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When I hear Shakespeare being rehearsed I get a completely different auditory perception when the books are dropped than from when they're read - even after learning the lines.

Those of us who drive to work on a daily basis seldom use a map or make wrong turns. We remember the journey. I know the location of every pot-hole and road surface change on my forty mile journey. It's not something I've consciously done and I'm not unique.

If we didn't memorise and learn we would not have progressed as a species. Many of us find memorising a crucial part of the learning process. I do. Even when playing familiar music from the score I play differently. I'm sure Richter does fine when following a score - I don't. Playing from the score hampers more than it helps me. Rock songs I play by ear and wouldn't countenance using a score.

I can also audiate at sight far better than I can play at sight.

I would not consider learning a new piece at the keyboard without first memorising the sound mentally but Jeff is new to reading and since he was the main participant during the Chopin Nocturne discussion and we were analysing it with a view to performance I considered all the things I felt might hinder playing from the score. I listed other things not just accidentals. I don't think they're a pain and take forever I just think they might have slowed down the reading if he didn't have a quick look beforehand, the same way that I looked at notes with more than three ledger lines or places where he might have to look down to make accurate leaps.

I know that not everybody consciously and actively memorises but going over aides-memoires can still help clarify the music in the head and allow us to hear features that might otherwise have been missed.

Not everything is black and white.

Yes, agree totally. Not awkward to play or remember, but awkward how it looks on the page when you begin to understand how it is written. Funny thus, the more you learn the more complex things seem to become. Not the other way around.


I once thought that people that played from a score, just needed the score. No practice, just the score. In other words they could see this Nocturne for the very first time and play it just as beautifully as Chopin intended. I've since learned that would be extremely rare. Even great performers such as Valentina and Chopinstein would have it well rehearsed prior to performing, whether reading or not.

So then, reading is more of a prompt of where you need to be at any given time within the performance. And in this context it is simply replacing or making remembering a bit easier. Neither has anything to do with how well one has practiced expressiveness and interpretation. By this logic thus it should make no (notta) difference, in terms of how well or how expressive it is performed. Thus, one is not better then the other, just different.

EDIT: Cross posted with Richard. Not a contrary view, just a little variance ... ie different

I learned some things about music study a few years in:

- There is usually more than one side to anything. If you try to get a definition of how something works, you'll fall short for that reason.
- For any truth, there is often an opposite one, and they are both right. As soon you as you stick to either, you have a problem.
- As students, especially in the beginning when everything is an unknown, we hold on to what we're told or read as an anchor. This flies in the face of the first two things. I would follow any thing too tightly and too extremely.
- If you are senior, teaching, or just explaining things, your "truth" may become an absolute for that reason.

I'm taking all this together, and applying it to the question of memorizing music and reading. What we have are experiences and conclusions by senior players. It's something to test out. It gives part of a larger picture. There may be different views and experiences, some even opposing, yet no need to choose which one is right or wrong. If we keep that in mind, then I think we're in a decent place.

A second thing is that whatever we think we understand may actually have deeper layers and more to it. Time and again, things that I assumed I knew about turned out to have surprising sides to them. I think reading music, playing music, developing music, are all in that category. I see that just in this bit of discussion. I am not a piano teacher and do not have decades of experience teaching. I'm still finding out about these things. They bit I've learned, it is a rich thing, or so it seems.

Reading both Greener and Richard. Questions come up on what it means to play from the score, or to learn music.

Reading can be different things. The one we see most frequently is "prima vista" - the thing an accompanist does when handed a score as she comes in, and has to play what's there immediately. It is a specialized skill. It is good to have some of that, so that you can go through a new score and see what it's about before working on it. Even here, you take a moment to look through the whole thing, consider key signature, modulations, ABA patterns etc. Analysis gives us the ability to recognize some of that.

Reading is also when you are working with a piece for a period of weeks, and you're going over familiar territory. If you perform with the score in front of you, it would also be the "familiar territory" scenario.

When you are working on a piece, reading may include examining the chunk you are working on. And here we get into the "awkward looking measure", and Greener being new to reading (but not to chord progressions). I would think that "reading" here involves examining that measure, seeing and hearing the patterns. Then you are playing what is in the score (reading), while anticipating some of what is going on because you understand progressions. You relate the unknown (notation) with the known (chords in the hand and ear), until eventually they become one. After a while, some of these patterns will go from your eyes to your ear - you see patterns, and you hear some of it.

Another thing that was mentioned there were measures with relatively high ledger lines. Those were played in octaves, and if you can see the octaves - as well as hear the pattern (if you're a 'hearer') then you can anticipate some of what is up high there. Those of us with mixed backgrounds have to see what we pull together between new and old.



