Make it real and you will remember it

Have you ever had trouble remembering what's coming up in your own performance?  There's nothing quite so gut-wrenching as realizing that you don't know the words for the next phrase, or that the whole piece you're about to perform has somehow slipped away...

I remember one time one stage, while taking applause between two songs, when I realized I had no idea what the first words were for the next song.  I leaned over to my quartet-mate and whispered under my breath, as subtly as I could, "what are the first words?"  He thought I was kidding so he leaned over to me and whispered back, "yeah right!"

Not too helpful!

But anyway it's not surprising that memory can be a challenge.  After all, each piece has hundreds of words and hundreds of notes that need remembering, as well as other elements of plan like dynamics, changes in tempo, special treatment of important words, different vocal qualities, perhaps choreography... it can be quite a lot, especially when you consider that your immediate memory can hold only about 7 things.  That's why local phone numbers were held to just that many digits, for example.

It's even harder if you're in charge of making sure that everyone in a large group remembers everything at the same time, with some kind of reliability!

So what can you do?

Well it turns out that every bit of information in your brain is held as a series of connections between neurons.  And to make a long story short and simplify things beyond scientific recognition, the more connections a neuron has, the easier it will be to recall whatever it's holding.  So if you want to remember someone's name, you can play a trick like finding a rhyming word and connecting it with a picture.  So if you're meeting a "Cindy" you might pick "windy" for a rhyme and then make a picture in your head of Cindy on a windmill.  You'll never forget her name after that!

The same thing is true of all the little details of a song.  As long as they remain a more-or-less random sequence of instructions in your head, you'll have trouble recalling them when you need them.  BUT if you have a strong story about your performance piece (who are you, who are you talking to, what do you want, what happens, etc.), all the little details find a comfortable home in that framework, and then when you're "in" the performance, it all comes back.

I was coaching a large choral group recently and the director was complaining that they always forgot a certain dynamic instruction.  And I wondered to myself, do they know why they're supposed to do it?