Professional orchestra life involves a giant queue of music. Whenever you finish learning a cycle, you can count on having to jump into learning the next one very soon after. So it requires careful management to be able to learn all of this repertoire, and learn it well. In this video, I give some insight into my process, and I hope it’s helpful for you! If you’d like to read instead of watch, I’ll throw the abridged transcript right below the video.

People who haven’t spent time in a professional orchestra environment, or anything adjacent to one, may think that the first rehearsal for a concert is where everyone in the orchestra starts learning the music. But I’m here to tell you that that’s far from the truth. In reality, the goal to shoot for is to be prepared enough to play the concert well, even at the first rehearsal. That way, when you’re working with your colleagues, the focus can be on making a unified product together. If people didn’t have their music learned, it would be chaos, and there’d be no way to put a good concert together in the short time frames that are so common in the professional world. Now, if you’ve been in a youth orchestra or community orchestra, you may have had, say, three concerts per year, and rehearsed once a week for several months to prepare for each one. And it is great to have that luxury. But in a professional orchestra, the turnover of the repertoire is so fast that we don’t get to do anything even remotely like that.

For a full-length symphonic program, my orchestra usually has four rehearsals, with occasional exceptions. Two and a half hours on Wednesday morning, two and a half hours on Thursday morning, two hours on Thursday afternoon, and a two-and-a half-hour dress rehearsal on Friday morning, before our evening concert. So we have in total just nine and a half hours together to get the program in great shape to present to the audience. And, on top of that, there’s new music coming into our queue with great frequency. It’s a revolving door of repertoire, where it’s crucial to stay one step ahead of it, if at all possible. So the key is to learn this music not only thoroughly, but efficiently. So how have I managed to do it so far?

The first thing to note is that not everything is of equal difficulty. Some pieces in that collection of 164 are simple songs for pops concerts. In fact, quite a few of them are. And those usually require just one run-through at home, with perhaps a few minutes spent on the occasional tricky passage. In most cases getting a pops set learned before the first rehearsal requires less than three hours of individual work for me. But, even though sometimes a three-minute song counts as a piece, sometimes it’s a symphony that’s more than an hour, like the Bruckner I played recently. I could not tell you how many hours that took me at home. The good news is that we get our music well in advance, but this was one of those pieces where I had to be especially careful about frontloading. The piece is so long and so chromatic, and it required a great deal of my attention for over a week. All this goes to say the repertoire I learned spans the gamut of no sweat to plenty of difficulty.

Before I set out to work on a piece, if it looks like it might have any significant complexity, I sit down with it away from the cello, put on a recording, and listen to get a broad idea of the piece. This is mainly a step I take when I haven’t played the piece before, or if it’s been awhile since I have. While I’m doing that, I follow along with the music, and I put little asterisks next to the lines that look like they’ll need special attention. If I’m sitting principal for a cycle instead of my normal second chair, that means that I’ll have original parts instead of practice copies, so I tend to mark much less in those cases, but usually, I have practice parts that I get to keep afterwards, so it doesn’t matter how much marking I do in them, and I can go ham.

This work thus far has all been done with just my eyes, ears, a cello part, and a recording. I actually wait on using the score, and I only look at it if I absolutely need to. That might sound counterintuitive, but in this case, I think it’s good advice, because I’m not going to be looking at it when I’m in rehearsal or performance, and I want to make sure that I can manage without it. It’s all about the best possible simulation of what things will be like in the moment. Of course, if there’s something that I can’t wrap my head around, then I will consult the score ,and mark appropriate cues into my practice part. On the rare occasion that there’s not a recording available, which happens often with very new music that has yet to be put out on an album, that’s an instance where I’ll be much quicker to find the score and look at what’s going on. I can ask one of our librarians if I can take a look at the score, but for a lot of music, there’s an easy way of doing it from the comfort of your own home that’s completely legal, and doesn’t infringe anybody’s copyright. And that method is checking the website of the publisher of the piece. For a piece that I just learned, I used the Boosey & Hawkes website, which publishes that particular composer’s works. And they have perusal scores available for free; you just need an account. So I was able to take a peek and see what’s up. Various publishers have this kind of feature available on their website, so do a search and if you can find a legal perusal score that’s available, go ahead and check inside.

So, after I’ve gotten a feel for the piece, it’s time for preliminary work at the instrument. Going through those tough spots and getting them under my fingers. I try to learn it to the point that I can play it at the tempo I expect, but also a bit faster, just in case. Once I find fingerings that work for me, I make sure to write them in. And this brings me to a very important point: at least for me, this work cannot get done well unless it’s done in a very organized fashion. that means marking everything I need in my practice part.

