Mental techniques

Now that you've made it through the early stages of memorization, you've already got some good mental practice techniques. (By "mental," I mean "away from the instrument.") You also know that mental practice is essential to successfully playing by heart. With your regular mental practice, you will maintain and improve your visual, aural, and, to some extent, tactile memories.

The difficulty at this stage--well, with any stage, really--is to sustain freshness and alertness while doing what you have to do to keep a piece internalized. In order to be fresh and alert, you need to keep some variety in your practice. Otherwise, you might find yourself in thoughtless routine, and that could lead to some unfortunate surprises when you bring your piece out in public. Because I'm least motivated when it comes to mental practice, I find that this is the area where I have to be the most conscious about finding variety in my practice. 

Leapin' landmarks!

You've already read about some of my mental practice techniques. I do a lot with landmarks. For example, I might leapfrog landmarks, visualizing A then C then E, eventually returning to B then D then F, and so on. It's much more common for me to work backwards, starting at the end and then working, in reverse order, through each landmark. On the whole, I try to do this work with metronome, sometimes well below tempo and other times at or near my optimal tempo. (Oddly enough, my optimal mental tempo is usually a few clicks slower than my optimal performance tempo. I'm not quite sure why this is, but it could be that I'm more careful (i.e., less tactile) when I'm working a piece mentally.)

If I'm short on time or I really feel confident about a piece, I'll just review the starting points of each landmark. From there, I might go to play the piece directly. (I'll write about playing techniques for this stage in my next post.) Generally speaking, my mental work at this stage takes less time than the playing work--but that doesn't mean it's no less important. 

As I become more and more confident in my mental work and the playing of the piece, I might alternate days of mental work and days of playing work. This is not so much about time constraints as it is about keeping things fresh and varied. Also, by taking a day off from playing in favor of a day of mental work, new interpretive insights will emerge from the silence.

There's really an endless variety of ways to diversify your mental practice. The most important thing is to keep it varied and to make sure that your choices are conscious. For those reasons, I continue to work with a practice log, a timer, daily goals, a metronome...you know, all of those good habits. This isn't to say, however, that I don't enjoy the occasional unplanned mental practice session on the beach, in moments of insomnia, or in walking meditation.

With so many options available, what are some other mental practice techniques that you can think of? Post your comments here!

Respect!

In a previous post ("Daily routine, with variety"), I discussed the need to keep variety in one's daily practice. It's far too simple to do the same thing day after day. Now that you've got a foundation and you've entered this middle stage, it's time to reassess your daily routine. (Of course, I advocate this reassessment on a daily basis, but this middle stage will require a higher level of assessment. You're in a new place now!)

With your solid foundation, you'll find that you don't have to do the same thing every day. There's nothing wrong with just playing your pieces, and you should not feel obligated to do mental work and landmark work every day. At the same time, you don't want to let your foundation slide, so you might want to alternate days of mental/landmark work with "performance" days. Whatever you do, let your planning and decision making be conscious, and avoid letting routine become a crutch.

You've only got so much time in your practice day, so it's still important to keep working with a timer and a practice log--especially when you've got to maintain your discipline with other pieces you're working on. It's so easy to get excited when you're finally able to play an entire piece after having spent so much time crawling through those early stages of memory! With that in mind, you need to remember that this middle stage is still a stage in the learning process.

I write these thoughts from experience. If you've read the early part of this blog, you'll remember that I had a number of significant lapse experiences when I returned to memorization practice after so many years away. What was missing from my work was a respect for this middle stage. I had quickly memorized my pieces (the early stage, but much too fast) and then naively paraded them out in performance without respecting the need to establish a firm post-memorized foundation.

After spending so much time to memorize your piece, the unfortunate fact is that you're just not there yet. If you embrace this stage as a learning stage, however, you will approach the concert stage with the confidence of knowing that you can, indeed, play by heart. Hang in there.

Daily routine, with variety

This blog was started in May, the beginning of my summer practice season. Since I've only had one concert this summer, I've been using the season to set groundwork on a lot of new pieces. This has meant that my practice has been almost exclusively about establishing, as opposed to retaining, memory.

I'm nearing the end of this section of the blog ("In For the Long Haul"), so it might be

valuable for readers to see what I do on a daily basis while most of my practice is about establishing memory. Once the fall arrives, I'll still use most, if not all, of these techniques, but my relatively pure practice schedule will be muddied by the need to prepare for performances. If I haven't written it before, I'll write it now: I much prefer the learning process over the performing process! But more on that in subsequent chapters...