This goes into another area, I think, which is where I'm in a learning phase as a student. This is the idea of developing and interpreting a piece. Horowitz is interesting, because his big ambition was actually to be a composer, but he was forced to become a performer when political events affected his family. So he looked at the score with the eyes and ears of a composer.

Actually reverse this. A composer starts with music in his mind, and only part of what he hears can actually get onto the paper. The symbolism is crude. If you are a by ear player, imagine the things that you improvise or invent, and wanting to put them on paper. There are things that can't be symbolized. So if you reverse this, you look at the score, and you see what you can draw out of that. The things like phrases, where a statement is being made, like parts of a "song" - what do you perceive in it? What do you want to draw out? The "little notes" that you found hard to remember, Greener, do they have significance as music? If you were creating this music by ear, would you have a reason for those little notes, and why would you have them?

So when these performers work on the music, they are not working to memorize it - they are working to develop it and make it their own. Memorizing would be part of what they do as well, if they aim to play from memory. But that's only part of what is happening. What we hear is a finished product, but the performer as crafted it in stages and parts - each in his own way.

Btw, these are random thoughts, fwiw.

They are “given” only in the sense that that are assumed to be correct. I have not seen the idea talked about that we are entirely capable of reading what is on the page yet using that only as a guide, free to change anything, any time. If I am reading non-classical music I may not play exactly what is on the page even when sight-reading it. By the second or third time through I will most likely be changing things considerably. I may or may not notate any ideas I have while doing this.

Correct.

For many it happens quite naturally and is relatively effortless. In fact, the slower the reading, the quicker the memorization, all things being equal. The reason is obvious. Is a slow reader is learning something that is expected to be played “at tempo” – and why would that not be true – then for obvious reasons such a player will have the music mostly memorized by the time he/she can play it full speed. That means that even if such a player is still staring at the page while playing at full speed, the music is doing very little good at all.

Memorization is also fairly effortless for people who have very fine visual retention. Photographic memory is rare, but some degree of visual memory of a score is common if not the norm.

I have none.

The better the visual retention, the easier it is to “read the music on the inside of the eyelids”. In other words, if you are the kind of person who can close your eyes and see the music, memorization is easy. But you may not HEAR anything you have memorized. That's a separate issue.

I did this myself for many years. The process may have been slightly different, but essentially it was muscle memory. I was not taught how to memorize efficiently. I used the “go magic fingers” method. It can be deadly in performance, for very obvious reasons. I now realize that even with no plan memorization was relatively easy when I was quite young and had to struggle hard to get the notes of difficult music. I was unable to come close to nailing the notes within the first two or three read-throughs, so the physical mastery of the music to the point of performance meant automatic memorization.

As my sight-reading ability increased, the exact opposite happened. The moment I reached the point at which I could nail something the first time, pure sightreading, it was natural for me to continue to use the music. So memorization became a separate and very annoying step. To this day when playing very difficult music I find the slow sections, easy to read and having no technical problems, very difficult and irritating to memorize, while any sections that demand that I do NOT look at the music are memorized automatically.

I think we can use something that is totally improvised as a contrast to something that is carefully notated and is meant to be followed faithfully.

Obviously playing “Satin Doll”, just getting the changes, then going off on an endless series of improvs is in a totally different world from playing Beethoven's Opus 111, where the notes are all but sacred – and should be.

But there is a ton of room between those two extremes. For reasons I have already mentioned it is quite possible to be fully aware of what is written and yet set yourself free to not follow it, to any degree.

Comments about this section. It was very difficult for me, as a child. It was a mass of accidentals. I had already memorize the sound, recording, but I could not arrange the data in an easy way.

Today simply hear it as B7 to E-----C7 to F7 to B7 to Eb.

So the "accidentals" are simply "notational accidents" that happen when a piece in three flats suddenly modulates up 1/2 step to four sharps when all the sharps have to be notated because there is no key change (the modulation is too temporary).

As a 6th grader playing this piece it was a mystery, so I had to play through it a lot and then just go with muscular memory.

Today I can effortless audiate it (and anything on that level that I have never heard nor played before), get the chord structure at a glance, then note instantly that the resulting downward bass line is inevitable because of the chords:

Bb---B/A----E/G#----C7/G----F----Bb7---- Eb.

In addition, as a person with nearly zero visual recall I can mentally write the music out in my head and see it, not as something memorized but as what would have to be written to represent what I hear in my head and fully understa.d

I have been very much involved in playing for musical theatre, and the same thing is true. But I think this is false analogy because what people do with their bodies totally changes when they are “off book”. It's a very different matter being entirely free to move your body, including both arms, then look at each other in scenes. The whole chemistry changes when the scripts are put away.

