Memorizing Music: The Four Memories

[Music] so many notes to remember and let's talk a little bit about memorization and the reasons to do it and reasons not to do it and of course strategies for overcoming the inherent difficulty of memorization I have a kind of a love-hate relationship with memorization because like almost everybody else I have at times gone on to the stage not fully prepared to play from memory and gotten into trouble with some kind of memory slip the trauma and the anxiety associated with memory slips is like a sick thing in the piano world it's a thing we do to ourselves and unnecessarily so I think there was just recently an event a situation with a well-known pianist who was playing I think a Chopin concerto that he played a hundred times and he just broke down in the middle of it and couldn't find his place and of course that became a focal point of the whole concert and he had to issue a public apology and you know cut himself or whatever he did there's nothing more natural and human than not being able to remember every single detail every single time and to set ourselves up to do that is again I think it's just a little bit sick nevertheless even if you are primarily a collaborative pianist and and are not playing from memory all that much you still need the ability to memorize a collaborative piano is still going to have to memorize a few of the more complex measures there may be a bad page turn there may be something so busy where you can't look at the score so we all have to memorize here's the the basic couple of problems I see that we run into in this area one is that we don't strategically memorize in order to prepare for what it's going to be like on the stage we memorize in the practice room and we have a different level of preparation than what we actually need on the stage two is that we don't have enough knowledge of theory and I would say improvisation we'll come back to that later first let's talk about memorizing in the practice room and not being ready for the stage I like to work with four types of memories now I don't know if this is neurologically correct but it works just for me and it works for teaching students so I list four types of memories number one is the intellectual memory that's the memory where I know what the notes are I could tell you things like it's in the key of C minor and it's in this meter and the running notes are 16 and the harmonic progression is 1 and then 2 65 and 542 and whatever here it modulates to this other key that's intellectual memory the ultimate example of intellectual memory would be if you could sit down with some manuscript paper you know take one of these and sit down without a piano to consult and write out your piece from memory with a pencil that of course would be the ultimate display of intellectual memory the second type I like to talk about is oral memory it's the memory of the ear you know what it sounds like you can play it in your head walking down the sidewalk you can you can have an imaginary iPod version going in your head third is motor memory and that is the subconscious knowledge of the physical notions you can't necessarily name them you could not away from the piano you couldn't list them but they are there when your play that's motor memory and then finally visual for those people who have the ability to see so we're accepting blind pianists here for those who have sight cues that they get whether it is things they need to see on the keyboard or whether they are recalling the appearance of the score in their minds know for the visual memory I've had some students who relied heavily on that and they would say oh yes I am seeing the score I'm on page 13 in the upper left corner and you know I'm actually getting information from that my experience though is that those pianists are in the minority and the majority of players are not getting real-time information from a visual memory of the score I mostly don't do that don't really work for me what I'd like to talk about is the relationship between the intellectual and the motor with the aural memory on the side okay so here's what happens in the practice room let's take that piece I was just playing to the C minor Rachmaninoff Prelude so let's say I'm practicing and I want to play from memory so what do I do I repeat I play and I play and I play in the practice room and then at some point I take the score away and try it without the score and if I make it through I go aha I have memorized it and then I go out on stage to play and what happens probably it falls apart the question is why and here's why this is what I call the motor memory trap and it's where in the safety of the practice room with no audience no threat no accountability no sense of shame if it doesn't go well we learned to do it by motor memory in other words I'm just sort of checking out and letting my hands go don't even really have to think about it and they just do their thing and so I assume that is the same as a solidly memorized piece when in fact it is not what is happening is that the subconscious muscle memory the motor memory is replaying all those motions and it is able to do so because I'm not under pressure and because nothing is bothering me and I feel safe if I go to the stage I am now under pressure the audience is disturbing me and I do not feel safe those intrusions then disrupt the motor memory and I bet you've had this experience I bet you've played something a thousand times in the practice room and it was always flawless and you could even think about I don't know ice cream cone the butterflies and check out mentally and you would still play the piece then you went on stage and you started doubting yourself do I really know this and your thoughts started to intrude and ask questions where should my left hand go what should my third finger be doing right now and as soon as you start to ask those questions you brake the motor memory it can't function because it's being intruded upon what we realize is that our motor memory in the practice room fooled us into thinking we knew this thing when in fact the intellectual memory doesn't know very much at all a sad thing we often see in master classes a student sits down to play and you go hey what key is this in and they go um um you know it's like saying where's the brake pedal on your car um um you know if you have to say um and look for the brake pedal I'm not driving with you because you're not ready for