I begin my daily practice routine by writing down my goals for the day. This gives me a sense of what I'm going to do, of course, but it also helps me come up with a realistic time frame, and it keeps me from practicing with little regard for my own endurance. Breaks need to be scheduled!

Currently, my daily goals include several numeric indications:

• a ratio-like marking, such as 15:10, indicating for me that I'll do 15 minutes of mental work and 10 at the instrument;
• metronome markings, usually one for mental and one for instrumental work.

By creating daily goals, I can work toward creating variety in my practice. It's so easy to get stuck in a routine, and routines result in unproductive practice. I often find inspiration for variety by looking at my notes from the previous practice session. I can not stress enough the need to maintain thoughtful, varied practice, and establishing your daily goals is a very good way to do this.

I like to use a table for mental practice. I used to use the sofa, but my poor posture equaled poor results. My practice space also includes a music stand. The stand sits next to the instrument, and it's where my score sits when a piece is becoming really solid. This assures that my eyes aren't on any music, but it allows me to easily refer to the score if I get into trouble.

At the earliest stages of memory, I'm either working completely away from the instrument, or I'm dividing my time between mental and instrument work. I work by landmarks, as I've already written about. If you've attempted to interpret my online practice log, you might have seen that I like to jump around a lot with my landmarks. This is part of my drive for variety in practice. If I were to always start from the beginning, I wouldn't be developing a fully dimensional understanding of the piece.

One of my big summer challenges has been the third movement of Bach's D minor Concerto. It's quite long, and there's a lot of just-about-but-not-really-repeated material. That's very Bach! With this movement, I've had to take landmarks to the next level. Because so much of the musical material seems repeated, I've classified the landmarks into several categories:

• those that resemble the first half of the ritornello;
• those that resemble the second half of the ritornello;
• those that follow a deceptive cadence;
• completely original episodes.

Since I used letters for my landmarks, these groupings look like this:

• A, D, [F, G], J, L, P, T
• [B, C], E, O, P
• H, M
• [I, I1], [K, K1], [M, N, N1], [Q, R, S]

Earlier in my learning process, I would play each landmark up to four times, stopping when I felt that the landmark was minimally acceptable. I'd write that number down in my log with the goal of reducing that number over subsequent practice sessions. At this point, I've got all of the landmarks down pretty well, so I'm working towards differentiating each by grouping, thus creating a mental map of the movement. I'm also working towards playing the entire movement slowly with that map in mind.

My description of the Bach movement isn't really intended to be understood by you. It's there to show you some of the ways I use variety to keep my practice fresh as I march towards the goal of total memorization. 

One of the great challenges in the early stages of memorization is time. When starting a piece, a lot of time isn't required. You're working mentally, possibly at the instrument, but you can only do so much. But once the piece gets closer to total memorization, you need more time to think through and play through all of the landmarks. Fortunately, once a piece is totally memorized, the time window contracts, and you'll need less time. This reality may make you want to stagger your work so that everything isn't reaching maximum time at the same time. 

In my own summer routine, I've found myself needing more and more time for practice as many of my pieces have reached their maximum time at the same time. For this reason, I've now dropped a few pieces for the time being and also relaxed some of my goals for the season.

A discernible regularity

Now that I've gotten us through the fact that not everyone agrees on memory types, I will admit that I'm not always sure when a mnemonic is memory and when memory is a mnemonic. I'm not a strong advocate for memorizing music that's already in one's fingers, and, as a general rule, I never listen to recordings in order to get to know the music that I'm working on.

That all said, let's presume that, in the early stages of memorization, just about everything is a mnemonic. The big advantage to this is that you won't develop tactile memory early on. This advantage will play out later when you might experience self-doubt during a performance; you'll have your mnemonics to rely upon.

Landmarks are mnemonics on a grand scale. I make them a part of my daily routine, and I find that they are essential to a successful memorized performance. But landmarks don't come right away. What about memorizing a few measures a day?

Repetition plays an extremely significant role in the memorization of even the simplest passage. You might find yourself repeating the same measures over and over again. The goal should not be to create a tactile memory experience, however. It can be used to create aural memory, but that's a hard thing to maintain when a piece is being learned from scratch. 