A better analogy might be to compare what readers do in spoken books, or what actors do when the speak the lines of characters in animations. I remember seeing Robin Williams years ago reading his parts for animations. He used a script. But he was also quite obviously improvising. There we are not concerned with what he looked like. Only the sound of his voice.

I think that comes much closer to what we do at the piano.

I don't. I just feel the need to state that fact. Let me amend that: I do if I am playing parts/passages that impair my ability to move freely and effortlessly while looking at a score. But if I am playing any part of a score that I could play with my eyes shut, without any extra physical challenges, I feel no difference. I am still free to change anything according to my mood at the moment.

What about a lead-sheet?

This is also true for me for the simple reason that audiation does not take into consideration fingering or technical problems.

I have no students who can scan music and memorize the sound without playing it. I agree that being able to do so is a worthy accomplishment. However, unlike you I am likely to dive in without first doing more than a very brief scan. I have had to do this countless time when accompanying or when having had scores thrown at me at the last minute with little or zero time to think before playing.

I also have students bring me music. I don't have time to think it through – lesson constraints. So I simply start playing, make note of problems as I push through. Anyone who reads ahead, absolutely necessary for good sight-reading, should be able to “audiate ahead”, much as when we do a cold reading of a page of a book we are able to read ahead and hear the worlds in our heads. Of course if we read aloud it goes much better with practice.

I think I agree with that. But rather than have a student simply take a quick look, I would have a student analyze the changes and notate them. This greatly accelerates learning and ultimately reading to, since a great part of reading is learning to see patterns and not to have to read every note – any more than you or anyone else is reading every letter of every word I am writing.

If I understand you correctly, you are saying that reading all the notes, in order, on auto-pilot, over and over, is a very efficient way of learning. Period. If that is so, I would agree with you. Or even doing the same thing in sections. And no, it is not black and white. Not only are their infinite shades of gray here – or grey – it may be more like dealing with an infinite of colors and so on.

Just because we share similarities in the way we learn, it is easy to assume that we learn in all ways in the same manner, and that assumption is deadly both for teachers (leading to very inefficent teaching) and for students (very misguiding ways of approaching learning).

deleted

FYI, Jeff, my baby pictures and baby playing are now on RST.

Sweet, on my way ...

Confusing. RST? Are these PMs that went astray?

Sorry to confuse. These previous posts may help explain ...




RST = Rostoskys serious thread. Please do take a look & listen.

Thanks, Greener.
and
link to same

I am continuing to read the thread with pleasure. I haven't had anything to add as far as analysis goes. I will say that I played through the Chopin Nocturne, very very slowly, for my mother, and she thought it was beautiful. I am becoming very fond of Chopin.

On memorization, I find it phenomenally difficult. I've been working on Clementi's Sonatina #4, first movement, for several months now, and just making very slow progress. I'm also working on memorizing three RCM level 1 pieces, 16 measures each, since December, and I have only in the last few weeks gotten two of them fully memorized (4 measures left to go on the third). So far the memorization on these three pieces hinders rather than helps my ability to interpret them well, because I'm so busy trying to remember the notes that I have very little mental space for expression. And it hinders my playing them at any speed, because I can't remember the notes that fast. I'm much better playing from the score.

I'm trying to learn how to memorize, plus I want to have some pieces I can play if I happen to come upon a piano with no music with me. So that's why I'm persevering. But it's really slow going. And just playing a piece a lot makes zero contribution to memorization for me. I have to make a very deliberate effort to memorize.

I don't read this thread for anything to do with learning how to play any particular piece. I just like thinking about how music works.

Very interesting situation. For me, I have always memorized subconsciously while working on a piece. After learning the piece and polishing it, I find that I have it memorized.

To work on memorization, I'd suggest working on very small sections of a piece, say 4 bars, and after memorizing that little bit, play it again and again, from memory, on the metronome. Every few times you play the excerpt, move the metronome up one "tick". You will find that after x repetitions you develop something called muscle memory, where your fingers after playing a piece over and over instinctively remember where to go. This will enable you to play more fluently, accurately, and quickly from memory.

For the more advanced musicians on this thread, what do you think about a "Concerto Analysis" thread? It would be in the Pianist Corner board, and would be basically the same as this one except 1) we would analyze concertos rather than solo pieces and 2) we would go more in-depth with the analysis. I could initiate the thread and try to keep it on topic.

That counts me out straight away. Although I like to think I have done a reasonable job of keeping up here, and while learning a tremendous amount -- I didn't even know about minor scales when we stared, or key change modulations that weren't marked on the score as such -- and we have ventured into some far deeper topics since.

