Learning a new piece can feel, particularly to the younger singer, like drowning in information. The patterns and musical relationships that are obvious to trained musicians can be lost as young singers try to keep their heads above water.
One strategy to dodge this challenge is to break down the new piece into component parts and draw a visual map. For example, in learning an arrangement of Billy Joel’s “The Longest Time,” you can draw singers attention to the fact that there are only three distinct sections:
[A] Intro/interlude (the “Whoa” section)
[B] Verse (“If you said goodbye…”)
[C] Bridge (“I had second thoughts…”)
Each is only 8 or 16 measures of material, so a 12-page piece suddenly becomes a few phrases to learn.
Map out the piece. In this case, we have
[A] [B] [B] [A] [B] [C] [B] [C] [B] [A] [A]
Focus on learning each section in isolation, and then work the three transitions – just a few bars on each side of [A]-[B], [B]-[C] and [C]-[B]. (Note [C] never transitions to [A] or [A] to [C]!)
Once you have rehearse each section and each transition, you can accurately assert that the singers have learned the piece (even though they haven’t yet sung the piece from cover to cover.) Leave it for another piece, and come back later to sing straight through, locking in the work they did earlier in the rehearsal.
These structural insights should be obvious at first glance to experienced musicians. However, when your students are sight reading, they tend to look at a piece as a single run-on sentence with no clear structure underneath. Guiding them to the structure and helping them to see the patterns can make learning and memorization so much more attainable.