CONCLUSIONS: A summary of HOW

Writing a concluding summary to a blog seems counterintuitive to the dynamic nature of blogs. Likewise, writing a concluding summary to a blog on memorization seems counterintuitive to the dynamic nature of memorization.

Throughout the entire process of writing this blog, I kept coming back to some very basic concepts. Going forward, I can't imagine working without these fundamental elements:

• practice log
• timer
• metronome
• landmarks.

As I continued to write, I found that, while I had been using these elements consistently, my application of them was in constant need of refinement. I also found that, at times, I was sorely lacking in one of the most discipline-challenging parts of any memorization practice:

• mental work away from the instrument.

In the coming days, months, and years, I am sure that I will continue to refine my approach to memorization. I don't every think it will get easier, but I do think that I'll get better at it. Will I memorize faster? I hope so, although another main concept of my approach is:

• patience.

It's not about speed; it's about quality. This becomes especially apparent when returning to pieces that have been put aside for some time.

Above all, it's important to know that you and I will continue to find new memorization techniques along the way. These will be applied to what we're working on at the moment, and they will be applied to works that we're bringing back to life. Just as I improved from my early lapse experiences, we can continue to improve further down the path.

There is always more to learn.

Memorizing Bach and his fugues

Along with some music of the 20th and 21st centuries, there's not much music more difficult to memorize than that of J.S. Bach. As a keyboardist, I write from experience, and I know that other instrumentalists and singers also find Bach to be among the most difficult music to memorize. I don't want to speculate too much on why this is, but, as a case in point, I can honestly write that it takes me about twice as long to memorize a Bach movement than it takes me to memorize, say, Handel or Couperin. And it easily takes me about four times as long to memorize a Bach fugue.

In conservatory, I was taught to memorize Bach fugues by memorizing each voice separately. I remember doing this. It was absolutely nuts. I also vaguely remember bringing two voices together, then three, in all manners of possibilities. This was a long and arduous process, and, today, I really question the musicality and practicality of this approach.

Today, I memorize Bach fugues just as I memorize other works. I use my landmarks, metronome, practice log, mental work away from the instrument--you know, all those good habits. This entire process is intensified by the fact that Bach, unlike so many contrapuntal composers, accounts for every single fugal voice with striking regularity. (Handel's fugues, in contrast, are much more informal, with dropped lines and voices that don't follow through from their starting points.) In this memorization process, one doesn't just memorize notes or chords. For Bach, each note is part of a line that is carried throughout the entire composition; each line is a living entity that is co-dependent upon the other voices in the fugue. That, my friends, is the highest level of contrapuntal writing!

When I performed Bach fugues from score, the learning process did not require me to know what each voice was doing. I intellectually understood that I should be aware of the voice leading, but, since I wasn't memorizing the music, really understanding and committing to the counterpoint wasn't essential. At that time, I played fugues with a certain level of indifference to the compositional process.

Memorization has forced a new respect for Bach's fugues. The number of voices has become paramount to the learning process, something that wasn't so much the case when working from score. Once memorized, there are always new discoveries in the relationships between the voices. This can be a distraction on stage, especially when hearing something differently for the first time...in front of a live audience! For this and for so many other reasons, I consider Bach fugues to be the hardest things to memorize and, once memorized, perform.

Aside from the techniques already described, there's not much advice I can give to learning fugues any quicker than the very slow route. I do advise, however, thinking of the appearance of fugue subjects and answers as landmarks and mnemonics. Along with larger phrases, fugal entrances can make good landmarks. At the very least, the performer should know the placement of each and every one. 

Fugue subjects and answers can also be thought of as mnemonics behind the foreground of other material that's developing. In my earlier Wikipedia quote, mnemonics are used when "the human mind more easily remembers spatial, personal, surprising, physical, sexual, humorous, or otherwise 'relatable' information, rather than more abstract or impersonal forms of information." If we think of a fugue subject or answer as a spatial or physical element, we can concentrate more on the activity around it, thus aiding the memorization process.

