Learn to Learn Repertoire

The forsythias in our region have officially announced the arrival of spring, having already bloomed, signaling warmer days ahead. I have a sense of relief each year when their yellow flowers first appear.

The assignments and playing jobs I had last week took up a great deal of my time, as I raced against the clock to prepare difficult orchestral repertoire.
In between, I had another orchestral work to play and a couple of concerts to perform, so things got quite busy. And because of some changes I made to my office situation, at some point, it became impossible to be in my office and tend to my website. So, I have been away.

And since I was in a place where I had to learn complex repertoire in such a short time and managed to master challenging technical passages, I have been ruminating on how to learn repertoire quickly.

What can we do to cut down on the time we spend learning, as we need to learn compositions as quickly as possible?
How do we learn difficult repertoire when we are pressed for time? Pieces we have never played before, and which are part of major orchestral repertoire.

As string players, we have a significant amount of playing in the orchestra, and sometimes we play nonstop with no breaks. Breaks, in this case, mean musical pauses. As joyful as playing is, such work requires much energy from the musician.
I had to apply my time management skills and create a short plan at the beginning, based on the number of pages and the understanding that it should allow for flexibility as my progress dictates.

I saw it fit to familiarize myself with the pieces first by listening to prominent performances from well-known conductors. And I also followed the score to study the different parts that other instruments play, to orient myself. Then I went over the score again and observed the key changes, meter, dynamics, movement types, and tempos. So, there was considerable time away from the instrument, listening, observing, and making notes.
It was crucial to have an overview of the entire piece first.

As I began to practice, I devoted my time to one or two movements per day and managed to cover all movements according to plan, marking the difficult passages. One of my concerns was to go over all passages from beginning to end, even when they looked easy, so as not to miss anything and avoid surprises.

As I went through this process, information overload was inevitable. However, I kept on. Since I had isolated the difficult parts, the challenging ones, I repeated them daily till the day of the event. Sometimes it felt like starting over as I moved from one movement to the next, but I kept going.

At some point, I had to go back and listen again to refresh my memory and to reinforce my understanding of the tempos, the accepted norms on how a certain movement is played.

After going through the entire work, it became a matter of mastering the different parts. So, I resorted to repetition—a major component in learning music. It is noteworthy that one's level of involvement in playing and physical fitness greatly assists in this endeavor, but again, the focus in this blog post has been on the shortage of time.

I have a couple of new such assignments coming up this month, and I have been following this plan as I actively prepare for the event.
Granted, the pieces we will be playing this time are not as involved as those I described in the above situation, but they still require preparation.

If you have a different way to achieve mastery of a piece, I encourage you to share it in the comments below.
In the meantime, I wish you happy practicing.