Many years ago we had a wonderful contemporary music quartet here in our city, two pianists and two percussionists. They played the best twentieth century music written for that instrumentation and commissioned composers to write new pieces for them. They were superb musicians and good friends.
I had interesting conversations about memorizing with the pianists on two different occasions.
One said something like, “if you need to read the music to play a piece, then you don’t know the piece”.
That made sense to me.
The other said something like, “memorizing is a kind of circus trick invented in the Romantic era to impress audiences. It doesn’t make any real difference whether you memorize or not, and it’s much harder for some people than others”.
That made sense to me too.
Although I’ve played the piano since I was a little kid, most of my early professional experience was as a trombonist. Pianists and string players are usually expected to memorize but wind and brass players for the most part are not, maybe because we are not expected to be soloists.
Is there any intrinsic reason to memorize music? Does it make any difference whether you are playing from a printed page or from memory?
The decision to perform from memory or not might have a lot to do with your comfort level, which, as one of my pianist friends suggested, might vary widely between good musicians.
But what about music training? Is it beneficial for us to learn some music from memory, even if only for our own enjoyment? Does it make us better players?
I say yes, it does.
The primary benefit I see is that once we have memorized a piece, we can put all our attention on the activity of playing the piece.
When we play a piece from a written part we are doing two things at the same time: we are playing and, simultaneously, we are also reading. Once we have a piece memorized we can just play.
But how to do it?
For most of my professional career I played almost nothing from memory. I knew a few odds and ends from memory, single movements mostly, that I just memorized accidentally because I played the piece a lot. I must say I got a lot of enjoyment from those pieces because I could play them from memory but I almost always read the music I performed.
Often when I intentionally tried to memorize something it did not go well. It was amazing to me how little I could play of a piece from memory even if I had read it many times. Memorizing was a tedious uphill battle, two steps forward and one step back – or worse.
I had pretty much decided that I lack the memorizing gene.
That is, until it occurred to me to ask someone who knows how to memorize. I didn’t have to look far. It turns out I live with someone who knows how to memorize. My partner, Jennifer Bustin, a fine violinist, is my favourite musician and, among her many musical accomplishments, she has a huge repertoire of memorized music and she fearlessly takes on new pieces to memorize no matter how long or complex.
I finally asked Jennifer how to memorize and she told me the method her teacher, the great Norman Nelson, former concertmaster of the London Symphony Orchestra, taught her as an undergraduate.
She has refined the technique over the years but the basic premise remains and she says it saved her many hours when she was very busy as a student and a young professional with reams of music to memorize.
I tried her method doubtfully. It did not seem like something that would work for me. It sounded like the kind of method talented people think is a method but is really just their talent working for them.
The first piece I tried was the Bach D major Prelude from the first book of the Well Tempered Clavier. This was probably not a great choice for someone who is not good at memorizing.
I had never played the piece successfully before although I had stumbled through it a few times. It is a “moto perpetuo” piece, meaning it is a continuous flow of fast sixteenth notes for two pages. There are repeating patterns but that is not very helpful because there are many subtle and complex variations on those patterns.
But, guess what? It worked! I not only memorized the piece but I was able to play it with more musicality and security than anything else I was playing at that time. And it was a lot faster than any approach I had every tried before. I immediately set to work memorizing the fugue and that went even faster.
Now I memorize every new piece I play.
Here is Jennifer’s memorizing method as I understand it. She emphasizes using recordings to become familiar with new pieces before starting to memorize. You can reference a good recording during the memorizing process to insure a strong interpretation.
- Starting at the beginning of the piece, choose a short phrase. It could be the first complete phrase of the piece or it could be a smaller part of that phrase.
- Play the phrase with the intent to memorize it. Include all the details you want in the finished performance – all the right fingerings, dynamics, articulations, etc. – the fullest expression of the piece. (Jennifer says a metronome is a great tool for this process, and it’s fine if it needs to be at a slower speed than the finished piece will be.)
- Play it again if you think you need to, then turn away from the page, look at your hands, and play the phrase from memory. If that goes well, play it again to solidify it.
- If it didn’t go perfectly, go back to the printed page and choose a shorter portion of the piece to begin.
- Move on to the next phrase but “hook” on the last few notes of the previous phrase to link the two phrases together. Repeat the same process with this new phrase.
- Here’s where it gets interesting and scary: Do not go back to the first phrase! Continue learning new phrases linked to the previous phrase with a few notes until you reach the end of the piece. Even scarier: if you do not finish this process in one sitting, pick it up where you left off. Do not start again from the beginning!
- This is hard! If you don’t trust it, do it anyway as an experiment. Jennifer says going back to the beginning is the reason so many people do poorly at memorizing. The result of starting over at the beginning each time is “the first-four-bar-mastery syndrome,” a strong beginning and a weak middle and ending.
- When you have continued this process to the end of the piece, play the whole piece again reading the music.
- Now play the whole piece from memory. If you need to check the music here and there, do so.
- If you are memorizing a short or simple piece you might be finished memorizing now. You can simply practice the piece for speed and security without reading. Keep the score handy to check details – be sure you are not de-composing the piece!
- If the piece is long and/or complex it can be very helpful to mark logical larger sections. Use letters or numbers. Then practice the sections in reverse or random order. This again prevents the “first-four-bar-mastery syndrome” and it gives us signposts to look for in performance.
- Very long pieces, like concertos, can be divided into smaller sections and memorized one section at a time.
Give it a try!
Memorizing your music is a joy. To my surprise I feel more confident playing some music from memory than reading. Reading is not easy either!
In some musical worlds memorizing is non-optional. You will very rarely see a soloist in front of an orchestra using printed music. But it might not have occurred to you that jazz musicians and players of popular music of all kinds play hours and hours of music entirely from memory.
I wonder how this method would apply to contexts where there is often no printed music to begin with, most of that music learned from recordings or on the spot from other musicians.
I think I’ll try a version of Jennifer’s method on my next jazz transcription. Watch this space and I’ll let you know how it goes!