Once I have the passagework in good shape, it’s time to put things together. I put in my earbuds, I turn on my playlist for the concert cycle, and I start playing along. This is not only an important part of my simulation of the real environment, but it also helps keep you honest about skipping things. It can be tempting if you’re looking at the page and see something that looks super easy to just skip over it, but sometimes, it’ll end up being harder than meets the eye. Playing along with a recording in real time gives you no room for skipping.

I generally try to run the entire program at least two days in a row, in preparation for rehearsal number one. Usually the preceding Monday and Tuesday. Both times, I have my pencil at the ready, and if there’s something that comes up during a run-through that I know I’ll need to address, I’ll either make a marking in my part, or fold down a corner of the page in question to remind me for later. Sometimes, I’ll miss something that needs my attention, but that’s why it’s good to have at least two days of run-throughs, so that I can get it the next time, improving what I’m doing with each iteration.

There are several things that often come up in a session like this. One is if there is a technical issue with passage work that still needs more TLC. I’ll sometimes add in extra fingerings on the fly to reinforce things, and I’ll try to take note of the problem to work on later. Also, if I notice that the conductor takes time in the recording, I’ll mark in a pair of eyeglasses in my part, so that I can be sure that I’m looking up extra attentively, in case our conductor does something similar. I’ll also find places where I’m tempted to come in early, and sometimes circle a rest or something if that’s the case. Or if I’m confused about what’s going on, mark in a queue based upon the recording or the score. Another important thing to do when you’re doing the run is to pretend to engage with the principal. When there’s something where you think ensemble (the fancy word for being together) will be an issue, focus your eyes on where the principal will be in relation to you in context. In my case ,that almost always means looking directly to my left. It’s training my brain to be on the lookout for important stimuli, to help me be part of a cohesive whole. It’s also wise to pretend to look at the conductor, too. of course. On the other hand, if I will be principal, I practice the physical leadership that I would do in rehearsal and performance, and in that case, I’ll put my eyes on the imaginary conductor and concertmaster.

Once it comes time for the first rehearsal, I bring in my scribbled-upon practice part, and I go through it with the original that we’ll use for the concert. I look carefully at the markings I’ve made in my personal practice part, and I put in what I think needs to be transferred. I try not to clutter the page with too much, but nobody should ever be ashamed of throwing some fingerings in there. They’re helpful, and they’re not a sign that you’re any less professional.

Well, I’m sure this seems like a lot of work to you, and at times, it is. But once you’ve spent some time involved in heavy orchestra work, you’ll find that you’ve already played a lot of the repertoire that comes into your queue. That doesn’t mean you don’t have to give it plenty of attention, but it does mean that you’re equipped with more knowledge and experience going in. And you likely have a better idea of what to expect, what issues may arise, and how to tackle them.

Just for my own records, I keep an incomplete list of orchestral works that I’ve performed in my professional and pre-professional career. And I decided to throw them into the Python interpreter to get rid of some unneeded data and to count the pieces, because that’s how I have fun. And this incomplete list shows 191 pieces. Granted, some of those were from this past season, but it still illustrates that one can build up a back catalog of works that they’ve done quite quickly, and perhaps without even realizing it. And, since we get repertoire in advance, it often gives us the opportunity to triage what needs the most work, get started extra early, and keep some balance. Working intelligently and in an organized fashion makes it so that nothing gets neglected, but you can get everything done when it needs to be done, and get it done well. Now, let’s talk about one last thing before we say farewell for today. Once rehearsals have started, that gives you even more information that you can use to iterate on your progress. as I record this voiceover, I’ve recently rehearsed this repertoire, and while doing so, I took a lot of mental notes. What kind of tempi are we dealing with? How does it feel in context? Is there anything that the conductor or the principal or the concertmaster said that I need to keep in my mind as I’m preparing this for the next rehearsal and for the concert? And, most importantly, what is there from the rehearsal that I could’ve done better, and how can I reinforce it at home? That last part is, of course, especially important. I try to remember those spots where I had a problem, and sometimes I’ll write them into my practice part. Then, after some post-rehearsal relaxation, I’ll address them while the rehearsal is still relatively fresh in my mind. This allows me to keep improving, and create the best possible product come concert time. And that’s how I kept my head above water while performing the contents of this gargantuan stack of music in seven months. I want to hear from you, though. How do you approach learning new repertoire? And do you have handy tricks that I may have missed? Let me know in the comments below.