emergencies and if you don't know what key your piece is and if you have to say um you are not ready to play so the problem is we fool ourselves with the motor memory into thinking the intellectual memory is intact and we actually need to do separate work to strengthen the motor memory now what kinds of things can we do I mentioned writing out by hand a little while ago as ridiculous as that sounds I actually recommend that very highly if you have a problem passage if you can learn to write it out by memory you will know a great deal about that passage before you're done when I was a graduate student I was working on the Schumann C major fantasy and I was going to play it in some recitals and was concerned about memories so teaching a class as a grad student and they had to take a test so during their test I would take out manuscript paper and I would try to write the first two pages of the Schumann fantasy note for note all the dynamics all the slurs all the articulations all little German you know Duke house fantastic fantastic Leiden shaft leaks floor to cloggin or whatever it says at the beginning just to see how well I could know it could I know every detail so writing out is a very good way to do it I think that's an extreme approach the normal approach should be number one you need to know your basic theory facts what key am I in what chord am I on those are the two most important things to know at any given time what key am I in what chord am I on so I'm in the key of C and I'm on the dominant I'm in the key of F minor and I'm on the sub-dominant etc and that you really should be able to narrate away from the piano how about this put on a recording of your piece and while it's playing can you narrate the keys key areas and progressions that it's doing so take this the ocean ate it so while it's playing you'd be like one chord in C minor that's a two for two chord and so on get the Neapolitan that's a great exercise another one in the same kind of area I like to do is make a fake book version of a piece a really good example of this kind of thing is something with a very clear melody in the soprano like by Schubert or Mozart where I could write out the melody by memory on a treble staff and then write in chord symbols above it so um how about so I would just write this part and I would write a major and I would write the dominant I think it's an interesting version there b7 and then a sharp minor 7 etc can you make a fake book version so making a fake book version is good another one if you're concerned that the motor memory is taking over try playing at a preposterous ly slow tempo so slow that you can't feel what comes next what you're doing is you're trying to break your motor memory and not letting the momentum of each motion carry you into the next motion so if we go back to that Rachmaninoff piece even just doing that now I really have to think about what that is when I go that slowly it's like C minor ok leading tone flat seventh alright now we're going to this other chord I'm going to G minor and so on it forces you to to interact mentally with the harmonic progression and when you think about how many times you have repeated something without interacting mentally with the harmonic progression holy cow no wonder we get in trouble in the stage no wonder now ideally for those who do not use the visual memory to consult from the score the way I think strong memorization works is the intellectual memory is in the lead you know what the music is you can name it you can list it you can describe it you can write it you can transpose it you can reduce it you can fake it then the aural memory allows you to pre hear - Audie 8 phrases that you've not yet played so as I'm finishing one phrase and I kind of quickly run through the sound of the next phrase that prepares me it also reminds me of the physical motions of that phrase and kind of gets my motor memory ready so the three memories really interact if you're prepared well however the number one lack among pianists is simply intellectual memory they literally don't know what the music says they literally don't know and that is why improvisation is so important because when you improvise you have to understand what all the building blocks of music are so whether it's a sequence different kind of sequence you understand what all the building blocks are and so when they occur in the music it's really obvious to you what they are instead of being a million different buttons that I need to remember to push in the right order but which have no inherent meaning in their pattern to me that's terrifying you know to look at a Bach fugue to look at a Mozart concerto to look at all those dots as individual bits of data that don't really have a cohesive meaning they're just individual things I'm supposed to remember and then there are also physical motions over which I must have minut muscular control that's really really pretty terrifying not how Bach thought it's not how Mozart thought it's not how Beethoven thought these guys thought in chunks in schemas in progressions in sequences which is a lot of the explanation for why they were able to do what they did so a practical approach to memorization number one go after that intellectual memory you could even make a list and ask yourself what's the key what's the meter let's do a map of the entire thing harmonically where are the key areas you know maybe a little like a Schumann character piece is going to be an ABA piece so the a section is probably going to have at least two key areas the B section is going to be a little bit more distant and maybe have a couple key areas and then the return is going to you know come back to the home key what is the overall harmonic map alright within that what is each phrase doing does the first phrase just sort of take a walk through the home key does it modulate to five like the old-fashioned way or does it go somewhere super weird like to a chromatic median like lists would do where does it go can you narrate - can you just play the tune and then just fake some chords so you have the basic structure kind of - the figuration can you do that in different keys if you can do that stuff you will be well on your way to solidify your intellectual memory alright let's give it a try Oh

Channel: cedarvillemusic

Views: 136,704

Keywords: john mortensen piano memorization

Id: XC-8P-sapHw

Length: 18min 4sec (1084 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 26 2017