We just started new music in choir. So i thought I’d share how I learn music. Since I cant see music- I can read music by the way- I do almost everything by listening and repeating it. It’s like an oral recall section of an audition- if you know what that is. I listen to the song a lot. And I listen to little chunks of the song a lot. Sometimes I just listen to the same measure for 10 minutes if I cant get it right. Fortunately that doesn’t happen very often, but you gotta do what you gotta do. And since I do music for fun, I listen to one piece over and over again.
Like you might do with a song you really like. Except I’m not as eager to listen to it again after the 40th time. I’ve never gotten sick of a song I was learning for choir, though. Not once that I can remember. I tend not to really get sick of songs tho. Not even ‘what does the fox say?’ But I also don’t really listen to the radio, which is where it got so overplayed. Even when my choir spent 6 months on the same 7 pieces, I didn’t get sick of the music. Which is good, because I have to listen to my music constantly to have it memorized for the concert.
For the last concert, the advanced men’s choir I’m in, we sang a polish war song. As you can probably guess, it was in polish. For your information, polish is HARD. I spent hours upon hours listening to the part track for that song. And that was packed into the 2 weeks before the concert because the part tracks weren’t recorded until then.
If you’ve ever sung in a foreign language, you know foreign languages make the song way more challenging. Fortunately, I’ve had a lot of practice singing in foreign languages. Primarily Latin and German, but I’ve sung in Haitian and African too. I think singing makes the words easier to say and remember, but at the same time, the words make the singing a lot more difficult. Especially in the case of polish. There are wayyyy too many consonants. When said incorrectly, most words just sound like you have a bad lisp or you’re trying to cough up a fur ball. Especially on the recordings. I usually ask for a transcript of the words so I know what I should be saying/singing. I do that for some english songs too, actually.
There was one song for All State Choir, “The ballad of Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard” that got so fast I had no idea what the words were. It was all english (and a really fun song) but I had no clue what to sing. So I had my mom type out the lyrics. I’ve actually found that that works really well too. I got a magnifier for my birthday last year called a Ruby. It lets you place the magnifier on the paper and follow the line of text much easier. I tend to use it when there are a ton of verses. I use it for an arrangement of “Amazing Grace” that I’m singing in church in a week.
Blind Music 