I know, these are tough thoughts to consider. But, I assure you, memorizing Bach fugues is much harder! Good luck.

Practicing for performance

I've already established that a piece and, in turn, a recital is never truly ready. There will always be room for improvement. The more we work at what we do, the more we are critical with what we do. 

This is not to say that we shouldn't be working towards a goal of "ready to go." There is a point at which you have to decide that your interpretation and knowledge of a piece must crystallize for the sake of your performance. You don't want to go on stage with lingering doubts about your interpretation.

I tend to reach this crystallization stage about three or four weeks before a recital. Even if I'm in doubt about the interpretation of a particular piece, I must stop trying to make it work, and I have to set my mind to making a convincing performance. Of course, at this stage, I already have a pretty solid interpretation, but sometimes I find that a tempo just hasn't settled or that I still have some questions about rubato. Whatever the case, the experimentation must stop at this stage, because I need to be working on the performance--not the interpretation.

As I write this, I'm preparing a performance that's about three weeks away. Since I already played the program before, I started a light review two weeks ago. Last week, I began seriously revisiting the program. Due to its length and complexity (and in spite of already having played the program), I've put all other repertoire on hold. 

In returning to the program, I noticed some issues with tempi and interpretation. (Thankfully, the memory retention has been quite solid.) In order to address those issues, I spent all of last week and this week focusing on the program in that capacity. But next week, I need to start reigning in that corrective work and settle into a state of assuredness about my interpretations. I'm sure that the next time I prepare this particular recital, I'll find new issues to address. It's always an uphill battle!

As I approach the recital (and the same could be said for practice recitals), I know that there isn't enough time in the day for me to go over every single piece with the same amount of detail. I like to touch on every piece every day, so I'll develop a pattern of alternating types of work. A day might look like this:

• Pieces A, C, E, G, I: do mental work from landmarks with metronome.
• Pieces B, D, F, H, J: play slowly from landmarks with metronome; play at tempo with metronome; play without metronome.

I'll alternate this pattern the following day so that I cover everything equally. As the recital approaches, I'll try to stay off of the metronome for the at-tempo work, just so that I become more reliant upon my inner metronome. Likewise, I'll keep up with the slow metronome work for the sake of technique. Most important throughout this entire process is the mental work. I never stop doing this. The mental practice isn't just about memorization. It's also about confidence in interpretation.

As ever, it's really important to keep reassessing your daily practice goals. If you establish a pattern such as the one above, it's far too easy to let it become a habit instead of intelligent, thoughtful practice. To that end, don't forget to list your daily goals in your practice log while working towards total presence in your own practice. Your practice habits, including total presence, will manifest themselves on stage, so be wise!

Improvisation

What are your options if you have a lapse? You could stop playing. You could start all over from the beginning. You could become angry and repeat a passage over and over again, much to the general discomfort of your audience. 

These are all really bad ideas. How about this? You could improvise until you make your way forward or backward to a landmark.

It's easy for me to think about improvisation. After all, I make a significant portion of my income as a church organist, and improvisation is at the heart of any successful organist's career. But maybe you don't have any experience with improvisation--especially in front of an audience.

If you do have a lapse, it may be possible to jump directly to a landmark. I find that this can work well, depending on the situation. But, in many cases, you don't have that option, so you need to have a plan. To begin, don't think of improvisation as something that you have to bring to a high artistic level. Let's save that for the jazz musicians and the great French cathedral organists. Your improvisation is going to have a very practical purpose: to get from A to B--or maybe from B to A. It doesn't need to be anything more than that.

You now know what your improvisation needs to do. Let's consider what it needs to be. First, it needs to be in the key of what you're playing, and it will need to modulate if your next landmark is in another key. If you know your landmarks well, you have a pretty good idea of what keys they start out in. Second, your improvisation should maintain the rhythm of where you are and, if necessary, transform itself to the rhythm of where you are going. Third, your improvisation should maintain the texture of the passage and, again if necessary, develop into the texture of where you're going to end up.

