Learning by heart

[travellingminstrel]

So here's my story. I started playing piano when I was about 10 years old, relatively late I suppose when we compare to prodigies and musical geniuses. My family isn't particularly musical, my grandfather played stride piano and my grandmother picked up all the music hall favourites of the time, but neither my parents nor siblings are musical. I persevered nonetheless.

I took piano lessons until 18, playing in various jazz bands as bassist and saxophonist (piano performance was generally solo), went to university and studied music, studying piano there alongside plenty of other aspects of music. I went to a conservatoire and studied composition, and then topped it off with a doctorate. During this time I played in post-rock/emo bands when a teenager, contemporary music groups, an experimental jazz group, an experimental krautrock band, and most recently I've played Brazilian music in a motley crew of performers.

During all that time I've not been able to memorise music. I've always had some sort of score in front of me. Even when doing piano competitions as a kid, I always had to have the score in front of me, and when doing piano exams it was the same block. Despite learning the pieces for months, even nearly a year at times, I couldn't play more than a few bars from memory.

Recently I've been doing a lot more piano teaching, and I adopted a method in the last year or so where I would sing the contours or lines of the pieces to my pupils when they were struggling, and I find that when I encourage them to do the same they pick up the pieces a lot more easily. I often spend a more than an hour each day doing this with pupils, and it was completely involuntary at first.

Approximately three months ago I started learning a new piece (a piece by Scarlatti, although it's not really important), and found that I could quite easily remember exactly what I'd been practising the previous session. I then tried using the methods to memorise the piece that I'd tried and failed with when I was younger, and to my surprise I had quickly memorised the entire piece and was able to go back and start from anywhere in the piece I liked, like rewinding a tape. Previously I would play a bar and get confused about what note or phrase came next. I couldn't 'auralise' or 'hear internally' what the next section was, and trying to remember even got me confused about the part I had just played.

Suffice to say I was completely delighted and enraptured by this new skill, and I've memorised a lot of new pieces, and am able to recall them at will, with a similar ease to listening back using my internal memory. This has enabled me to overcome a number of difficulties I thought I would be forever beset by, not the least of which is the embarrassment of the reply to "Oh, you're a pianist! Could you play us something?".

Has anyone had any similar experiences with memorisation? Any tips for keeping or improving this newly-found skill?

[dima_76557]

@ travellingminstrel

I think your singing the lines was the last piece of your personal puzzle. You also taught regularly, so you were forced to systematize, structurize the material for others. This is a skill that should not be underestimated. It is intense involvement that does the trick, not this or that separate skill or approach.

One cannot say that "singing" and "listening" are the main factors for successful learning and memorizing in piano playing. In that case, all singers and all solfeggio teachers would be splendid pianists. I can assure you that, although they use the piano regularly, they are not.

P.S.: Analyzing all the details in a piece and working deliberately on my technique (not mindless drilling, but careful and deliberate quality practice) boosted my progress considerably. A piece worked on in this way never gets out of my "system". Singing and listening reinforces memory, of course, but it is only one of the many elements in memory for performance, and certainly not always the most reliable. I've had more than one experience when I "heard" the notes that were to come, but I couldn't make the link to what came next in terms of hand memory and keyboard memory.