A student mentioned that he’d been having trouble memorizing music recently. In particular, he’d been struggling with memorizing the words.
He’s a fine young musician; learning melodies or even tricky harmony lines comes quickly for him. But he was puzzled over why the words weren’t staying in his memory more reliably.
I suggested that he had underestimated the power of group rehearsal time. I think that most singers never really think about the process of memorization; it just happens, automatically, in the process of choral rehearsals.
The only way that memorization reliably happens is through repetition. The only way most singers get that repetition is in the context of group rehearsals.
With remote or asynchronous rehearsals, many students are discovering that the moment at which they know the song comes many repetitions before they’ve got it memorized.