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John,
I tell my students to play "so slow it sounds stupid." That pretty much brings it down to a speed at which their brains can think (not to insult their intelligence, but the brain need sit slow enough to be able to process it!).

And Betty, I agree that memorization is a good skill to teach students. I have my students participate in Solo/Ensemble and WMTA Auditions in which they have to memorize. Every once in a while I'll have them memorize something for a recital, or the student will choose to do so. A piece performed from memory will stay with them for a long, long time. I even recall songs I memorized as a child! There is some value in this.

This may be an area where there is a substantial difference between the young beginner and the adult beginner.

We oldtimers have significantly more difficulty memorizing anything. At 55 I struggle to do so, and if i don't play something for a week it's largely gone - sometimes in much less. It's often said that the repertoire you memorize by age 20 will always be with you, and that seems to be my experience.

But what memorizing I do manage can be largely done before the piece is well learned. Of the four types (i would say there are five - I think visual memory of the score differs from a visual image of the keyboard and/or fingers) only tactile would have to wait. The other three or four can easily be done prior, and probably would help the learning process. Certainly for small sections I am more secure if I can retain the visual image of the score and the aural image of the sound while practicing, and then tactile follows naturally.

It bothers me when I read the old tale suggesting that we have some kind of mental deterioration or inflexible mind hard-wired into our system, like a programmed auto-destruct. We're the same age. My ability to learn, retain, think clearly, acquire both music and language, are much greater than they were when I was young. It is a matter of mental habit and approach.

It is possible that some people in their fifties cannot remember things as well as when they were younger. It is possible that some of these people simply are not accustomed to memorizing things anymore, or have mental habits that interfere with that memorizing. The others might actually have that difficulty. This does not mean, however, that everyone who is in his 50's has that difficulty. Nor does it mean that a 15 year old will learn better and faster than a 55 year old, because of age.

Did you try to learn music when you were young, so that you have a point of comparison? What bothers me about the theory of age-related disability is that it may prevent someone from acquiring skills. If I believe you have a disability I will not try to help you. But if I believe you may not yet have an effective approach, we would examine that approach to find out why it's not working and what we can do about it. As soon as we believe we cannot do something because of age, race, dietary habit, culture then we have put ourselves into a position of helplesness.

It's not an old tale. It's true. There is plenty of research to show that memory and certain types of learning, particularly language, decline as we age.

There are physical changes in the brain that are seen on MRI. And people who start piano young have changes in their brain cells that people who start older don't have.

Rather than claim it isn't true, we need to find strategies to deal with it and work around it.

There are trombone solos I memorized when I was 12 that I have no trouble playing today - some of the Arthur Pryor stuff, for example. Yet this past summer I memorized IGSOY three separate times, and still can't play it.

Children soak up a foreign language almost without effort. People my age work their rear off, with little success.

Ask any experienced, er, mature pianist if they can still play the stuff they learned as a child. I'll bet they can. Now ask them how long it takes to memorize something new.

I am a linguist. I am learning my 6th language in my fifties. I am teaching a new language simultaneously to a fifty year old adult and a 14 year old child in separate sessions. Both are doing well, both have five languages under their belt already, and both are progressing at about the same speed. In all cases I am applying my expertise, experience, knowledge and methods that I have put together over the years. I am learning things faster and more effectively and mastering them to a greater extent than I did in my late teens or early twenties. When I teach, I do not just teach language, I also teach approaches to learning the language. I speak with a fair amount of fluency.

What are the variables and circumstances that these researchers take into account? Is it immigrants who try to learn the language in a classroom situation? Are they learning language by trying to read first? What approach are those trying to learn a language using - I mean deep down approach?

I believe the hang-up is right there: in how we approach what we are learning. How many of us will adopt a childlike state and allow ourselves to learn without filtering or over-directing ourselves? What is the actual process, moment to moment, in learning something new? If the process is at fault, then memory capacity is not the issue.

I can and do soak up foreign language without effort. I am your age. I do not work my rear off.
Ask me. At least the same amount of time, but probably less time, and retention is better.
What happens to the physical blobs of gray matter does not concern me. I understand that we only use a fraction anyway. I am concerned with what I am capable of doing, and what people I tutor are capable of doing. If they can do what the research says they cannot do, then I would rather question the research - and do so gladly.

I do not like such theories being put out as fact, because negative expectations can cause those things be dint of those expectations.

