Memorization process question

Most of my memorization process is basically muscle memory.
There is a big chance that I will lose my spot and I will not be able to continue. That is why ,if possible, I always perform with music in front of me, but it just does not look cool performing that way. Do you guys memorize note by note and phrase by phrase until you really remember the notes that you need to press at any bar? Please do help on this. Thx in advance.

I've never tried to memorize note by note, but I do memorize structures within a piece such as starting notes in phrases, intervals, chords and scales. For example, I might remember to start a "chunk" on a F minor chord or perhaps begin a progression of thirds on a C. I sometimes practice a piece in chunks, backwards or forwards, to test my memory of those starting places. If I get lost, I can always return to one of my starting places and recover. Occasionally, I try to "write down" the piece in my head, but I've never actually tried to write it on paper. I can also visualize places in the score.

Thx Deborah. It really helps to know the memorization process.

Are you able to hum the melody line from the beginning to end?
Is this one of the way to ensure we remember the flow of the music?

RonaldSteinway:

First, it is completely historically valid to use the music. Bach, Haydn, Beethoven and Mozart did. In his later years Svyatoslav Richter peformed with the music, with a small lamp on the piano, and a page turner. And, very recently, Anthony Tommasini, chief classical music critic for the NY Times, wrote an entire article on the properness of doing so.

Secondly, regardless of whether you use the music or not, it is most important that you learn your music in terms of not just only the notes but also the underlyng harmonic structure.

That means that you go through every piece and you write in pencil above each chord what it is, using letter names just like a jazz or pop piece.

Once you do that, then you start to organize your fingers laterally on the keyboard according to what you see vertically on the score. Each key is a whole or a half step corresponding directly to that chord.

Once you get a sense of how the work is put together, then you will develop a more natural sense of flow.

I bet you can walk around your house in the middle of night without bumping into things. That is due that fact that you already know where everything is. The piano is no different.

If you know your music, even if you temporarily slip up, you will know where you are, and you will be able to continue. There has not been a concert pianist in history to whom it hasn't happened.

Accordingly, how you memorize a piece has a lot do with how it is compositionally put together. I memorize Bach, one hand at a time. Some teachers have you sing along. I find that tedious, but if you can't sing it, then you can't play it.(F.Busoni)

The fastest learners are those who can sight read it, sing it in their head, and follow the harmony all at the same time.

Good luck.

Yes, but for me, this comes effortlessly. The hardest part is interpreting the melodic lines. Sometimes I "play" the piano in my head, trying to identify the phrasing and rubato. Sometimes I "listen" to the music in my head but imagine an opera singer's phrasing. I find this very helpful but also extremely difficult.

Oh, I forgot to mention, I find it helps a great deal to memorize the left hand alone, especially if it is jumping around. I always try to identify patterns to help me memorize.

If you can hum a tune you heard on the radio (or iPod or whatever) you have it memorized - whether you realize it or not.

This may seem overly simplistic but personally I just play a piece enough times (or a section of it) that I've internalized the melody and can sing it in my head or out loud. This of course builds muscle memory too - simple repetition.

Many of us I think make memorizing a more difficult task than it need be. Do you hum the piece to yourself when you're away from the piano? Good chance you have it memorized...there might be one or two trouble sections where your fingers forget where to go next...but that skeleton is in place.

Muscle memory is the least reliable memory type. Have you ever read The Musician's Way? It talks about how to build a mental image of your repertoire -- the music becomes such an innate part of you that a memory slip is nearly impossible.

I worked with a colleague recently who took a similar approach with me -- he had me take the first phrase of a piece, and describe it out loud. I had to describe what it sounded like, what the physical movements felt like, basically everything BUT the notes on the page. Afterwards, I was able to work through my pieces on my own, memorizing in this way, and it's true -- a memory slip is waaay less likely when you learn music in this way.

I agree with a couple posts here that using one type of memory alone is not good enough to memorize something as complex as a piece of music.

