Learn it in your ears now, drop the paper later
Okay, so this is the lesson where I tell you to stop staring at the paper. Not forever. Just sooner than you think you're allowed to.
Here's the thing though. Most people treat the sheet music like a life raft. They hold onto it the whole rehearsal, eyes down, and then the one time we sing without music (a concert, say) they panic because the raft's gone and they never actually learned to swim. I want to change that order. Learn it in your ears first. Let the paper fall away because you don't need it anymore, not because someone yanked it from you in December.
Opinion time, and I've said a version of this before: memorize late, not early, but learn by ear from day one. Those aren't the same thing. Memorizing is "I've stared at this page enough times that I don't need it." Learning by ear is "I know what this sounds like in my body," which is a completely different kind of knowing, and it happens way before memorization if you let it.
What this actually looks like at home
You don't need a piano. You don't need to read a note of notation. Here's what you do need:
A recording of your part, isolated if you can get it. If I've given you a practice track with just your voice part loud, use that one, not the full mix. Your ear should be spending its energy on your line, not sorting it out of everyone else's.
Small chunks. Always small chunks. We've talked about this before with hard passages, and it applies double here. Don't try to learn eight measures by ear in one sitting. Learn two. Play it, sing along quietly, play it again, sing along a little louder, play it a third time with no help at all. Then move to the next two measures. You're building a chain link by link, not trying to swallow the whole thing at once.
Say the words before you sing the pitch. Speak the rhythm of the words in tempo, no melody at all, just rhythm and text. This sounds like a waste of time and it is one of the most useful five minutes you'll spend on a piece. Half of what feels like a "hard entrance" is actually a rhythm you haven't said out loud yet.
Sing along under the recording, not over it. Quiet, blended into what you're hearing, not trying to prove anything. If you can't hear the recording anymore because you're singing so loud, turn yourself down. This is the same blend principle from our vowel lesson, just applied to how you practice alone in your car or your kitchen.
Put the paper down for the last pass. Once you've done a few rounds with your eyes on the page, do one more round with the page turned over or across the room. See what your ear already has. Whatever's missing, that's what you go back and drill. The gap tells you exactly where to spend your next five minutes, which is more efficient than rereading the whole line hoping something sticks.
The alto section and the big exhale
I want to tell you about something that happened a while back with the altos, because it's the clearest example I've got of ears doing work that eyes couldn't.
There was an entrance, a hard one, that the alto section kept missing. Not the notes, the notes were fine. The timing. They kept coming in late, tentative, like they were apologizing for existing in that measure. I tried explaining the counting. I tried pointing at the page. Nothing landed, and I could feel myself doing the thing where I over-explain and everyone's eyes glaze a little.
So I had them stop looking at anything and just breathe out loud together first. One big audible exhale, all of them, right before the entrance, like a held breath finally letting go. Somebody laughed when I asked for it, it felt a little silly, breathing out loud on purpose in a rehearsal room. But they did it, and then they came in together, right on time, no hesitation, like the exhale itself carried them into the note.
That's not a notation trick. You can't write "big loud exhale" on the page in a way that would've fixed it faster than just doing it with their bodies. Their ears and their breath solved something their eyes couldn't. That's the whole case for learning by ear, really, right there in one rehearsal.
A real caution, not a big one
If you're practicing with headphones or earbuds at home, keep the volume reasonable, especially if you're doing repeat passes for twenty or thirty minutes at a stretch. Loud plus repetitive is exactly how people wreck their hearing without noticing, a little at a time. Turn it down further than feels dramatic. Your ears are the whole instrument here, literally, so don't abuse the input device.
Before next time
Pick one phrase from your part, just one, and learn it fully by ear this week without looking at the page after the third pass. Bring it to rehearsal and let's see what your ear already knows.