In other words, your improvisation needs to be in the style of what it is you're playing. In some ways, that's the easy part, and there really isn't any right or wrong. It just needs to be convincing. The harder part might be trying to modulate to another key, but that's something you can practice both physically and mentally.

It's possible to practice your improvisation in a pedantic way, working your way through various modulations and making sure that you can get from landmark to landmark. Unfortunately (or fortunately), there's not really that much time in the day to practice like this. You can also force lapses by making yourself nervous, a technique I discussed earlier. 

The bottom line is that the vast majority of your audience (and, most likely, 100 percent of your audience) won't know that you're improvising. For you, the lapse moment may feel like an eternity, but you also know, quite rationally, that it's not that big of a moment. This is a game of outwitting the situation, and you have to learn to keep your cool.

This brings us back to fear. Don't forget this: Your audience is not there to hear you make mistakes. They give you the benefit of the doubt in what you are doing, and they will always assume that you are doing the right thing. They're not looking for mistakes, and they really wish you the best so that they can enjoy the performance as much as possible. All you have to do is uphold your end of the bargain by letting them think you've played a perfect performance--whether or not it's true. Keep your cool!

Playing techniques

I generally feel that, in the same day's practice session, mental work should precede playing work. In real life that's what happens. You'd never do mental work after playing a recital, for instance--unless you're reliving the recital, good or bad, in a post-concert restless night!

As I wrote in my previous post, you might want to alternate days of mental work and days of playing work. You might also have less time in your practice session, so you might just touch on, for instance, your landmarks. Just as you might envision each landmark's starting point, you could play the start of each landmark instead of playing the entire piece. For me, this sort of thing works best in reverse order.

Let's presume that you've gotten very sure of your piece and that you've gotten into a comfortable, though varied, practice routine of mental and playing work. You're quite confident in your memorization and in your interpretation of the piece, but you want to make sure that your piece is really ready to go. Other than jumping around from landmark to landmark, what are some ways in which you can make your playing work varied?

For one, you could simply play through the entire piece for fun. By "for fun" I mean that you are playing this in a way that is completely relaxed without much attention to landmarks or visual memory. For me, it's very rare when this type of playing happens in concert. If it does happen, it's usually followed by a lapse when I start to realize that I'm playing before a live audience! This "for fun" playing really shouldn't become a regular thing, but it's nice to remind yourself how fun it is to actually play well without any stress. When we're on stage, we need to give the appearance of this relaxation, but we have to be very conscious of what we're doing. All told, I wouldn't recommend this type of playing more than twice a week. It can be harmful to what it is you are trying to achieve.

In contract to the "for fun" playing, I often engage in super-concentrated playing. Here, I am forcing myself to anticipate each landmark, to visualize them before I get there. I even try to visualize every note while playing, especially in fast music, thus overriding any tactile response. I don't want this type of self-consciousness to happen in concert, but, if it does when, say, I'm excessively nervous, I'm ready to handle it. Another reason to force landmark anticipation and visualization is to keep your mind where it needs to be: on the music. It's all too easy in this middle stage of memorization to play "for fun" with little regard for focus and detail. Beware of losing the Inner Game!

Sometimes I try to make myself nervous by deliberately creating memory lapses. In doing so, I create a situation in which I can practice working my way out of a lapse, either by jumping to an earlier or to a later landmark. In some cases, I won't be in a spot where it's easy to jump to a landmark, so I must force myself to improvise till I find myself in a place for smooth and convenient transition. (New to improvisation? Hang in there: I'll touch on it in a later post.) Very importantly, don't do too much of this type of practice. It is very easy to make nervousness a learned response, and you might find yourself establishing some specific and regular lapse areas in your piece. 

Be nice to your Doppelgänger.

