Performance / Analaysis

[Bob]

Is it better to write out an analysis...

OR...

"Learn" the analaysis so you can "read" it right off the page?




I'm thinking it's better to be able to read it off the page, nothing written down.  If it's written down, that's nice, but it's really not helping me much unless I can instantly see and know those things on the page.  That made me wonder why bother writing the analysis down?  Instead just analyze and read it off the page.

What do you think?  I'm just worried that my written-down analysis will stay written down -- not in my head, but on the paper.

Still... writting it down might help in some way.  To have the ideas there and pick up later... or see larger patterns... but it doesn't seem to be as "deep" in my mind that way.

[nolan]

I am at the point where I need to write things down. There are just some relationships that I don't notice until I intensely study and write out the analysis. But I find that writing things down is a great way to learn a piece really well. It serves to ingrain the theoretical aspects of a piece into my mind.

I feel that until I can see those relationships instantly every time I read the music, there is nothing wrong with writing it out.

[rc]

I used to write a lot of analysis on the pieces I've learned, but I don't think I've ever really looked at them afterwards, heh.  I tend to figure it out as I go and memorize it anyways.

What I wish I did more often was write down some fingerings, especially where I'm not using the editors fingerings...  That screws me up down the road.

[ramseytheii]

Is it better to write out an analysis...

OR...

"Learn" the analaysis so you can "read" it right off the page?

I'm thinking it's better to be able to read it off the page, nothing written down.  If it's written down, that's nice, but it's really not helping me much unless I can instantly see and know those things on the page.  That made me wonder why bother writing the analysis down?  Instead just analyze and read it off the page.

What do you think?  I'm just worried that my written-down analysis will stay written down -- not in my head, but on the paper.

Still... writting it down might help in some way.  To have the ideas there and pick up later... or see larger patterns... but it doesn't seem to be as "deep" in my mind that way.

I think you have hit on one of the main tasks of the pianist, and maybe the most important because it's the task that is never finished.  Neuhaus calls this seeking out the "artistic image."  If I may presume to say so, I believe you are searching for a way to know a piece as strongly as if you could actually touch the elements of its composition. 

Conservatory gives the tools for analysis, for objective identification of those elements, but rarely does it provide fodder for the subjective characterizations that guarantee we will know something as we know ourselves.  Neuhaus writes: "work on the artistic image can be successful only if it is the result of the pupil's continuous development musically, intellectually and artistically.... without this there can be no 'implementation,' no 'embodiment.'"  The teacher must develop the student's "imagination by the use of apt metaphor, poetic similes, by analogy with natural phenomena or events in life, particularly spiritual, emotional life."

Neuhaus talks about the difficulty of showing how to do this without direct contact with the pupil, but he does give a few prescriptions: "the pupil should study a piano composition as a conductor studies a score, that is, not only as a whole... but also in detail, taking the composition apart to see its component elements, the harmonic structure, the polyphonic structure; taking separately the main elements..., the secondary elements... to dwell particularly on the decisive 'turnings' of a composition..."

Your question deals with half of this problem, the second half of taking a piece apart to see what is inside.  But also those concrete things have to have poetic counterparts, and I think this is really the key to learning something inside and out, to make it personal and subjective.  A harmonic progression will more or less be the same for everyone, but if you can identify it with something you already can visualize, it becomes yours and only yours.

To this extent, I mark up my score a lot, but not in a way that clutters it.  I compare my work marking the score to buildng a house in the forest: you want an architect who will build the house fitting into nature, not one that just razes two dozen trees and fills the space with a foreign object.  I use colors to follow linear horizontal lines, and I keep them as uniform as possible.  I try to also connect similar sections that appear at different parts of the piece by using similar colors. 

I don't have synesthesia, but I can still pick out from a lot of colors, one which I think appropriate either to the mood of a section, or a series of colors which I think appropriate to a hierarchy of voicing.  Usually red is principal, blue is bass (I think of blue as a "deep" color), green and orange or pink on the inside. 

I don't mark everything, just things that are not self-evident.  However don't underestimate the simple power of identification (saying to yourself, "this is the melody and this is the accompaniment, and this is the harmony it follows). 

This feels rather vague typing it in, but I hope you can find some inspiration for your problem in this mass of words.  I recommend Neuhaus' "The Art of Piano Playing," especially the chapter on "Artistic Image."  I think it is just what you are searching for!

Walter Ramsey