We are not exactly on common ground, but close. What is true is that many adults experience difficulty learning languages and learning to play a musical instrument. Furthermore, the two keep being linked. But then we get to our measurement-crazy relatively superficial scientific ways. I'm not convinced that we are looking at the right things. We may even be looking at symptoms and considering them as results of the hypothesized ailment.

I don't have the time to develop the ideas and they would be OT to this thread in any case. But generally speaking I believe that capacity to remember, diminished abilities, or the image of impressionability as though young people were warm wax and we were hardened cool wax -- I don't believe in these things --- especially not as fact.

I believe that the manner in which we approach things and absorb them, how we direct and over-direct ourselves, the process of learning in a fine and intimate consideration of it, is at stake in a lot of cases. I have my theories, and I'm seeing what is happening in my own case. Either I'm an anomaly or there is something to it.

I can accept the hardened-wax model of human memory if presented as an hypothesis, but not as a fact. Believing in such things as facts can be debilitating. In addition, if it's not true, a student with a healthy mind, good capacity for learning, may be facing a teaching population who will not aim for much because the model has predicted limited capacity. Teaching literature is full of self-fulfilling prophesies, whether it be women, Blacks in certain historical periods, those belonging to the lower classes. The inferior abilities of any of these classes was always a "known" fact. I would rather err on the side of optimism than to become self-limiting.

I think for me the relevant question would be choice of approach.

Some of the posters above advocate learning a piece as the primary, with memorization likely to appear along the way.

But there are a number of teachers who advocate a different approach: a focused attempt to memorize a piece first, before (and as part of) the attempt to master it.

Either is possible. When I was young by the time I'd learned something it was pretty much memorized without the effort. As an oldtimer that no longer happens. I don't know why - the conventional wisdom says our memory declines as we age, despite keystring's isolated counterexamples. It is true for me. That doesn't mean i can't memorize, merely that it is difficult and doesn't stay with me.

So it might be that the teacher who has only young children would want to approach this topic differently from those who have a substantial component of adult beginners.

It's worth considering the role of the ego in memory - the wish to know how/that something has been stored. It adds considerable stress to the system and is something I don't think young children bother with.

Why would ego be involved? I memorize music and cooking recipes because it's handy.

It is stressful and potentially debilitating, however, to ascribe to the belief that at a certain age we are subject to incremental deterioration and a kind of hardened inflexibility which will render us increasingly incapable of doing and learning. Then we may find ourselves fighting our supposed disability, looking anxiously for signs of what we "still have left" - all round it is a harmful and unnecessary thing.

If some common weaknesses in the learning by a given age group are actually matters of habit and behaviour, then it is also senseless to not address and change these habits in order to make learning effective where it is not, and break through the resulting barriers.

I gave my examples which come from an approach that addresses learning behaviour itself on a deeper level. There were two reasons for presenting it. One involves success through approach, and the idea that approach can make a difference (therefore disability is not necessarily involved - perhaps hardening of habit). The second is that if two people of a certain age are not having the results that are being put forth about age-related limitations, then in the least those limitations cannot be an absolute fact.

It attempts to 'anchor' our memories but in realty the water's too deep. Why? Insecurity, I would guess.

Oh, I understood "ego" in the sense that it often seems to be used by music teachers - pride, hubris. In the sense that you are using the term, I don't know what "it" (the ego) does. "I" set out to memorize the music I play or sing, and haven't encountered any difficulties in doing so. Vocal is a bit harder since you must also memorize lyrics, sometimes in a foreign language, as well as not having any physical reference for pitch if you want to sing a capello, on key, and remaining on key. But it can be done. My biggest challenge was Mozart's Requiem two years ago, having joined the choir when it was already in its third or fourth week. I have no idea what my ego was doing, but that Requiem is still stored in memory where I can pull it out any time I want. I don't know about deep waters. It seems a normal thing to do. But I also see memorizing music as something that is done with understanding, underlying forms, rather than rote chains of notes - the idea of unfolding a sensible sequence, so to say.

I think it was Merleau-Ponty somewhere who commented that the problem with the cogito is not the '...therefore I am' but the 'I think'. Thoughts do not of necessity posit a 'thinker'. (as neither do memories)

I'm not sure how I can use that. Whether or not there is an ego, or what that ego might be, it is possible to memorize things and it's not that hard. There are ways of approaching it.

Yes, there is an ego and no, memorizing is hard.

There is an ego. I cannot use that in the practical application of memorizing music. I do not find memorization hard, and I use a process to do so. Do you have strategies for memorization to help those having difficulty, since that is the purpose of this thread? I still don't know how to make use of what you are presenting.