My teacher John Whitelaw talked about a Doppelgänger technique in which the performer would picture him or herself as an audience member while also playing. Although John and I were working with music from score, this technique has excellent applications to the memorizing musician. It takes a little practice, but you'll find that you will hear the music differently--indeed, like an audience member. This in itself can add a bit of nervousness and realism to the play-through experience. A similar technique is to record yourself, treating the recording as if it needs to be perfect.

(I could go on about using audio or video recordings as a practice technique, but that's not really in the scope of this blog. In short, I'm not a big fan of the process because one ends up modifying the interpretation more and more to fit the particular circumstances of the recording instead of working purely with one's ear.)

With all of this playing--and the excitement about finally being able to play through a piece after so much work--, we can not forget one of the most important playing techniques: to not play at all and to work mentally through the score. Don't neglect your mental work.

With so many possibilities, what are some other playing techniques that you can thing of? Post your comments here!

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.

The Middle Stages of Memorization: You've got it! Or so you think...

So now you've gotten a pretty good foundation with your piece. In fact, you're able to play it through completely by heart with only a little bump here or there. Or maybe you've even played it perfectly once or twice.

Now what are you going to do? You feel pretty good about it, but you're nervous about playing it in public. On a good day, you can play the piece really well, but on a bad day you don't feel completely ready.

Welcome, friend, to the Middle Stages of Memorization, a musical purgatory that lies between the early excitement of memorizing a piece and the late confidence of knowing that you have a solid piece in your repertoire.

Here's the problem: The early stages of memorization have very clear goals. You need to get from A-Z, and, as I've been outlining, there are some very clear ways to do that. At this point, it's very hard to assess your goals when you're so close to performance-level memory. Am I ready yet? Do I need to do more? How will I know when I'm ready? Scheduling a performance in order to find out the answers is not a wise way to go about this!

The middle stages create their own impatience. You're almost there, but not there yet. How much mental practice do you need to do? Should you just play through the piece till it's perfect? When should you add new repertoire to memorize? Will this process ever be over?

Most importantly, when can you let a piece rest? You've spent so much time bringing your piece to this level, but how do you know when enough is enough? 

These are all very challenging questions to answer, and you may find yourself quite unsettled at this point. In my upcoming posts, I will address this issue and present some techniques and methods for finding your answers.

Taking an old friend to heart

In a previous post, I suggested that new repertoire needs to be memorized as it is learned, as opposed to learned and then memorized. I also asserted that, if a piece is not memorized, it is not learned.

In my own case, I've been bringing a number of learned-but-not-memorized pieces to memory, although, this summer, most of my learning has been from scratch. While this blog has been mostly dedicated to scratch learning, it does raise the question of how one might memorize a piece that is already in the fingers (or voice) and may have already been performed with score.

As you know, I firmly believe that tactile memory is the weakest form of memory. This is why scratch learning is so important to me, as it keeps tactile memory from taking precedence over intellectual (i.e., visual and aural) memory. However, if you already have a piece in your repertoire--but not memorized--, how are you going to get it memorized?

Begin by approaching the piece as if you don't already know it. After placing your landmarks, spend some days only doing mental practice with a metronome. You might surprise yourself by how much you know; you might also be discouraged by how little you know. In your mental work, establish your landmarks. Be able to see them and hear them cold.

After a few days, set up a daily schedule beginning with mental work followed by work at the instrument. At the instrument, work only from your landmarks--slowly, with a metronome--, and resist the temptation to play through the piece. Are you able to visualize and play the first few notes of each landmark?

You might need some remedial memory work. Use the techniques described previously in

The same could be said for memorization.

this blog. Find patterns in the music. Use analytic techniques to bring you to a greater understanding of the piece. The good news is that you probably already have a strong aural sense of the piece, so don't be afraid to use your ear as much as possible.

When you finally come around to some fairly thorough memorization, play the piece slowly with metronome, but make sure that you are thinking of each landmark before you play it. Congratulations! You've now reached the middle stage of memorization. I'll discuss this stage in the next section of this blog, along with techniques for making your piece ready for performance.

