Project: LEARN FASTER.

[ajspiano]

Except, of course, those individuals who would like people to believe that you accomplish something like the Appassionata in a week or so.

Well - thats a stretch for me at the moment. However, I have a good friend who majored in composition and as part of his degree a professor required him to completely memorise a WTC prelude and fugue per week. I also read recently of a professor that pushed students to do the same with whole sonatas.

I flat out would not be able to do that, but, the notion of me not being able to achieve something (anything at all actually) given some time and thought is something I find a little offensive. I guess I have a lot of self confidence.

Anyway - yesterday I set myself the task of learning Chopin Op 10. No. 6 in 1 week. I'm starting with something shorter and not to full of pyrotechnics so that I can focus on the rate of learning the notes without having to worry about technique too much. I will be adding new pieces and each time attempting to nail them to the wall in one week and detailing methods and results here.

Today is day 2 for 10/6 - will provide my first 'report' before the day is out.

[candlelightpiano]

I'm behind you 100 percent!!  I know you can do it!

[j_menz]

I wish you well in your endeavours.

I'm always amazed anyone can remember anything - not a skill I ever acquired.

[quantum]

If you knew that you needed to learn one P&F per week for a whole term, it doesn't mean that you need to be working on a said P&F for a period of only one week.  I would interpret that assignment as: present one P&F per week.  You could have been working on these pieces for several months, and present one a week as they become ready.  It is all about strategic learning.  

You would also need to understand the focus of the assignment.  I would guess that the point of learning one P&F per week is not to present a polished performance ready interpretation every week, but rather to develop an efficient technique in digesting large amounts of music in a short time span.  This is a very real scenario that professional musicians face, especially if you are working in the accompanying field.  

[ajspiano]

You would also need to understand the focus of the assignment.  I would guess that the point of learning one P&F per week is not to present a polished performance ready interpretation every week, but rather to develop an efficient technique in digesting large amounts of music in a short time span.  This is a very real scenario that professional musicians face, especially if you are working in the accompanying field. 

This was precisely the point - it was all about rapid internalization of the music. Performance quality was not necessary. The assignment was "take this P&F, memorise it by next lesson". It was then dropped the following week for a new piece..   alongside other more long term work.

This friend has his repetoire of performance works which include many of his own compositions - he can also kind of play pretty much anything within the standard well known repetoire - there are no gaps, he can get through whatever I throw at him without the need for a score..  its kind of like "wait..  oh yes, thats the one that goes like this right?? *plays really rough version of piece"

Its perhaps the result of the compositional focus - he was not often required to perfect a piece, but was often required to have a great understanding of the music behind countless pieces.

I'm purely planning to explore the idea of being able to do this - I'm not going to spend hours on end a day trying to master it in a week - rather test and adjust methods with the aim of being able to effortlessly process an entire work in a shorter amount of time than I currently can.

The "1 week" idea is kind of just a trivial target time frame that I may or may not achieve.

[ajspiano]

To run over progress so far (from yesterday)-

I have sight-read through HT, then played the entire thing separate hands 3 times and then began putting together 1 or 2 bars at a time. I worked mostly on the opening, which is also the ending and I can play it quite roughly HT - so I have infact already covered 50% of the piece on day 1. Today I have spent some time doing "away from the piano" work - essentially reading and re-reading the score, then reciting the notes from memory in my mind a bar or a half bar at a time.

Tonight I plan to cover some of the remaining sections of the piece at the piano, and I hope to be able to play through the whole piece by monday, mostly by memory. When I have more results I will explain what happened and how/why i think it did or didnt work..

[danhuyle]

Learning and memorizing one Bach P&F per week is a challenging task. So the goal is to learn a piece, i.e. learn notes without getting caught up with the other stuff.

I can learn a piece and play it slow with music if this is the goal? I've never been able to learn whole sonatas in one week. Maybe I should challenge myself to learn a complete piano sonata in one week?

I'm not concerned about memorizing at all. If a piece lets me memorize, then I'll memorize, if it doesn't force me to memorize, then I don't bother.

[starstruck5]

You must have been reading my mind AJ -good luck with the Chopin Etude!

[flyinfingers]

Good luck, AJ!  If anyone can do it it would be you!
Your passion for music is an inspiration and you're a darn nice guy too!

[ajspiano]

So I've been experimenting with different processes for memorising, and reading a little about the process.

Essentially (and no doubt highly simplified) when you read the brain process is different to that of when you play from memory - the signals fired between neurons are actually different. Thus in order for me to memorise faster I must immediately start playing from memory, not reading through repeatedly. I knew this already but it seems I wasnt really acting on it.

So the initial test process was as follows, away from the instrument - read half a bar of the middle voice (not the bass note or the melody) once. Immediately attempt to recall the names of the notes from memory. Regardless of whether I successfully recalled the notes, read the half bar again, the recall it, twice. Read again - recall 3-4 times. This was enough for me to then look at keyboard memory, I knew what the notes were so now I could focus on how to play them. I visualised the notes on the keyboard and imagined how it would feel to play them. I repeated the process of read/recall/read/recall until I could comfortably recall how to play the notes quickly and without the need to refer back to the score at all.

At this point I added in the bass/melody to the section and repeated the process again. Then did the whole thing for the next half of the bar, then put the whole bar together (all in my head). I worked through 4 bars like this and was sucessfully able to recall the whole thing in time with no mental stutters after about 15-20 minutes.

In theory that means I should be able to get through the whole piece in a touch over 2 hours. There's a problem though, 4 bars was enough to fatigue me mentally. But I think partially thats because the particular piece is perhaps harder to remember than others because the patterns within the notes are less discernable. Additionally, now that it is several hours since I did that I can no longer recall the passage without mental blocks.

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Another thing I attempted yesterday was to write out the score by hand - interesting. Turns out there was a mountain of information on the score that I thought I had taken in and yet a just hadnt. For example, I started by trying to write down as much as I could without having to refer to the score first which turned out to be very little, I actually didnt even know what the time signature was - I couldve used some thinking/ear skills to figure a fair bit out but that was not the point of the exercise so I just worked on memory.

Anyway, I also plan to write out several different versions of the score - one that is bass/melody (structural outline), one that it the middle voice (connectivity between structural points), and one that is the whole thing (memorising the whole unit together).. which will no doubt take me a very long time, but I suspect that I will speed up as it goes on and when i try it again on a new piece.

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also pushed to play through the middle E major section last night, not too challenging - will be looking at the return to Eb minor tonight.