Funny how people hold a view that professional singers must memorize their songs.
Singing from memory in public is a fairly recent fashion.
Before the late 19th century, singing or playing piano without the score was often considered a sign of casualness, even of arrogance.
The custom of playing from memory developed along with the growth of a body of classics that everyone agreed were worth preserving exactly as their composers had intended.
Teachers encouraged students to memorize them. Many young singers memorize easily, but it gets harder later on. With advancing age, memory becomes doubly uncertain; above all, confidence in one’s memory begins to fail. There goes the assurance that the next phrase or note will be correct with no conscious effort. ~Charles Rosen(1927-2012), US concert pianist.
After a century of recording, the record/CD-buying public has been trained to expect perfection, whereas earlier audiences didn’t mind if things went occasionally awry.
The burden of memorization falls particularly on solo performers. Your performance should be superlative. Singing with lyrics on the stand does not prevent superlative performance in any way.
Scientists now agree that memorizing music is more complex than memorizing words, and the challenge is greater for those who also have to play instruments. Experts disapprove of Singing by heart. It makes the performer casual about fine and detailed nuances, clusters of notes(खटकाs), mordents(मुरकीs) and portamentos(मीण्डs) notated in the score-sheet.
Because of the burden of memorization, many soloists restrict themselves to a handful of songs. The sheer effort of memorizing, unnecessarily wastes a huge amount of process time. It also wastes emotional energy and introduces unpredictability.
Where does unpredictability come from?
Several elements...
In performance, muscle memory will carry you along when something distracts you, or when you have a moment of doubt.
To develop it you simply have to parrot the same song over and over, for a long period of time.
Not having your lyrics with you can give terrifying moments of insecurity.
Worse, they may be in places in the song where you have never had trouble before.
If you can hammer those places into memory, the next performance may see you, having another couple of nasty moments in completely new places.
Many singers waste much time and on memorization.
If you’ve prepared your song thoroughly, does singing it from memory really add any extra dimension that is worth all the pain?
One musical event manager, once said to me, the audience listens to the singer.
It matters not whether the singer has the song by heart, or has key things written on paper.
The more nuanced and complicated the song, the harder the effort to memorize it, if that is the objective.
Our hindi film industry has approx. 168,000 songs until 2018. How can one individual ever memorize even all the मुखड़ाs (refrains), leave along entire songs.
Songs of five generations of music directors…
1st gen.: Pankaj Mullick, Khemchand Prakash, Anil Biswas, Naushad, …
2nd gen.: C.Ramchandra, Shankar Jaikishan, SD Burman, Madan Mohan, OP Nayyar, Salil Chowdhury, Roshan, Hemant Kumar, Ravi, Jaidev, Vasant Desai…
3rd gen.:Kalyanji Anandji, RD Burman, Laxmikant Pyarelal, Khayyam, Ravindra Jain, …
4th gen.:Bappi Lahiri, Rajesh Roshan, Anand-Milind, AR Rahman, Nadeem-Shravan, Annu Malik, Jatin-Lalit,…
5th gen.: Shankar-Ehsan-Loy, Ismail Darbar, MM Kreem, Himesh Reshammiya, Shantanu Moitra, …