Above all, assume nothing, and make sure that you have approached your old friend with as much care and attention as you've been approaching your new friends.

Knowing when to take time off

Back in my conservatory days, my piano teacher Michael Ruiz was very firm in his belief that one should practice every piece during every practice day. This is an approach that I still cling to, and, for each of my practice sessions, I make an effort to touch each piece that I'm working on--even if only for a few minutes. By using my daily goals, I can map out what it is I hope to achieve that day. One advantage of this approach, of course, is that everything remains at the forefront at all times.

This approach might seem like a disadvantage. Because I work on everything every day, I am limited to how much I can handle each day. Wouldn't it be nice to be working on more music? This approach, however, assures a kind of self-censorship, and it keeps me from biting off more than I can chew.

I don't recall my teacher discussing when to take time off. Time off is a really healthy thing, and we musicians can become unhealthily obsessed with our work. When I entered Yale, I was used to practicing nearly six hours a day. But when it came time to dole out the practice room schedule, my teacher Richard Rephann said three hours per person would probably be enough. I was shocked! Maybe Richard was telling us something about quality over quantity. At that time, three hours a day felt like nothing, and I must have felt that I was on permanent vacation. 

Since then, I've come to respect the need for a day or even days without practice. At the

A nice practice room.

moment, I seem to have gravitated towards a schedule of two really intense practice days and then a day off. If I aim for three really intense days, I find that I'm pretty beat by the third day, and I don't practice as well. If I'm in that sort of situation, I might use the third day to play through my music more for enjoyment than for intensive study.

Once the academic year recommences, my schedule becomes such that I will be forced to have days away from the instrument. I'll also have concerts, and these can force mandatory intensive practice on days that I would rather have off.

The pianist Arthur Rubinstein is attributed to the comment that if he missed a day of

practice, he noticed; if he missed two days, the critics noticed; and if he missed three days, the audience noticed. If I'm preparing a recital, I turn to Rubinstein's wisdom. I never like to take time off when a recital is just a few days away.

But when working in the early stages of memorization, I don't think that one needs to be so dogmatic. In fact, time away from the instrument helps music grow internally. It also helps to rekindle the passion for the repertoire. 

I'm writing this post on a day off. Yesterday, my work on the third movement of Bach's D minor Concerto went very well--so well, in fact, that I imagined it would be ready to go within a week or so. Last night, I woke up around 1am, and, as a means to help me fall back to sleep, I started mentally working my way through that movement. Before I fell asleep again, I got hung up somewhere around my L landmark, and I realized that the piece still needs more mental work with the score before I can run the entire movement in my mind.

When I return to practice tomorrow, you can be assured that I will be strongly motivated to fix that L landmark. My day off was planned before my sleepless memory lapse, but having this day off is helping me to process any impatience I have in the learning of the Bach. Being away from the instrument today is making me excited about tomorrow's practice session. Indeed, I'm even getting excited as I write about it! The Bach is close, but forcing the issue by working in a dogmatic, non-stop way is not going to get me to where I need to be. A day off is a nice tonic.

Do you take days off? How often? What's your practice schedule like? Leave your comments here!

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.

Those slow pieces

When I first returned to memory work, I started researching memorization techniques on the internet. If you've found this blog through a similar search, you know that there's quite a bit of information out there. (I will say, however, that one of the reasons I'm writing this blog is because most of the information out there is cursory--and, as you know by now, memorization practice is not a cursory endeavor.)

Back then, I came upon a site (reference forgotten) that briefly discussed how to work on slow pieces. The general suggestion was to play them quickly. The logic, as I understood, was to establish tactile memory as a foundation and then eventually slow the piece down to the desired tempo.

You already know my opinion on establishing tactile memory as a foundation! But let's explore what else is wrong with this approach, not only because it applies to slow pieces, but it applies to all repertoire as well.

It is true that learning a slow movement by playing it fast can work. I've done it, although I no longer do it. But what is it we are trying to achieve?

