Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Recital lessons - Memory

I'd say I've definitely learnt from this recital, and I'd like to share something interesting.

First a small confession. I know a lot of people who submitted something for this recital prepared it in the weeks preceding it. The piece I submitted, Michael Nyman's Big My Secret, is a piece that I learnt quite a long time ago but has always been strongly in my memory, as I play it often because I like it a lot.

I realised that in my recording I played it too fast, that was no secret, and that I'm sure it would sound better and I could bring more out of it by slowing it down a bit. So I sat at the piano and I tried to play it a lot slower. Small problem. It seems it has been "encoded" into my memory as a fast piece because I've been playing it too fast for such a long time. Slowing it down means my memory actually fails at certain passages. So I get the sheet music out and play from it, and this is where I make my real discovery. I play slowly through, partially using my in-built memory of the piece and sort of checking it against the score as I play and trying to play slowly and accurately, and suddenly I begin to find all the holes that my memorised version has created. I originally learnt this piece accurately from the score, but after learning it so well I eventually played it only from memory...until now...

So now I see what's happened. I know about memorising bad habits and incorrect playing and that sort of thing, but I had no idea to what extent a piece that I'd spent a long time learning from the score originally had sort of evolved itself to what it is in my memory now. And now I'm trying to relearn it accurately from the score to make another, slower and hopefully better recording.

This has been a number of things to me. A great disappointment for one. Now I realise that not only am I spending time learning new pieces and maintaining my old ones, but I must maintain my old pieces in the correct way as well. Maintaining them from memory alone isn't good enough, and they just adapt and mutate into the same creature as before, except with an extra arm and perhaps a little mentally slow...

But to say it's disappointing is a bad thing only, and yet to have made this discovery is quite a good learning achievement I think. I realise that with these now poorly memorised pieces it won't take me long to read the score again, as the foundations are well and truly in my memory. It's just they need a little trim like an unruly hedge and allowed to grow neatly again. So it is far from a bad thing, and something I think this recital, as my first, has helped me learn.

A final word to say that I will be commenting on all the submissions, but it sure does take a long time! Maybe I should start listening at work...

I'm glad you see this as a learning achievement. Since we're all in this for our own enjoyment and progress, it's helpful when we see we've been making a mistake. I've found the exact same thing.

I used to play a piece at speed hoping to get things right. I'd play it over and over because slow play is not fun. Then after reading several books and talking to various teachers and pianists (and reading Frycek's signature line repeatedly), I finally realized that I'm not going to improve that way. I have to do the hard work of slowing down, taking things apart, then putting them back together. I mean, if I want to play it better than I am. If I didn't want to improve, I could keep at things the old way.

I am also working on keeping things in my memory, and that requires taking them apart from time to time. I read this in the Charles Cooke book last summer, and I was so glad to see I wasn't the only one whose pieces began to slip and get messy. It happens to all of us. I like the extra arm part--sometimes I have no idea where some of my "new" notes come from! Truly a mutation.

Nancy

This is one reason I prefer to play by ear: it's just more work than I want to put into it to keep up these pieces. You can't learn them once and then expect to memorize them forever, they need continuous maintenance. But that takes so much time that you're always limited to having only a few pieces in your repertoire.

Of course, you can't play classical pieces by ear, so having the ability to play at first sight from the score would be pretty neat too.

It is encouraging to read others having the same problems. I sometimes revisit the score to discover those extra or missing notes...

I'm trying to use the score to start memorized pieces from different spots. A big problem I have is when memory fails and I can't pick it up without going back..... most embarassing at a lesson...

"They" say that a forgotten piece relearned a couple of times will remain forever (or at least a lot longer) in memory...

This is why I'm so in awe of those fluent sightreaders (they REALLY DO exist - good accompanists HAVE to). Given that, you'd think I'd spend more time practicing my sightreading :rolleyes:

This is a major problem with memory for me too. To use my example piece I talked about in the first post, I cannot reliably pick that up from any point except the beginning. There are one or two places in it where I can pick it up if I can jog my memory hard enough, but it's like trying to jump start a car and it sometimes fails and I can't play on after the first measure of my pick-up point.

Now that you mention sight reading, I agreed with my piano teacher that I need to more regularly practice sight reading simple pieces in order to develop that ability because, as mentioned by mahlzeit, unless one plays by ear (not really suitable for the classical music I most like to play), sight reading is the only thing that will allow one to be able to fix these holes in pieces quickly, relearn them efficiently, and of course learn new pieces more quickly as well. Although I can and do play a bit by ear, I now see improved sight reading as being the only way I can really improve my repertoire at a rate that is higher than its decay, instead of just trying as I am to maintain it where it is while still attempting new pieces.

Unruly hedges.

Man. I feel like i'm in one of those English mazes...

...Steve