When I memorize something, I memorize the notes (visual), the movements (kinesthetic), the music melody/line/etc (aural), and I try to anticipate where the music is going (cognitive). Sometimes, to give my fingers a break, I will listen to a recording to help with the aural and cognitive sense of the music, and if I add the score, I'm adding a visual element as well. If it's a truly difficult piece, I'll watch a video repetitively and practice another memorization skill, imitation. (Not necessarily to play exactly like the performer, but to imitate the performer's movements.) But I haven't had to use that one in many years. The more advanced you get, the less you have to rely on imitation.. but at the beginning, especially, it can help quite a bit.

All, thx for the advice. I will try all these methods.

In this case, surely the "it" refers only to the melody and not to the piece. If I know the melody (themes) of a piece well, that doesn't necessary mean that I have all the complex harmonies, the accompaniment patterns in both the right and left hand, the various inversions of chords all memorized, too. There are more complexities to memorize than just the melody line.

Regards,

Great point. However at this point association often sets in. Generally memory in songs is triggered by a few different "points" in the piece - these points are usually the beginnings of sections and important phrases.

Being able to memorize the entire melody is a great starting point, because it sets your trigger points in place already. From there it is often easier to remember what left hand/embellishments/accompaniments go with particular points in the melody.

Personally I prefer not to use music for many reasons, among them, turning pages, how many books can you carry and how about poor lighting.

The more you study the more you will uncover what you don't understand and eventually conquer it.

Find the difficult passages and know exactly what finger plays which key.

It's very rewarding to know a score by memory that you once found difficult to sight-read....or to even play it with the score for that matter.

rada

No lie. If there even is a melody to sing - I sure can't sing Chopin's Op. 10, no. 1, for just one of an endless number of examples.

The more music theory I learn, the more I can break down a piece analytically in both macro and micro respects and while I've proven I can memorize music without the use of this knowledge, I find doing so incomparably easier and quite simply better through an exhaustive analysis (this understanding also translates to how to play the piece).

The singing melody is in the left hand ... with occasional countermelody amongst the right hand arpeggios.

This is the best advice on this thread! Thanks!

"Muscle memory" (better termed "proprioceptive memory", because it also comprises memory of what your joints are doing when your muscles contract) is essentially stored data specifically about the individual movements you've been making in the course of practising a passage, nothing more. It forms unconsciously and automatically as an inevitable consequence of just making the movements. The pianist's problem when playing is how to gain access to this data reliably and just in advance of when it's needed. I think the key to understanding how revolves around the general principle that all purposeful, voluntary movements are made and learned in the context of trying to achieve some very specific goal - which for the musician, is invariably some succession of well-defined, especially desired sounds. Your ability to mentally recall the particular sounds you wish to play next, automatically (i.e. by a formed association) accesses the "address" in the brain where the proprioceptive data needed for configuring each of the succession's required movements is stored. This ability to recall a passage's sounds mentally is clearly stated or alluded to in what everyone has posted here so far.

Being able to imagine the pitches of a passage's melody (or, at any rate, of the most salient voice of a passage) is usually sufficient to reliably accomplish this accessing. For me personally, though, I like to be able to imagine the complete sound that will be emerging from the piano following each playing-movement, as I find doing this causes my movements to be far more accurately controlled. But consciously absorbing them is much more exacting and painstaking work than just absorbing the sounds of a single voice, in my experience - especially in the case of atonal pieces!

Almost all of my practising time on a piece is spent trying to absorb and recall each sound in as much detail as I hear it in actual audible terms. By the time I'm satisfied I can do that, I generally find I've learned, along the way, an efficient movement for producing each sound faithfully and that I simply know which keys to move to next without any conscious consideration at all - so long as I'm able to keep my attention focused on the memorized sounds going on inside my head.

memorisation process

And all because of bum sight-reading skills.

Nobody memorizes a book ...
from the age of 6 years we learn to read the words ...
and can read a whole page from Harry Potter in 30 seconds flat.

“Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say
that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.
They were the last people you’d expect to be involved
in anything strange or mysterious,
because they just didn’t hold with such nonsense.”
(thank you JK Rowling)

So why the blight with reading a keyboard score?

Please chaps ... dump any persnickety response
lumbering through the history of music.

Why can we read a book but not a keyboard score?

without sounding like the piano needs retuning.

Reading a book is totally different from reading a keyboard score.

Reading a keyboard score needs much more processing capability.
When we read a keyboard score we need to:
1. Need to know the notes.
2. Need to know how many counts.
3. Need to know the location of the note.
4. Our muscle need to be instructed where to press.
5. Need to read both LH and RH.

All of these have nothing to do with memorizing the notes.

Neatly put Ron ... but questioned
“Reading a book is totally different from reading a keyboard score.

Reading a keyboard score needs much more processing capability.
When we read a keyboard score we need to:
1. Need to know the notes ... (letters of alphabet).
2. Need to know how many counts (long or short word)
3. Need to know the location of the note ... (grammar).
4. Our muscle need to be instructed where to press (eyes read).
5. Need to read both LH and RH (two eyes capture instantly).

All of these have nothing to do with memorizing the notes.”
(See bracketed responses ... as in easily reading a book)

I disagree with this to a certain extent. If we were talking about reading a book out loud, I would disagree almost entirely (based on the way it's worded), but as long as we're not reading aloud, the motor skills function is not necessary for reading. Once we start reading aloud, it is every bit as difficult as sight-reading piano music with one exception, which I will discuss at the bottom.

First, most people read around 250-300 words per minute. The average word has 3.5-4.5 letters in it. That's about 1200 letters per minute. Rachmaninoff's 3rd piano concerto, known for its many notes, still doesn't approach this figure. (Consider 30k notes, approx, at 43 minutes.. averages to nearly 700 notes per minute. Even if you take out the minutes the piano doesn't play, it averages less than 1000.)

We make up for reading by recognizing words instead of individual letters. However, for those who do not immerse themselves in musical scores, they do not pick up on groups of notes (chords, runs, arpeggios, groupings, etc). They simply see notes. Well, if you have to read all letters in order to understand words, you'd be reading books a LOT slower. So, now compound the idea that you don't recognize the "words" of music with the idea that there are nearly 3x the number of "letters", and the answer seems pretty clear.

Music is a language like any other, except we don't understand it as words, but rather process it as groups of sounds.

One major difference in processing power lies in the fact that we practice reading/speaking 8-12 hours a day since birth, but we certainly don't do that with music. Most of us read something every day we are alive, and I would wager nearly everybody speaks throughout the day. We also tend to speak in the language we read. These actions reinforce each other and make reading easier.

I would also wager that virtually nobody walks around reading scores of music for hours every single day. And I would quite easily wager that nobody puts their fingers on the keyboard as often as they speak. (For people with speech impairments, substitute sign language, writing with a notepad, etc.)

The second problem is voices. When we read/speak, there is only one voice we are trying to capture. It is either the voice of the character, your voice, or the voice of the person we're listening to. Processing multiple conversations simultaneously is something the brain is not hard-wired to be able to do. It can be practiced and learned, but you will still miss some things. The same goes for music: multiple "voices" create a particular sound with each passing bar of music, and the brain is not pre-wired to be able to deal with this. It has to be trained to internalize at least part of the process so it can consciously focus on one task.



All of this, of course, is disregarding the need to find the keys on the keyboard, which is both a similar, but also entirely separate, issue. Similar in that it is required for adequate sight-reading. Separate in that it has very little to do with the ability to literally read the "language" of music.

Hi Derulux ... you’d make a good lawyer for the Defence.

The problem with those who has been hard-wired into the
present system of notation is that they can’t see further than their nose ...
and settle for a crippled sight-reading lifetime.

But what if you change the form of a keyboard score ...
into an accurate graphic representation of the
PITCH, DURATION AND GROUPING OF NOTES ?

