On Memorising Music, Part 3: Lyrics

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 speciality is singing malapropisms, getting the rhythm and the vowels right but substituting in incorrect words. As indeed was my mother’s. I never knew whether it was deliberate or accidental when I caught her singing, while prepping veg one Christmas Eve, ‘…and a parsnip in a pear tree.’)

Anyway, I have found it useful to think about how one might analyse lyrics in different ways to reflect their status as both linguistic and musical phenomena.

Lyrics as Language

The obvious, and indeed, traditional, way to approach a song’s text is to consider its meaning. Analyse the lyrics as if they were a script for a play:

Who is the protagonist? What is the back-story, i.e. what brought them to this moment in their lives? What do they want to achieve?

Who are they addressing? How does that person/those people react to each stage of the story? Are there key turning points in the drama? Where’s the jeopardy?

And for all of these: how do we know? – i.e., what is the evidence in the text and/or its musical setting that give you clues to answer these questions?

Alongside this analysis, it is useful to develop visual imagery to generate an internal filmic representation of the drama as it unfolds. This works in a similar way to the song map I recommended as the starting point for analysis, providing a structure into which all other detail fits and stops you from getting muddled up as to where you are on the journey.

Lyrics as Sound Objects

You can also consider lyrics in musical terms, simply as sound objects, independent of their meaning. This is easier when singing in a language you don’t actually understand, but you can dissociate from meaning even when you do know what the lyrics are saying.

Explore the patterns of repetition in word sounds such as alliteration and assonance. Are there repeated consonants or vowel shapes that shape the sound-colour of the line? Sibilants being a different feel from fricatives, voiced consonants bring more weight than unvoiced, singable consonants and approximants produce a more connectable line. Characteristic vowel colours likewise bring expressive resonance: oohs are more introverted than ahs, ees are brighter, ohs softer. Do different sections of the song explore different sets or combinations of word sounds, and how does this affect the emotional impact of the wider musical narrative?

How do the word sounds interact with other musical dimensions? How do the consonants serve to characterise the rhythm? Which vowels are used at melodic peaks, with particularly colourful chords, with particular voicings?

This is kind of like the way you might analyse a poem, but instead of considering how the word sounds interact with the meaning (which of course you can also do with song lyrics if you want to), you are considering them as way to create more interesting musical sounds. Consonants are like integrated vocal percussion, vowels serve as inflections of tone and timbre. I find this a useful approach for two reasons.

First, because it leverages the fact that I am better at storing musical information than verbal. And secondly, because it is interesting. This is in turn useful not just because it motivates deeper attention, but also because I come away feeling like I’ve grown as a musician.

Lyrics as Motor Actions

When we sing, we shape the column of vibrating air that comes from our lungs through our vocal folds within our vocal tract, using pharynx, lips and tongue to craft the word sounds defined in the text. We can do this largely without thinking about it because we are very well practised in the art of speech through living as human beings.

But if we do stop to think about it, we have an opportunity to refine our understanding and thus control over our vocal apparatus in song. We can build on our analysis of word sounds as they shape the musical experience by considering how they live in our throats and mouths.

How am I shaping the vowel that appears most frequently in this line? Can I shape it differently to create more resonance, or to enhance its contribution to the emotional impact of the line? How am I transitioning from one vowel to the next? Can I connect them to create a sense of developing line?

How am I creating the consonants the interrupt the stream of vowels? Can I use less force to make them crisper and less likely to disrupt the vowels either side?

What am I doing with my facial muscles (cheeks, jaw)? How does that affect the tone of the word sounds as I form them?

Thinking about the detail of word sounds as part of vocal technique again builds in the articulation of text into your lived experience of singing, independently of the meaning. And thinking in depth about the how of their production inherently requires you to think deeply about the what it is you are producing, giving you much more opportunity to internalise it.

All this might sound like a lot of work. And, if you did all of it in depth for every song you learned, it would be. More often, as discussed in the previous post, once you’ve got your overall map, you’ll find that some bits slot into place more quickly than others, and that not all moments in a song will need the same kind or amount of deep work to embed them. The bits that need more TLC will let you know.

But endlessly repeating something to try and force it into memory is also very time-consuming, and even when it succeeds delivers little except a memorisation that is often quite fragile and temporary. Approaching via analysis also takes time, but delivers a lot more than simple memory: it delivers growth as a musician. The goal should be that we come away from our practice sessions feeling more invested in the music than we started, with greater insight into its modes of expression and greater admiration for the songwriter’s skill.

When this happens, memory has got something to work with, as we are integrating it into our musical lives in a much more intimate way, and using methods that don’t risk us mentally tuning out. Worst case scenario: we have an interesting time, and become better at our craft.