Unlike keystring, I've always found it MUCH easier to memorize vocal music than piano repertoire. For me, remembering one pitch (and word or syllable) at a time is much more "do-able" than remembering fistsful of notes. And it also makes more sense to me to perform vocal music from memory, because the performer can look at and interact with the audience as he/she presents the text as well as the tune.

Except for the occasional student who has perfect pitch, my piano students who also sing all tell me that it's easier for them, also, to memorize vocal music. And although I've never required piano students to perform from memory, I do require my vocal students to perform without the score. If they have a slip, they can glance over at their accompanist (yours truly!) and I will "mouth" the words.

Also, I notice that the school-sponsored solo & ensemble contests (for middle and high school students) require vocal contestants to perform from memory, while instrumentalists (including pianists) are not required to memorize. Instrumentalists do, however, have to play scales.

True. Melody is an aid to memory. All oral traditions - epics, sagas - are singing traditions.

Lalakeys, a correction to what I seem to have conveyed. I do not find it more difficult to memorize vocal music. There is more to memorize since lyrics must be memorized, some with stanza after stanza. Once or twice the lyrics just won't gel. To whit:

(Lost Lagoon - Pauline Johnson)

"It is dusk on the Lost Lagoon,
And we two dreaming the dusk away,
Beneath the drift of the twilight grey,
Beneath the drowse of an ending day,
And the curve of a golden moon.

It is dark in the Lost Lagoon,
And gone are the depths of the haunting blue,
The grouping gulls, and the old canoe,
The singing firs and the dusk and you,
And gone is the golden moo-oo-oonnnn.

O lure of the Lost Lagoon,
I dream tonight that my paddle blurs
The purple shade where the seaweed stirs,
I hear the call of the singing firs
In the hush of the golden moo-oo-oo-nnn-nnnn-nnn."

It's the only one I have never managed to memorize completely. Especially problematic are:

"purple shade where the seaweed stirs, ... call of the singing firs..."

mixed itself up with ...
"depths of the haunting blue - grouping gulls, old canoe, singing firs and the dusk and you"

I would forget what colour the shade was, and also end up with "squawking gulls, old canoe, purple pines and the dusk (dawn) and you...."

I have memorized lyrics in English, German, Latin, French, Croatian, and Italian - but the purple pines et alia elude me to this day. Can anyone figure out why?

KS

Addendum: When I was in my first ultra-amateur choir, the singers had to memorize the music by rote, played by the pianist. The also associated the melody to the words. A section that had a vowel, such as "oo-oo-oo-oo-oo" as though instrumental would have them totally lost. (It was one particular piece which had me catch on to that.) On the other hand, instrumental-type "oo" music had me right in my element. I would learn the melody and attach the lyrics. For them it was the reverse. I would also study and hear all the voices, so that the various harmonizations, fugal type passages or whatever would play themselves out in my mind.

My way of learning music was not compatible with the last choir either, even though admission was by audition. For me the music had to make sense. We were doing a Requiem of the classical era. I studied the passage, understood its structure, where the modulations etc. were. When I learned to sing the music, even initially sight reading, it had to be in the framework of its structure.

I joined the choir late and they told me the wrong movement for the next rehearsal. Even this choir was learning by rote and the music was "meaningless". The accompanist would play a sequence of notes, as much as their memory could hold, and they set about memorizing this chain of notes and then going on to the next chain, interval by interval. I couldn't function like that. I sat in the back for half an hour, pencil in hand, studying the the music, making little notes half in solfege, half in notes about harmonic progression (modulates to dominant etc.). Then I was able to function with the choir. However, then I had a new problem. I had the passage down pat and it was half memorized, while they continued chain-learning which took forever and it was unpleasant to sit through.

The choir gave me a CD which they all memorized by playing it over and over wherever they went. I don't function like that. I studied the music, its structure, worked on difficult passages. Within three weeks I had the entire Requiem memorized. The choir needed its notes to the very end. I started using the CD after I had memorized the music for timing, remembering points of interpretation etc.

What I was seeing were two ways of approaching music and memorizing that music. I related to music in a totally different way than the members of this choir. Within a single rehearsal I learned passages they were working on the second week in a row, so that I was able to sing them consistently within about 10 minutes of any passage, while they struggled. This has to be approach and not ability. If I had tried to approach the music in the manner that they did, I would have struggled as well.

Might these experiences be pertinent in the present context?

Probably not.