How to Memorize Music Quickly...While Dancing
Every once in a while I play in the pit orchestra of a traveling Broadway musical. These shows park at San Diego’s Civic Theatre for a week or two, often hiring local musicians to supplement the players that travel with the show full time.
I love playing these productions — the music is worlds apart from the classical fare I normally perform, and the actors are ridiculously talented. In the pit orchestra for these productions there’s typically only one player to a part, and I feel like I’m playing chamber music, the environment I’m most at home in.
Last week I played the show “Ain’t Too Proud,” a musical about the life and times of the legendary R&B group, The Temptations. The rehearsal and performance schedule for these traveling shows is intense: we rehearse for about six hours on a Tuesday, perform the first show (which is about 2.5 hours long) that same night, then do seven more by week’s end.
Adding to the normal pressure of these shows was that “Ain’t Too Proud” had an “on-stage” component for the band. During the Finale there would be a big reveal of the band, then we would join the cast in performing a short dance routine, while playing from memory!!!
Since no one in the audience can see us, those of us in the pit usually enjoy a comfortable anonymity…an anonymity that is perhaps a bit too comfortable. While I’m used to playing on a concert stage, the default anonymity of a musical meant that going on stage felt much more stressful than normal! Combine that heightened anxiety with the fact that I have NEVER danced on stage before, let alone with my instrument, and you can bet I was practicing my steps well in advance of the first rehearsal!
I was feeling pretty good about my preparation when I received a text early Monday. Little did I know that short text was about to shatter my confidence.
It was from Healy, a longtime friend and the local concertmaster on the show. The text read, “Do we really have to memorize the bows and exit music?”
I startled. Wait, the Bows and Exit Music? I knew we had to memorize the Finale, but those two songs, too? That couldn’t be right.
I quickly searched my phone for the email with the show info. There it was. Tucked away, right after the line about performing the choreography, was one more innocuous looking sentence: “Musicians must memorize Bows and Exit music.” I had been so distracted by the part about choreography that I had completely missed it!
That meant there were TWO MORE pieces to memorize.
And the first performance was in 36 hours.
36 Hours to Showtime
I’m a fan of the research papers Noa Kageyama shares on The Bulletproof Musician blog. Researchers test a specific kind of practice technique, like this experiment on mental practice vs. physical practice and their benefits to memorization.
In this particular experiment, the test subjects practice memorizing a new piece of music in the method the researchers suggest, then record their newly memorized piece while the researchers notate how well they did. Everything is pristine, ordered and controlled — just as it should be in science.
Reality is seldom so kind.
For good reason, there’s no experiment (that I know of!) in which the subject is required to memorize a piece of music in a day, then perform it on stage in front of 3000 people.
After a brief freakout (and a few minutes of internally berating myself for not reading the contract more carefully) I realized this was a unique opportunity to apply all the various memorization skills I’ve learned over the years, and test them under pressure.
It was a chance to run my own real-world experiment on memorizing music quickly, but with significantly higher stakes!
A Plan of Attack
Technically I had 36 hours to memorize the two pieces, but in reality it was much less. Tuesday would be spent rehearsing the the whole two-and-a-half hour show, and I knew I would be tired enough from the rehearsal day that any additional practice would be of little benefit.
As I thought about it, I realized I would need to nail the memory on the charts TODAY. I had about six hours of other obligations (plus, you know, sleep!), which left a total of…not very much time. That meant I needed to be very strategic with what time I had.
I had a few things working for me:
The pieces were short: about four minutes of music in total.
Each piece had fragments of familiar tunes, like “My Girl,” that I already knew by ear.
Both charts had a number of repeated gestures. If I could learn one gesture at a time, memorize where it fit into the structure and how many times it repeated, I could memorize large chunks of the pieces quickly.
With the exception of two very fast scales, most of the music was technically straightforward (read: easy).
There were a fair number of rests, which cut down on the amount of notes I had to learn.
A fellow musician shared a bootleg Youtube video of the final Broadway performance of the show, which included the two numbers I needed memorize, so I had something to play/dance along to. Thanks, rule-breaking audience member!
I settled on the centerpieces of my strategy: interleaving and active recall. The interleaving worked on two levels: on the macro level I would do many short, concentrated bursts of practice throughout the day, rather than long slogs of an hour or two; on the micro level, I would switch between the two pieces during each short session (or work on different chunks of the same piece) after playing each one for just a few minutes.
Doing this on both scales ensured my concentration would remain high throughout each practice session and the day. Fear is also quite helpful for concentration!
Active recall was the other main part of the strategy. Rather than learning a piece till it feels solid, then memorizing it, for me active recall has come to mean memorizing is the learning. In other words, when learning a piece, I attempt to play small passages from memory after I’ve only played them one or two times.
Despite making many mistakes in the beginning, over and over I’ve experienced that memorizing from the get go, while harder and more effortful in the short-term, is a shortcut in the long, drastically cutting down on the overall amount of necessary practice.
While interleaving and active recall were the two parts of my big picture strategy, I used a number of other tactics throughout the day to memorize the pieces.
What follows is my practice log for the interval between receiving Healy’s fateful text and the first performance. The style is a bit stream-of-consciousness, since I was (rightly!) spending most of my time actually trying to memorize the music!
Monday
9am-9:50am
First pass at Bows. Listen to it numerous times. Figure out the structure/architecture to divide it into meaningful chunks. Identify the key changes. Identify notable audio cues for where I have to come in (who’s playing what, etc.). Identify patterns and repeated passages. Drill those a patterns a bit, then attempt to play them from memory — not great!
Learn the rest of Bows chunk by chunk in this manner for about 40 minutes.
