On Memorising Music, Part 3: Lyrics

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Tuesday 27th January 2026
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As promised, here is the follow-up to my recent posts about memorising music specifically focusing on lyrics. I considered this some years ago and and again more recently, and recommended lots of specific practice strategies, but it feels worth revisiting to reflect on the reasons why those strategies can be useful.

So, the general points about approach I made in the previous two posts remain true: the key to effective memorising is in developing depth of understanding, not in mechanical repetition. But words are processed a bit differently from music in the brain, and quite a few people (me included) find them harder to memorise.

On Memorising Music, Part 2: Finding Depth

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Friday 23rd January 2026
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My previous post on this theme came to the conclusion that the secret to memorising music lies in deepening one’s understanding of it. In music we find difficult, we can’t manage it at all without working in depth, but in music that comes more readily, we need to find ways to get inside it, in order that it might then get inside us. This post (and the follow-up dedicated to lyrics) is about ways we might go about this.

At the heart of all of these ways is the process of analysis. Molly Gebrian makes the point that all music practice is, at bottom, a process of creative problem-solving. This is as true of internalising music as it is of figuring out how to execute it. Studying our music should be a process of asking questions, hypothesising answers, and then seeing if the music detail supports our hypotheses: ‘What’s going on here, then?’, ‘How does this work?’, ‘Why is this note used here rather than that one?’

On Memorising Music, Part 1

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Saturday 17th January 2026
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I’ve been having a number of conversations recently about memorising music, with both piano friends and choral friends, and reflecting on them has helped bring a number of things into focus for me. This post and the next cover general themes that apply across both worlds, and I’m planning a follow-up that specifically considers lyrics, since language is processed by the brain somewhat (but not entirely) differently from music.

For some people, a lot of the memorising process happens during the process of simply learning how to execute the music, without any specific attention to memory per se. For people who find memorising hard, this can seem like unhelpful information: that’s all right for them, you might think, but it doesn’t help for those of us that struggle.

However, as someone for whom that is sometimes, but not always the case, I think there are things to be learned from what’s going on when memorising comes readily to inform how to go about things when it doesn’t.

Getting into the Flow with Mosaic

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Tuesday 13th January 2026
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I spent Sunday happily in Norwich with Mosaic, a mixed-voice barbershop chorus who meet once a month, and who are preparing to participate in the British Association of Barbershop Singers’ Convention in May. Last year I had revoiced an arrangement for their contest set, and we spent a good deal of the day working on that, with a little TLC also on their other song.

The general trajectory of our work on both songs was to start from the holistic and work our way towards the detail. The reason for this is that global concepts often improve a lot of details at once, and so save you a lot of effort compared with diving immediately into the nitty-gritty. The chorus’s MD Chrissie had identified flow as a primary area she wanted to develop in the delivery of my arrangement, and it turned out that quite a lot of what we worked on with that song was also relevant to the other.

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