Keep walking

After making my way through some baby steps towards a few memorized pieces, I established a few ground rules for future work, and I still follow these rules today:

Above all, program planning is of utmost importance. Memorization takes time, a lot of work, and a lot of maintenance. I have to be extremely careful to choose works that I feel I'll want to play for the rest of my life. Life is short, so why devote it to B-list composers or compositions? More so, why make your audience hear anything but the best? I'm sure that some audience members don't need to hear Bach's Italian Concerto again, but it's a useful

piece for any keyboardist to have in his or her repertoire--and it's an excellent piece of music. Without getting too much into how to build a program, just consider that every piece you commit to memory should be something that you'll play for more than one season. If not, is it really worth your time?

In that same vein and as one who returned to memory after years of playing from score, I focus at least 50 percent of my time on works I've already played. Why reinvent the wheel? If I've already played A-list works successfully years ago with music, why not make them part of my permanent memory? This approach immediately helped me to build some repertoire. In most cases, I've been able to memorize the previously learned (but not memorized!) music in less than half the time of new works. All in all, I try to keep a healthy mix of old and new repertoire, but all with the purpose of committing these works to memory.

Given my unique case, I feel that I have a big gap in the concerto repertoire, so I've also made learning one concerto at a time a top priority. Oh, sure, I have concerto repertoire...but now it's time to memorize it! In conservatory, we musicians are always forced to learn concertos with, quite possibly, little hope of ever playing them in front of an orchestra. But what if that opportunity arises? One never knows, and it would be a real shame to turn down a good opportunity. (As with many thoughts on this blog, this is the sort of thing I was told and taught years ago by my conservatory piano teacher, Michael Ruiz.) 

As discussed in the previous post, patience is extremely important when working towards playing by heart. For this reason, I insist on working pieces in different stages of development. Starting everything from scratch at the same time is deadly to one's patience, focus, and motivation! I'll go into more detail later when I discuss the use of a practice log and a timer, but, to start, a typical practice session for me might include these types of pieces:

• brand new work (30')
• review of almost-completed work (20')
• half-learned concerto movement (40')
• review of ready-to-go work (15')
• start memorizing previously learned work (30')

Again, I'll get more into this when I discuss the practice log, but it's important to note that the "ready-to-go work" takes the least amount of my practice time.

Finally, because memorized repertoire is permanent repertoire, it's a good idea to review what you've spent so much time to learn. It's probably impossible to keep everything fresh, but it's tragic to let your work wither on the vine. Is it possible to keep a full program ready all the time while learning another program? Maybe--although I don't have enough practice time in the day. But it should be possible to keep a half program alive. Since "ready-to-go" pieces take less time to practice, why not play 15 minutes of concert repertoire each day? Keep it ready, keep it fresh. Your audience needs you!

Starting to Memorize: First steps

When I started to work from memory again, I had to make some strategic decisions. How in the world was I going to do this?! I already had some engagements, and I couldn't just memorize a recital in a few months after being away from the process for so many years.

My initial thought was to learn a piece by heart and then play it on a program in which all of the other repertoire would be with music. But how would the listener perceive this? Would it seem pretentious to pull away the music for a "special" piece? Would it then be confusing to go back to the score for the rest of the program?

My solution, already described here in painful detail, was to play a short Bach work from memory on a program of otherwise non-memorized contemporary music. It didn't work. I quickly learned that my "memory brain" was palpably different from my "reading music brain." How so? It's difficult to describe, but each type of brain use seems to work different muscles.

As you've probably gathered, I don't give up too easily, so I started to explore other avenues. My first decision was to not think too hard about where and when I was going to perform. This decision can be described in one simple word: patience. Even since these first steps, I've had to return to that one word. One can not memorize well through speed and impatience. And if you're going to go to the trouble of memorizing, you might as well do it slowly and carefully so that it sticks. Patience.

My next decision was to think really hard about repertoire. I was starting small, with short works, but--as I now well know--there are plenty of short works by Bach that are really hard to memorize. So, I considered forms that I thought would be fairly simple:

• rondo (rondeau), also know as refrain forms
• binary (although, as we've already seen, I had some trouble with my first binary form)
• theme and variation (again, it depends on the piece/composer)

I decided to settle with a rondeau by Louis Couperin. This simple piece had a short, catchy refrain and a series of episodes (couplets) that lasted only about eight bars each. I knew, quite simply, that if I were to have a lapse in concert, I'd be able to get back to that refrain and them move on to the next couplet with ease. Best of all, the rondeau had a lot of couplets, making it a relatively long piece. Once I got the whole thing going, I had nearly seven minutes of music. Yahoo!

From that rondeau came another rondeau, also by Louis Couperin. I now had twelve minutes of music. And then a miracle happened: I was asked to prepare some recitals with a recorder-playing colleague of mine. The recital wouldn't just be recorder and harpsichord the whole time, so I would have a chance to play my newly memorized pieces. And so I did, to great success each time.

You might wonder how I moved from "reading music brain" to "memory brain" in these performances. It really wasn't that hard, especially since it felt more like moving from "accompanying brain" to "memory brain." I was only playing my solo music from memory, and that made all the difference.