Last 10 minutes: repeat the same big-picture process with Exit Music, which I saved for the end since it’s easier.
12pm-12:30pm
Taught for two hours and now back at it. Do a cold run to see how much I can play along with the track. Remember surprisingly little!
Work on tricky scalar passages (sextuplets at 130 to the quarter!) to get them fluid. The scales are modal. I actually practice modal scales (I am a scale nerd), but these are so fast that my regular fingerings flop.
There’s one tricky rhythm in Bows that I always screw up. Come up with some words/lyrics to remember the rhythm, which helps, but still feels unstable.
Spend some more time analyzing the structure.
1pm-1:15pm
Have to pick up my son from preschool. While waiting in parking lot, I listen/watch the video and sing along (windows up so no one else suffers!).
2:30pm-3pm
Home for a few hours. Listen to the video again before taking a nap. Naps supposed to be great for memory consolidation. Also, I like naps.
After nap, go over music with the video and score. Attempt to visualize the sheet music in my head — can I see it in my mind as it looks on the page? Vision very fuzzy.
4:20pm - 5pm
Cold run. Lots of mistakes, especially in Bows. Consider the word “Bows” as a homophone and relation to bow-ed instruments. Internal punning = loss of concentration!
Focus on the middle section. Play one troublesome measure until solid, then add one measure before and after it. Helpful!
For stubborn memory spots, play slowly while counting aloud. Also play slowly while singing or saying pitch names. Do same thing while singing fingerings aloud. All three methods help clarify spots in my head.
Still struggling with the tricky rhythm in Bows. In “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Memory,” Joshua Foer points out that our memory is poor at recalling boring, everyday things, but good at remembering strange or unusual things. A yellow school bus won’t stick in our mind very long, but a tie-dyed school bus full of creepy clowns having a barbeque will!
With that principle in mind, come up with new lyrics for tricky rhythm. New lyrics combine Suzuki rhythm words with profanity which I can’t repeat here — works like a charm! (My sincere apologies, Suzuki.)
Drill the scales more. Play through both charts with video a few times at 75% tempo and at full tempo. Getting better!
7pm-7:30pm
Review both tracks. Much better recall than at last session, able to get through with minimal mistakes.
Add dance steps to Exit Music. No mention in contract of dancing during Exit Music, but the players do it in the video so I’m taking no chances!
Make a lot more mistakes when I add movement. Practice more until I can do steps and play together more easily (not well, mind you, just more easily!).
Turns out if you can dance while playing something you’ve got it pretty well on autopilot. Might use that as an indicator in the future for if something is truly autonomic — perhaps Lindsey Sterling is onto something?
Tuesday
No time to practice before the rehearsal. Halfway through the first rehearsal told we’re not mic’d while playing on stage, we’re miming along to a pre-recorded track!
Feel slightly duped, though I probably would have prepared the same way, since I want to be an accurate mime (no Milli-Vanilli moments for this guy!).
Our entire band gets a short rehearsal of the dance steps with the dance captain, but without our instruments and not on stage. At end of the rehearsal day we’re shown how to get to the stage from the pit, then instructed where we’re supposed to stand on stage.
We don’t get to practice the steps on stage. Guess our dress rehearsal is the first performance! 😬
Showtime
Been a long day, but still have to play a whole show!
Finale is a blur — the entire cast dances on stage in front of the band, with 3000 people clapping along. Whole thing is loud, high energy and fun! Swept up in that wave there’s little space for anxiety.
Steps in Finale go ok. I make it through Bows and Exit Music with about 90% accuracy. Relieved that day one is over!
Post-mortem Terpischorem
All told I spent close to 3 hours actively memorizing these two pieces. It’s impossible to tell how much time I spent inactively memorizing them, by which I mean going over them in my head in the intervals between practice sessions. That omission is important, as I’m convinced informal mental rehearsal has a great impact on memory.
Aside from interleaving and active recall, here’s a summary of the strategies I used throughout the memorization day:
Listening/Watching: Listen “until it haunts your dreams!” is what I tell my students.
Structure: Very important! Knowing the structure gave me a map in which I could place all the different chunks that I had to learn. Musical structure is our version of the memory palace.
Identify Repeated Figures: This saves so much time, especially if you have a good handle on how repeated gestures fit into the structure!
Key Areas: Bows modulated several times — it was important to keep track of where those modulations happened.
Rests: I didn’t use it this time round, but while writing this post I had the idea imagining a seven-foot version of the number of measures playing the instrument in the rests. So for the first set of rests in Bows I would imagine a huge number “4” playing a saxophone (feels like something out of Sesame Street!)
Create Meaningful Associations
Give Names or Images to Figures: I learned this trick from our rehearsal with the dance captain. He called one of the moves we had to do “the knocks” to help us remember the particular knocking motion we did with our arms. Likewise, giving a personalized name or image to a musical gestures can help us recall them more easily.
Lyrics: This is one of my favorite strategies! In lessons I’ll also often improvise silly lyrics to passages to help students remember a tricky rhythm. Extra points if the lyrics match the musical character!
Passagework
Play from memory from the get go — learn passages by memorizing them.
Dalcrozian Strategies: sing/play, count/play, say fingerings and play etc.
Visualize what passages looks like on the page.
Learn one measure well, then work a measure forward and backward, gradually creating longer stable chains.
Aside from the important lesson to read contracts more carefully, if there’s one thing I learned from this experience, it’s that I can memorize music much faster than I thought possible!
For the future I’m keen to experiment with purposefully giving myself less time to memorize things, but without having to worry about performing them the next day for 3000 people!
