Learning

Recent conversations about learning music have identified memorising lyrics as a specific challenge. I feel this one too – the notes and rhythms stick in my head far quicker than the words do, and I have a particular talent for weird random errors in the lyrics while singing (spoonerisms, paraphrasing, malapropisms).

So it seemed like a good idea to collate some of the specific activities and tricks people use to help learning lyrics. If nothing else, having more different things to try the process more varied and thus less boring than if you just plug away at the same thing for the same amount of time. But my hunch is that varying your approach also makes the learning more effective as it means your brain has accessed the material in multiple different ways. Thus, when you have a momentary memory blank from your primary mode of learning, there are other patterns of experience available to fill in the gap.

I’ve been having a lot of conversations recently about how people go about learning music: within Rainbow Voices, with other conductors I’ve been mentoring, and then just chatting with friends at the recent LABBS Convention. One of the latter conversations brought a key theme into focus in a way that helpfully organises various other interesting ideas people had shared.

My friend Mick Dargan was commenting on a previous blog post of mine where I made the point that people aren’t just empty vessels that you can pour the learning tracks into and then they know the music. He said that he could have the tracks on in the background for hours and still not know his part: he can’t learn by just passively listening, that is, he has to do.

I spent Saturday in Milton Keynes where I had been asked to deliver a workshop on Vocal Health and Developing Resonance with Junction 14 Ladies A Cappella. I have worked with the group every so often over quite a few years, but always previously in the more standard coaching format. It made an interesting change to approach the day through a single theme. It was overall probably physically less tiring than a coaching day – there were many more opportunities to sit down – but also more cognitively tiring as we were dealing with information as well as skills.

The day was structured around exploring the fundamental elements of vocal craft, introduced in the order in which one needs to get them established in order to set up the instrument: body, breath, phonation and range in the morning, moving onto the resonant cavities in the afternoon. Each involved some sharing of concepts, some exploring in exercises, and some application to repertoire.

Another one here that emerges from a series of conversations with people in different parts of my musical life. ‘Performance-readiness’ sounds like it should be a relatively easy thing to define, but my observation is that there are wildly different views on what people take it mean in practice.

So at one extreme there is the position that a piece needs to be highly polished before it is fit to be shared with others. And, while in many ways I like the commitment to high standards this view implies, in practice it often serves as a procrastination tactic. ‘I’m not ready yet, I need to practice more,’ is a way of avoiding the risks inherent in a performing situation by hiding behind an activity that you’re never going to be judged harshly for wanting to undertake. Doing more practice is always a Good Thing, and so can usefully be deployed to deflect criticism for holding back from performance.

I’ve had a number of conversations recently with people about different approaches to learning music. You won’t be surprised to hear that it’s a question that has multiple right answers, though the different approaches confer different advantages and so may prove more or less useful in different circumstances, and I’ve been finding it useful to reflect on these differences, both for my own benefit, and for the various other musicians I find myself supporting.

Start at the beginning

This is a classic approach for a reason. Learning the music in the same order that an audience will listen to it has an intuitive logic because your learning experience follows the same narrative journey that you will eventually be sharing with others. It is easier to make sense of the music when you encounter each musical event in its proper temporal sequence, and it is easier to internalise (and memorise if that’s your genre expectation) if you have this sequential structure in place from the get-go.

My title today comes from one of the more surprising bits of feedback I have had after a coaching session. To be fair, it wasn’t actually me that was described as ‘sensible’ (I was as daft as ever), it was the ideas we had worked on. The point was that the singer didn’t feel she had a long shopping list of things to remember, because the ideas fitted in with her existing musical concept of the songs, but her use of the word ‘sensible’ to articulate this point still made me laugh out loud (well, squawk).

My day with Silver Lining chorus had the brief to help them discover more musical opportunities with the package they will be taking to LABBS Convention in the autumn, with its first complete outing at a local festival this month. They already had a clear concept of what they wanted to do with the two songs, so it was a matter of finding ways to help them realise that vision more vividly.

I’ve been thinking quite a lot recently about the balance between being uncompromising with one’s standards, and about when to let things slide. I’ve been having a number of conversations with people about this, and have also (possibly as a consequence) been particularly aware of it as a question in my own praxis.

Clearly, holding people (including oneself) to a level that you know they can achieve is key to maintaining and developing performance standards. Jim Clancy puts transforming good things that you do sometimes into things you do all the time at the heart of excellence; John Bertalot writes about choral rehearsing as being like pushing a man up a greasy pole.

I’m coming back today to a topic that Michael Callahan raised in response to my post about Practical Aesthetics earlier in the year, and which I noted as a big one that deserved separate reflection. The question is this: to what extent does an audience need to be informed to enjoy a performance?

Michael’s comment was framed, to match the post he was responding to, in terms of knowledge of musical aesthetics, but I think the question extends further to concern other aspects of musical knowledge: style, genre, technique. Do you have to understand what the musicians are doing in order to enjoy it?