By learning and playing slow pieces quickly, we are affecting the manner in which we will ultimately perform them. Just as listening to recordings will influence our personal interpretations, this method will certainly get in the way of our ultimate goal of transcendent performance. In short, it's unmusical.

Aside from this highfalutin talk, there is the practical issue of the very nature of slow music: Slow music is slow, making it easy to lose one's concentration and get lost in the lack of activity. Therefore, slow music requires the highest level of visual and aural memory. Building a tactile foundation in order to achieve this will ultimately fail. 

Personally, I use a slow metronome to work my slow movements. That metronome is set at a speed slower than my ultimate tempo. I do this for my mental work and also my work at the instrument. The metronome keeps me from speeding through the long, slow notes--both mentally and physically. 

You know what? I do the same thing for my faster movements. All in all, I apply the same approach to my repertoire, regardless of final tempo.

The long and winding road

In my previous post, I admitted that I didn't really enjoy working away from the instrument. As true as that is, the fact remains that I haven't been doing much of it at all. Up until now, I've started my work at the instrument and then made my way to working away from the instrument--quite begrudgingly.

Since starting this blog a few months ago, my practice techniques and the quality of my practice have skyrocketed. From posting an online practice log to dissecting my day-to-day good and bad habits, my practice keeps getting better and better. I was aware that I had a passion for music, but I had never quantified it in such an analytical way. I knew that this is what I do, but I was never so acutely aware of how intense this is.

One obstacle to putting down my thoughts in a "how to" manner is that the reader might assume that I know exactly "how to." My own success at memorization has given me a vantage point, however that vantage point is still one of renewal and discovery. Memorization-wise, I may be far ahead of those who play from score, but I'm still far behind those who've been doing this much longer than I.

My previous post, on mental practice, ended with this paragraph:

What about learning a score completely away from the instrument? Why not? It's something practiced by many musicians, and I've been incorporating more and more of this type of practice into my own routine.

If truth be told,  the process of writing that post and coming to that final paragraph raised a big red flag for me: I haven't been doing enough mental practice. More so, I'm not so convinced that some of the techniques I've written about, namely repetitious practice, should take place before mental practice commences. I'm doubting if one should even touch the instrument before having spent a lot of time with a score away from the instrument.

If you've kept up with this blog, you may have surmised that I write the posts a few weeks in advance of their publication. This gives me a little leeway to take time off and also to proofread my writing before it's posted. This post is being written on July 26. Before today, my last day of practice was July 22, as I took a few days off for a short vacation. 

On July 22, I reached a crisis with my practice: Was I doing it all wrong? I've been writing about a solid foundation at the instrument, and, until now, I hadn't thought too much about starting with mental practice. Thankfully, I had a few days off, and I resumed my practice today with a new verve.

As I've stated multiple times in this blog, there is more than one way to memorize music. After all, it's your brain, and you need to do what's best for you. I've also stated that the process of memorizing music will make you a better musician. It forces self-analysis. 

And so I start again with some new thoughts on my approach to memorization practice. I've developed a ratio system for my repertoire, trying to keep mental work at a 2:1 or 3:2 ratio to work at the instrument. I'm trying to be more conscious of my work by writing down daily goals and keeping my practice approach varied. Just as professional athletes need to switch up their workouts, we musicians need to, too. 

One of my pieces, the second movement of Bach's D minor Concerto, is now being practiced completely away from the instrument. I'm going to make sure that I can "hear" it before working at the instrument. If I were to continue as I had been, I would just be repeating passages over and over in an attempt to develop aural memory. It makes a whole lot more sense to do this away from the instrument. I suspect very strongly that the learning process will be much faster, too.

Today's practice session was very quiet. I played very little, and the only constant sound was a metronome. When I returned to the instrument after so much silence, I was reawakened to the timbre and expressive possibilities of the instrument. Mental practice made my playing much more special and less routine. My ear was rejuvenated!