Makes the Rach PC3 a piece of cake.

Uh...no, the bass line is not a singable melody, it's just a bass line. And the tessitura of the "countermelody" is out my range.

Ha! I've been told that before. Most people who know me told me either to be a lawyer or play music professionally. Of course, being as stubborn as I am, I went an entirely different route.

Most of the time, I just like to point out different ways of thinking. But I always base my hypotheses on facts, and if someone brings to light facts/ideas I hadn't previously known or thought of, I consider them honestly and will quite often change my hypothesis to accommodate the new information(after some deliberation/discussion, of course).

Actually, it isn't a language like any other. One of the several reasons why it isn't: people have danced to music since prehistory, but do not dance to language.

Take away all the empty cascades of notes, but what are we left with? I cannot think of one major piano concerto which has more padding than Rach 3. He says nothing new, but rewrites his 2nd concerto with extra guacamole and the bloated interior of an unhealthy burrito made with pork carnitas.

I was reading through Beethoven's Op. 53 this afternoon, which I performed some years ago, but Beethoven makes his point in a fraction of the time, and far more efficiently.

Some things remain a mystery.

Gosh, btb, makes me wish you had some kind of examples handy for some kind of new graphical representation of scores.... But you wouldn't have anything like that to share, would you?

-J

I think his second concerto is a better piece of music, but I think the third works better as a real "warhorse" sort of concerto, where the soloist stands in front of the orchestra. There aren't really any moments in the second concerto where you can sort of stick out as being virtuosic. The fact that Rachmaninoff wrote his third in preparation for a concert tour I think reflects this. It really says the same thing as the second, just the language is less raw and is more introverted. It offers the soloist more possibilities in terms of varied expression and subtleties, which works for some performers (like Horowitz).

And before instruments, those people used their voices.

I always had the idea that we "process" music more as emotions than as groups of sounds...I guess it depends on what level you are looking at or what your point of view is...

Certainly motherese, which some evolutionary psychologists speculate is the origin of music, was all about emotional regulation and social connection.

In a very condensed sense, first we experience the world, then we learn to read, then we read to learn. We have it backwards in music. When reading a book we experience an inner life as rich as the world we live in. When it comes time to read to learn we already have knowledge about the stuff we need to learn. In music, when we start with step three we start with zero knowledge about the world of music.

Of course this is just one model, but I think it's the most practical, and it makes sense to me.

However it all initially transpired (and I'm not at all convinced they used their voices prior to rhythmically beating on things), the point remains - people dance to music, but not to language, and therefore, music isn't a language like any other.

It has been proven that music is processed in the same areas of the brain that language is - Broca's area. However, I don't think it's scientifically correct to say "music is a language" but rather that music and language share many similar properties. Here is an interesting article on research on the subject:

http://cel.huji.ac.il/courses/structureandprocesses/Bibliography/Fadiga_Annals_2009.pdf

Interestingly enough, there appears to be an association not only with music and language, but also with dancers and athletes as well as pointed out in the above article. Yet you would not say that sports are a language. I'm sure some may say dancing is a language and could make a case for that. I suppose in a loose sense of the term 'language' as something that communicates a thought or feeling, perhaps you could say music and dance are both languages. Not sure about athletic endeavors, though.

Yes, I know that music is, at least partially, processed in the same part of the brain as language. But that doesn't justify saying it is a language like any other. To me, anyway, it clearly is not.

I was agreeing with you that saying it's a language isn't quite accurate. Also, I wanted to post again because I decided having 6 quotes looked neat.

As a player of mostly contemporary music, I haven't memorized anything in years...except just recently. There's one non-tonal piece where the texture is constant, and motives are so self-similar but always different. Somehow, playing from the music did not help! So, with a goal of recording it this summer, I'm memorizing it. The hand movements, the intervals, the sonorities. I'm working a page at a time, from the last to the first.

It's only three to five minutes, but an insane three to five minutes.