How Can Musical Theatre Performers Learn Harmonies Faster?

There is a very specific kind of panic that happens when the music director says: “Great. Now let’s split into harmony.”

Suddenly the melody you have known perfectly for twenty minutes means absolutely nothing because somebody next to you is singing it loudly into your ear. Fun.

Learning harmonies is partly about learning your notes, but it is also about learning how not to get dragged away from them.

Stop thinking of your part as “not the melody.” Your harmony is its own line, so learn it that way. If you are constantly defining your notes based on what the melody is doing, you are making your job harder. Know what your line sounds like by itself, where it moves, the spots where it gets close to another part and you tend to drift, and then put the other voices back.

Practicing your part completely alone is useful at first. But that is not enough. Eventually you need to sing it while hearing the melody.

If your harmony immediately disappears the second someone sings another note near you, you do not quite own it yet. That is okay. Keep going.

Look at the score. This is one of the places where basic music reading becomes incredibly helpful. Maybe your note stays the same while everybody around you moves. Seeing that on the page can make the harmony much easier to hold. Sometimes the harmony sounds complicated but looks very simple on the page.

And. Please. Record. Your. Part. If you are allowed to record the music rehearsal, do it. Listening back to your line is far more useful than going home and hoping you remember what happened at 2:15 that afternoon.

Harmony gets easier the more you do it. You got this.