I'm game to follow whatever is presented. One challenge I think we have had on this thread is being TOO advanced already for the interest of some Adult Beginner followers. And there is quite a bit more to cover in the natural flow of this Sonata Analysis that is already on the radar, I believe.

You are quite likely to find interest on the Pianist Corner board. For me personally though, I am challenged plenty here and do not reckon to be advancing beyond Adult Beginner ... ummm ... ever.

Polyphonist, I would happily follow a concerto analysis thread, and even try to contribute . Do you have any particular concerto or concertos in mind?

I'm going to start the thread right now; maybe you could make a post there in a few minutes?

I don't think memorising level 1 pieces is going to be that much of a benefit. I have difficulty learning easy pieces. There's little or no intellectual engagement. I'm better off when there's more going on and the techniques aren't easy enough to pull off in a couple of ten minute bursts.

Give me a difficult passage with awkward fingering and blind asymmetric leaps and I'll have it memorised before I can play the blessèd thing at half speed.

Analysis is a worthwhile activity in its own right but it is also a crucial first stage in the learning process for some of us. It's the stage where you find out where the musical landmarks are by investigation instead of by hearing them through possibly flawed techniques. Where does the piece climax? Where does it build tension and where release? How should this passage be phrased and what is its context in the piece?

We need to build physical techniques for playing, we need to develop reading skills because it's the only direct means of communication we have left with the masters who wrote many of the works we now play and we need to build memorisation techniques so that what we learn is not forgotten. This doesn't mean we have to memorise our pieces and play without the score but we do better knowing the music and how to express it beyond what's on the page. Any good reader looks ahead in the score not at the notes they're currently playing - in other words they read a measure, and play it from memory as they look ahead at the next measure. They recognise chord shapes, scale runs and arpeggios from memory of the patterns not from reading the individual notes rapidly.

Anyone who improves a piece of music by repetition is memorising the music, consciously or not. So whatever we do at the piano for practise should involve improving our technical equipment, our reading ability and our memorisation ability. It doesn't mean we have to memorise all our pieces - that's a discipline reserved for those that prefer to work that way and those that want to enjoy the benefits of mental play and practise away from the piano.

For those that audiate from the score rather than just recognise the notes reading imparts so much more and effectively allows playing by ear what's being audiated from the score. My own memory is sound based not staff based and I can only write out the score by working out the notes from memory not by seeing the score in my mind's eye or memorising the staff.

I don't hold with the notion that memorising is wrong (for this thread) or that mentioning features of the music that might help the memorisation is wrong (even if all we're memorising is the expression in the music). Just knowing (or feeling or hearing) that the music moves from tonic to dominant, for example, and thereby increases the tension allows our creativity to enhance that tension in our playing, our audiating or our listening whether we get louder or quieter or faster or slower or just make subtle alterations. This is musical expression. This isn't written into the score. It is memorised. Perhaps for some it is done afresh each time but I suspect they'd be in the minority. You remember how the music goes - not the notes, any old reader can do that - but the music, the interpretation, the passion, the personalisation.
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I use the metronome differently too. I use it to restrain myself and increase my control not to chase tempo. I prefer to increment it When I feel it's holding me back - I don't increment it and try to keep up with it. I have a speed at which I can practise a piece without error periodically through the year and only take it up to tempo for a week or two now and then. Speed comes from practise, repetition, assimilation and confidence not from trying to catch a faster hare though that might increase the motivation periodically or test the ability.

My own method is to practise only as much each day as I can hold in short term memory after a few plays. I have generally memorised the sound of the piece by listening and audiating daily before I venture to the piano. I preview a passage by playing it mentally, then actually play it, then review my performance. I repeat that between three and seven times. I use fewer repetitions as my confidence grows in the passage. When I can play the notes correctly from memory each day I move on to the next passage but keep the previous material, still in short phrases, until I can also play them with the correct phrasing, dynamics, pedalling and articulation every time too. For a while that's done daily but as I progresss through a piece early material gets repeated only every few days or weeks etc.

I may still need to get out the score for another week or two each time I go over a passage but this gradually reduces. When I can play all the passages without getting out the score I'll start putting them together in larger units if I haven't started doing so already.

An easy piece that's playable, slowly or otherwise, from the score may never get memorised unless I specifically want to add it to my repertoire. Bach preludes, Clementi sonatinas, Chopin mazurkas and Grieg lyric pieces are among such pieces for me. They consitute my reading matter at weekends. I could manage many of them most of the way through from memory, I'm sure, but I don't feel the need to try.