I'm sure that I'll arrive at another crisis point in good time. In the meantime, consider that this "how to" guide is from the perspective of one who doesn't have all the answers.

Working away

Up until now, I've written a whole lot about working at the instrument. (And, although I haven't clarified it before, I should point out that, by "instrument," I also mean the voice. A singer's instrument is just that: an instrument.) But what about working away from the instrument?

On the whole, I strive to spend as much time working away from the instrument as I spend working at the instrument. There are many stages to the memorization process, so a 50/50 ratio doesn't always work out. Then there's my own little secret: I don't really enjoy working away from the instrument. But that doesn't mean that I shouldn't, so I force myself to make it a part of my daily practice.

I suspect that a lot of musicians don't enjoy working away from the instrument. For me, I simply enjoy playing too much. Sitting on a sofa and visualizing my score isn't a whole lot of fun. But working away from the instrument is probably the best way to quickly develop visual and even aural memory. 

It should be stated that visual memory isn't just about "seeing" the score. Some visual memory can be related to how one visualizes chord shapes or hand positions at the instrument. It can also be how one envisions a musical form. Nevertheless, I feel that the best visual skills come from working away from the instrument. In fact, what we're really talking about here is mental practice, as opposed to physical practice.

In my day-t0-day routine, there are many times when I don't feel like practicing a specific piece or practicing at all. Keeping my practice agenda concise and creative helps me stay motivated and inspired. In that same vein, I keep my mental practice as varied as possible.

Not only does this help to keep me interested, it also keeps the work from becoming routine and, therefore, thoughtless.  

Here are some of my techniques: 

• Do mental practice away from the instrument. Use a different room, use a different chair. Go outside, even if for a ten minute session. Use your mental practice as an opportunity to stand up and not be sedentary. Who ever said that cerebral work didn't burn calories!?
• Apply everything already discussed to your mental practice: landmarks, metronome, mnemonics. 
• Landmarks: Jump around. If you know all your landmarks, don't visualize your piece in forward order. Go from Z to A. Or skip every other landmark. Make sure you can visualize the start of each landmark.
• Metronome: I use a metronome for mental practice because it helps keep me from daydreaming. It also keeps me from mentally rushing the easy spots.
• Mnemonics: Visualize those patterns and differences in patterns. This is really helpful when in the early learning stages. When you return to the instrument, you'll identify those patterns much quicker.
• Visualize a piece straight through. This is really hard to do early in the memorization process, but it does help develop aural memory. Later on, once a piece is more or less memorized, a straight-through visualization can become a good exercise in concentration. (I'm not terribly good at that, so I tend to work with landmarks instead.)
• Can't sleep at night? Try some mental practice. If it doesn't help you sleep, at least you're doing something with the wasted time. You can also do mental practice while out for solitary walks or sitting in a park.

What about learning a score completely away from the instrument? Why not? It's something practiced by many musicians, and I've been incorporating more and more of this type of practice into my own routine.

Do you have any techniques for mental practice? Or maybe you have your own anecdotes. Post them here!

But wait...there's more!

Repetitious practice is not always the best practice, but it can't be ignored. In my worst, most impatient type of practice, I tend to repeat and repeat. I'm just too anxious to get the piece to playing level, and all I want to do is play. 

This sort of practice can be thoughtless. Even if it isn't thoughtless, it does little else but to assure a tactile foundation. Those musicians who bring a piece to playing level before attempting to memorize it have probably done not much more than repeat passages after, perhaps, marking fingerings and other foundational notes. After a point, it may be possible to play such work from memory, but is this really as far as you want to prepare before going on stage?

As I write this blog post, I'm asking myself, "What are some other early memorization techniques that I can use?" You should be asking yourself the same question, because there is no one way to do this, and you must always be creative with your approach. 

