of the team, and – by giving someone other than the MD the decision about what to do in them – bringing a little spritz of unpredictability to things.

I spent Saturday with my friends at Bristol A Cappella, revisiting their set from the European and BABS Conventions back in May in preparation for the World Mixed Chorus contest in Germany next Spring. By now they are deeply familiar with the music and their performance plans for it, and this presents the opportunity to do the kind of deep work that only becomes possible when you no longer have to focus on what you are doing and can direct your attention to the how.

Much of our work focused on listening techniques, finding ways to enhance everyone’s perception of what they were doing, since the first stage of refining your execution is increasing the acuity with which you hear the detail. Duetting inevitably played a part in this, with a lot of micro-adjustments making themselves through the process in addition to the explicit observations singers made as we walked through the process.

In my last post I shared some suggestions to help people develop the musicianship skills needed for singing on the off-beat. The second stage of the process is to consider the music that is asking you to deploy these skills and asking if the composer and/or arranger are facilitating your success or creating obstacles.

You see, off-beat passages are a classic example of the kind of thing a notation program can do really well, as it just produces a literal rendition untroubled by the sense-making that the human brain brings to the process of singing. And whilst sometimes (well, quite often) the problem is patchy musicianship skills in the performers, sometimes the problem is also over-optimism on the part of a writer who hasn’t spent enough of their life in rehearsal trying to help people with patchy skills achieve rhythmic security.

I left you last time with the following exercise, which reproduces the kind of thing you quite often see in a cappella arrangements, and turns out to offer a useful case study to explore this central musical question.

Every so often, it seems that everyone I talk to is grappling with the same challenges. Well, maybe not everyone, but enough to feel that we have something of a theme going on, and thus an opportunity to try to be helpful to multiple ensembles at once.

A conductor recently messaged me with the following clear summary of the problem:

a couple of our sections are having real trouble getting into singing off the beat. A good number of our songs have crotchet notes aligned on the half beat and they're often getting pulled into alignment with the beat instead. I wonder if you have any good ideas for how we can encourage off-beat singing?

In the character of robots...

Wednesday took me back to Coulsdon for another visit to Surrey Harmony. Two months on from my previous visit, they had had time to work with the ideas we explored in June, and we could see what was working, what needed further support, and what could usefully be added. And once again, we were working both to support the development of their director’s rehearsal and conducting skills and to build the skills of the singers.

Indeed, these two things often work hand in hand. Their MD Penny had a clear idea of the challenges she was facing: things that she knew she wanted to improve but was struggling to get the results she wanted. Hence, the coaching processes of diagnosis and intervention served both to help solve the problems and to model ways to go about solving them.