Johnedallas
Mon, 07 Apr 2008 01:25:44 -0700
In einer eMail vom 07.04.2008 08:41:13 Westeuropaische Normalzeit schreibt [EMAIL PROTECTED]: With song texts it is helpful to speak the text aloud as well as singing it. Spoken lyrics are stored in another brain section as sung lyrics. (That's why we get confused first and can't remember them without the music) But the imprint of the thing is deepened by connecting those two areas. Martina, Interesting point! Though I'm a singer, I hadn't realised that! I always thought that the memorisation of music and lyrics worked the same way: just keep doing it - i.e. reproducing the notes and the words until you "get inside them", and know how they work, and why this note must follow that note and this line must follow that line, and then just let them out of you, as if you were telling the audience about something you had experienced. This method worked when I had to learn long speeches from Shakespeare plays at school, and it worked later when I had to memorise arias from Handel oratorios. Find out what the poet/composer was trying to "say", and say it for him. An important aspect is anticipation: you have to know how the piece ends if you want to do the beginning and the middle right. I had an interesting experience on St. Patrick's Day, when I performed with my German-Irish folk group. We do the complex ballad "The Foggy Dew". We've been doing it for years now, and memorisation is complete. But for some reason, I started (off stage) just reciting the words. Long, 7-stressed (iambic heptameters), rhymed lines with occasional internal rhymes. Our bass-player and chief arranger just grunted and said, "It sounds better recited than sung!" And I'd never recited it before - only sung it! I suppose that is the sign of a really good lyric - it can stand on its own without the music. By the way, what was that "complex German ballad" that you had to learn? The "bit by bit surfacing from nowhere" is an interesting phenomenon. (I've had that experience - in the days before Google!) It compels you to think about the structure, and where each bit fits in. Basically, you were "re-composing" the piece, so when it all came together, it was "yours". Cheers, John -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html