Who do you find most difficult to memorize??

[nicko124]

The aim of this thread is to find out which composers are diffucult to memorize and which are easier. Obviously the entire thing is specific to each individual and you may find no difference between composers. I do find differences in difficulty.

Difficult to Memorize -  Ravel, Beethoven, Scarlatti

Easier to Memorize -  Liszt, Debussy, Gershwin.

I'll mention more when I can think of them but recently I have noticed the above. I'm not certain why I find the differences in difficulty between composers, it's probably based on the different styles they compose in.

For example Liszt composed in the transcendental style and this makes the passages stick out more. It's a good job I can memorize Liszt fairly quickly because it leaves more time to actually sole the technical difficulties.

Anyway please share experiences on this matter.

[thalbergmad]

Anything i don't care for I can't or don't want to memorize.

[musicsdarkangel]

i'd agree with thalberg.


If I had to categorize........

Hard to memorize:
Rachmaninoff (especially the concertos), Chopin, Bach

Easy to memorize:
Debussy, Mozart (quite debatable),  Ravel

.... really though it's all up to the pianist.  How much do you want to learn the piece....

[ryguillian]

I'm not speaking from personal experience but the most difficult works to memorize seem to be serialist works: Boulez, Carter (I'm aware he's not serialist; he uses all-interval chords in works like "Night Fantasies" and achieves similar results), and some Rzewski. I'm basing this off videos of seen: Pierre-Laurent Aimard performing "Night Fantasies"—he was using the score; Hamelin performing "The People United Will Never Be Defeated!"—he was using the score; et. al. The aforementioned pianists are of the highest skill and thus we can presume those works are the most difficult to memorize.

—Ryan

[hodi]

i find mozart easy to memorize
schumann - harder to memorize

[pabst]

from experience -

pathetically easy to memorize - chopin
painfully hard to memorize - schoenberg

[mikey6]

It depends how you memorize.  Analytical memory or learning harmonic motion can work for most compsoers but get's harder the further they venture into chromaticism and is rather pointless with atonality.  I find Shostakovich rather hard to memorise coz he sits on the border of tonality and advanced chromaticism.
Mozart can be difficult if you start thinking about all the scale passages, it's easy to get lost unless you have 'safety points' (for lack of a better phrase) at the begining of phrases or sections.
The difficulties with Bach is obviously the polyphonic writing, you have 3 lines or more to memorize, each doing it's own thing (unlike say chopin where one role is reduced to padded accompaniment - most of the time)

[steve jones]

I find Shostakovich difficult aswell. With his preludes and fugues there are very few musical 'landmarks' to guide you.

[quantum]

So far the most difficult for me has been Scriabin.  His middle and late period works follow his own brand of "tonality", neither major, minor, or atonal.  Chopin was seemingly difficult until I got into Scriabin, but now I find a lot of Chopin easier to memorize. 

Bach is also quite difficult when first learning a new piece, as the fingers have so much complex movements to make.  I find Beethoven lengthy at times, which may cause confusion between similar sections. 

[kghayesh]

- Easiest  Mozart, Chopin
Mozart's music is so simple yet its hardness is from how to play it musically.
I find Chopin's harmonic progressions so logical that many times i can figure out the notes without reading the score

- Hardest  Bach
Bach's polyphony in most of his works especially the fugues makes it so hard to memorize it HT. So, most of the time you should memorize it voice by voice which is a tough process.

[apion]

The more compelling I find a composition, the more motivated I am to memorize it.  Thus, pieces I adore are the easiest to memorize.

Brahms, Beethoven, Liszt, Mozart and Mendelssohn are easiest for me.

[kreso]

The most difficult composer for memorizing is deffinetly Bach!!
It's not so difficult to catch all tehe notes, but to play them on a wright way with so much voices and so much themes, is really hard work.
Check out the "The Art of the Fugue"...

[sara81]

DEFINETLLY BACH!

Even the 2-part inventions can be tough sometimes.
Imagine the fugues or preludes.

[tompilk]

Sorabji - Hardest... (I assume)
Beetoven - Easy for me...

[phil13]

Hardest: J.S. Bach.

Easiest: J.S. Bach.

Phil

[elisianna]

Hardest for me would be Bach. =P

Dunno about easiest. u.u

[pianistimo]

this makes me feel good because i can retain a lot of finger memory for bach - but find brahms really hard (or debussy), or chopin frustrating.  the scarlatti is easy for me, too.  and, beethoven and mozart.  i must be a romantic classicist.  i like to listen to all kinds of romantic music, but never seem to play it that well. 

barber's nocturne is one of the hardest pieces i've attempted to memorize.  it's not that hard, but you have to listen over and over to get the ideas.  it's fairly short (four pages) but a lot of modified repetition (as in brahms).  when your fingers are used to going one place - you have to actively engage the brain and say "no, don't go there - go here."

[rohansahai]

I find Prokofiev extremely treacherous to memorise

[arensky]

Bach.

[g_s_223]

Brendel, in one of his books, IIRC, said that Schumann was very tricky to memorise because he often repeats stretches of music with just slight changes. These minor changes are alledgedly quite disruptive to the memorisation process.

[sevencircles]

Serial music like webern, Schoenberg and Boulez.

Pollini has performed the hardest works of these composer live and technically perfected if I´m not entirely wrong.

[gouldfischer]

I don't find Bach difficult to memorize. Perhaps because everything is so... logical! Once you've seen where each voice goes, you can only think like "of course, it couldn't be any different". It's not like some 20th century material which seems kind of random...

It's like a chess position from a real game as compared to a totally random (and even impossible to be reached) placement of the pieces over the 64 squares. Tell an experienced player to look at both positions and then copy them from memory to an empty board. He will surely be able to remember the former (actually it's fairly easy to remember entire games, even those you played years ago), but that "random" position would, with all likelihood, not be perfectly restored.

Bach seems to me so perfect that memorizing is easy. I love Prokofiev, for instance, but to say that it's easier to memorize, say, his sonatas than Bach's fugues is, IMHO, an indicator that the person is trying to memorize the wrong way (note by note, for instance, instead of getting the phrases and their "roles" and vertical relationships throughout the piece), or that one perhaps lacks a deeper harmony understanding. I mean, if you're aware of the harmony motion all the time (like said mikey6), you'll find plenty of 'safety points' everywhere (often every beat is one).

Cheers, all.

[prometheus]

Yes. strangely enough, or not, a chess grandmaster does no better at memorising a chess position that would never appear in a game than a normal person.

This tells one a lot about how the memory works.

[musicsdarkangel]

Brendel, in one of his books, IIRC, said that Schumann was very tricky to memorise because he often repeats stretches of music with just slight changes. These minor changes are alledgedly quite disruptive to the memorisation process.

Same can be said about Chopin.

I can't STAND it!!