Hey! I still have a blog!
I would not be surprised if I no longer had any readers, though. Hey, don’t blame me, blame my sudden popularity.
I’m taking a break from memorization to…listen to Act 1 of I Puritani, to help me memorize it. If it weren’t kind of unsafe to listen to loud music while you’re biking (you’re unable to hear traffic noises etc., so I usually listen to podcasts or audiobooks on my bike) I would be listening to it as I travel.
How I memorize things – I apologize if this is really boring*, but I have nothing else to talk about – is, if I’m unable in the time frame to memorize organically (just by doing it), to record myself singing by memory. Then I listen back to the recording, looking through the score, see where I made mistakes, practice whatever mistakes I made if needed, then try again. It works very well, at least for me, but it’s very time-consuming. Earlier today I memorized the finale of Act 1. It’s about 8 minutes of music. It tooks 75 minutes to memorize, and probably it hasn’t quite stuck and I’ll need to do it again tomorrow. Act 2 has a lot less in it, at least – one big aria that’s pretty much already memorized, a duet, and a few other interjections/ensembles.
If the record/listen/repeat method doesn’t work, there is a more extreme method. I’ve only done this twice, once for the Eckhardt-Grammate competition, once for the Torture Memos. You record whatever it is that you can’t get (using the music), then listen to it in your sleep for a couple of nights.
I realize that there have been scientific studies showing that you can’t learn in your sleep, so probably what’s happening here is that you’re learning before you fall asleep and whenever you wake up in the night. It seems to work very well, though I suppose it could be a sort of musical placebo effect.
Anyway, usually I don’t like March Break, because most of my students go away on tropical holidays and I don’t make any money, but this year I don’t really mind.
*More proof that I have turned not just into my mother, but also into my dad. When I was a teen I would roll my eyes whenever my dad would talk about his golf games. “I don’t tell you how I do my high notes,” I would say. And look at me now.