By Marco Roncaglia
Learning a music score, whether choral or soloist, can
be either easy and enjoyable or difficult and boring. How can we be sure to
find ourselves in the first situation and avoid the second?
That reminds me of the first educational challenge we
had to face as children: learning how to speak.
Let’s think about what led us to speak our first word:
not the ability of writing and reading, of course, but our instinctive
curiosity towards the world of sounds; we couldn’t hear words yet, but what we
heard in the world around us sounded like pure and magical motifs. Driven by
our biology, we let ourselves be attracted by that universe of sounds and their
ability to convey so much to us even when we couldn’t comprehend their meaning.
We are not children anymore, but maybe we could go
back to that particular condition when learning a voice part.
Imagine we are walking around the streets of our city
without a precise destination, just for leisure. While passing by a building, we
hear voices singing and we stop to listen, intrigued. We search the best
position to hear, where the sounds are clearer and louder, and there we stay.
We don’t know the name of the piece, we can’t even get the words, only the
melody and harmony; we listen while the hidden choir practise the piece until
we are able to sing along with growing confidence and pleasure.
After a while the singing stops, so we take up walking
again, but that motif is stuck in our head.
Well, this could be an example of a functional
approach to the task of learning a part: instead of reading the notes first,
then paying attention to their value and dynamics, then concentrating on the lyrics and only much later focusing on
the piece in its entirety, we could imitate the melody from the beginning,
listening to it while sung or played by someone that already knows it well,
starting casually and roughly but with curiosity, and becoming more and more
precise: we are very far from any demanding duty, and abandoned to playfulness
instead.
In other words, we are starting from the sound itself
to get to the music, and we are doing this with the natural curiosity and
innocence of children who can’t read or write yet, but can still learn with
extreme ease.
Finding that “magic” again may not be easy or instant,
especially as full-grown adults; but it has long since proved to be the most
efficient way to learn a music part without effort and to fix it easily in our
memory. We will find it hidden in some drawer, unexpectedly ready to be sung
out loud again.