My repetitious practice creates a comprehension of pattern. I like the Wikipedia definition of pattern: "a discernible regularity in the world or in a manmade design." In musical terms, that pattern could be a simple regularity of notes, and it could also be the regularity of harmony or rhythm. It can be any combination of those three, and possibly even more elements. 


Presuming that you've already created a phrase-influenced landmark in a piece, repetition of that phrase should help you discern the patterns therein. But be careful: don't let your repetition ingrain tactile memory. This is where a timer and metronome become important. Limit your time with repetitious practice while also keeping your metronome slow so as to avoid tactile memory.

Those good habits

My last few posts, headed as "working at the instrument," should provide some fairly redundant information for anyone with a good practice discipline. The use of a practice log, metronome, and timer are standard tools for many, if not most, successful musicians. They're mentioned in the context of this blog on memorization practice because, as it was in my case, not memorizing for so many years helped me to neglect some of those good habits that I'd already learned. 

That's not to say that I wasn't using a metronome, practice log, or timer over the years, but it is to say that committing to memorization practice has made those items essential. And as I already posted, returning to memory forced a lot of these good habits to return.

None of the information given so far has, in fact, told the reader how to specifically memorize specific notes. As we'll soon see, there isn't one way, and the memorization process will take on multiple facets--just as there are three, and possibly more, types of memory. 

Because the memorization process is multifaceted, it's best to have as much as possible working for you, and this includes using all of the good habits that you may have already learned. So, take a moment to consider what your good habits are now and what they may have been at one time. Do you have any good habits that I haven't already mentioned? Post them here! (You can even post your bad habits, if you'd like.)

A Timer

The next step to making your practice focused, efficient, and patient is to use a timer. Call me nuts, but I time every bit of my practice. Call me compulsive, but I even time my breaks. (For the record, this post is being written during a one-hour break from the instrument.)

As you can see with my online practice log, I'm pretty precise about how much time I devote to each piece I'm working on. (I summarized some of my approach to timings here.)

So, what's up with the timer?

The timer works at both ends of the practice spectrum: it moderates the exciting moments, when one want to keep on working while avoiding everything else, and it forces those moments when one might not be so motivated. Let's begin by looking at the first end of the spectrum.

When I'm really excited about a piece, it's easy to go on and on. It's easy to ignore all of the other things on my plate, and, before I know it, all of my practice time is gone for the day. For me, the worst thing is when I practice a piece so much that I don't feel like practicing it the next day--or anything else the next day, for that matter. To this end, the timer keeps everything in moderation.

Let's face it: memorization practice (or any practice, really) is hard work. It's not always the most fun thing, and it's easy to get distracted with other things, such as email, phone calls, or writing a blog about memorization. The timer keeps limits while also making obligations. 

It's important to know, before beginning the practice session, how much time you have. From there, divide up your time. Don't forget breaks! Use a timing and stick to it. (You can always change it the next day.) My advice, if you're doing this for the first time, is to work with shorter timings. You'll be pleasantly surprised to see how much you've accomplished in a short amount of focused time. If you have a smartphone, you most certainly have a timer with your clock app. (You probably also have a stopwatch--another important tool.) Set it and use it!

A timer helps you to know your limits. It forces patience, and it forces you to do a little each day instead of too much one day and nothing the next. As Aesop wrote, "Slow and steady wins the race."

I haven't written yet about how to exactly memorize notes, but repetition is a large part of the process. Repetition practice can be redundant, and redundancy results in thoughtless and inattentive practice. With a timer, one can address the need for repetition practice while avoiding spending too much time in redundant practice. 

In a typical day for me, I try to practice around three hours. I might start first thing in the morning with two 30-minute sessions and then a 30-minute break. Because I'm most creative in the morning, I really need to set the timer for my breaks. Otherwise it's too easy to get caught up in my break activity. And since my break activity is often at the computer, it's really, really easy to lose a sense of time. 

Until I started using a timer regularly, I simply couldn't practice in the afternoon due to inattentiveness and lack of motivation. Knowing this, I'd squeeze everything in before lunch, with short breaks and a mad dash to the finish. But the timer has helped me to pace my work better, and, with short practice blocks, I can easily continue into the afternoon. 

The timer is my solution for disciplined practice. Do you have one? Leave a comment, and let me know what it is!

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!