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From:  Greypins@a...
Date:  Thu Mar 28, 2002  2:17 pm
Subject:  Re: [vocalist] Memorizing parts

mirko,

i have no memory at all (too much acid in high school, i guess).
what has always worked for me is to do a structural analysis of whatever
piece i was singing, sometimes making a chart to help me. this works with
both music and text. for the music, even if your theory skills are poor,
you can look at it simply as what music repeats and what doesn't (as in
'same, same, different, same'). with the text, you can look at rhyme
schemes and how they fit with the musical structure. even better is to look
at what happens, dramatically, in a scene and how that fits with the music.
this means knowing who says what to whom and how your character contributes
to the scene and how all of that plays out musically (unfortunately, in
opera, there is the tendency to say the same thing over and over again so,
there might not be all that much going on dramatically).

mike






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