What about form? I've just started working on the slow movement of Bach's D Minor Harpsichord Concerto. I began by putting in landmarks, and that inevitably raised the question of the movement's form. This is a simple form, essentially a series of episodes flanked by a ritornello. Knowing that the ritornello only occurs at the beginning and at the end of the movement has helped me understand where to put some landmarks while also minimizing my work. (That is, if I learn the first ritornello, I don't need to learn the final one, since it's the same thing.) Looking closer at the form, I see that the ritornello functions like an ostinato bass, occurring regularly throughout the entire movement.

What about harmony? With that same concerto movement and now knowing about the ostinato bass, I can use harmony to help my memorization. For instance, the opening ritornello is in g minor. When it's repeated as a bass line with melody (my "A" landmark), we're in g minor, closing to a c minor cadence. In the next section (my "B" landmark), we start in c minor, but the ostinato bass appears a few bars later in d minor, eventually cadencing in B-flat Major. From there, there are some sequences and other harmonic machinations, all eventually bringing us back to g minor. 

None of this formal and harmonic analysis is worth publishing in a scholarly journal. I did this in sketch form for my own purpose: to memorize. With that in mind, you don't have to come up with a hardcore analysis. Simply do what works for you, but make sure that whatever you're doing is going to bring you to a better level of memorization. Think of these small steps as mnemonics towards the greater goal of memorized music.

Sometimes I work and work on a piece, and parts of it just won't stick. One way of dealing with this is to take time off, something I'll discuss later in this blog. By getting away from the piece for a few days or an even longer period of time, I might return and find the piece in a better place than when I left it. It's hard to judge how and if such mental rest will work, so you might not want to count on it. A more reliable technique is to play through your piece as you might have already been doing. Every time you get stuck, write down the location, taking detailed notes of where the problem spots are. In truth, you might find that there are less sticky places than you originally thought! This process in itself leads to better memorization, and it also gives you a practical foundation from which you can fix any problems.

I'll admit that I'm not always this intellectual in my memorization practice. I recently started work on an unmeasured prelude by Larry Bell. Because the movement isn't in my ear, I'm using the fingering I've established to help me memorize the right hand. This is tactile work--though mnemonic in its own right--, but it's with the goal of creating aural memory. The visual memory will follow once I have a better sense of how the piece "goes."

And what about aural memory? And what about visual memory? Both of these are very important to the early memory process, and I'll address them in my next posts.

What are some techniques you use in the early stages of memory? Did I leave something out? Post your comments here!

You and your metronome

Much of what I can say about using a metronome is standard wisdom for those who practice music. As I already discussed, the field of "early music" tends to eschew these modern inventions. In any event, knowing where the absolute beat should lie is a very useful piece of information.

For the memorizing musician, the metronome takes on a new significance. Because we are working without score and, sometimes in performance, under fear of memory lapse, it's really good to know the optimal tempo for a piece. And, by optimal, I don't mean "fastest." This is to say that, when one works from memory, it can be easy to become too concerned with the notes or the maintenance of memory to give much thought to tempo. Of course, this scenario would indicate that one wasn't really listening to what one was doing--but that's another matter entirely.  Suffice it to say that it's a good idea to know how fast or how slow a piece should go. This is your own interpretive decision, unless the composer has left specific indications.

I have a hunch (based on my own past habits) that musicians who don't play from memory don't do a lot of metronome work. As I feel that working from memory forces all good habits, I'm aware that not working from memory allows for apathy. In my own case, I didn't use a metronome for years. When I started working with living composers, knowing their beat became a necessity; when I started working from memory, knowing my beat became even more imperative.

When I resumed my memory work, I didn't start working with a metronome right away. I remember one concert when I arrived to do my warmup, only to realize that just about all of my fast tempi were the same. That's a disconcerting thing to consider just before a recital! My only explanation is that, in my memorization work, I had settled into a comfortable pace with tempi and had not really thought much about it until I was on the spot. I would like to suggest that, had I not been playing that recital from memory, I might never have noticed it at all. Memory forces a certain level of self-examination.

My own personal anecdotes aside, there are some very specific ways in which metronome work can help your memorization practice.

1. Slow metronome work (from memory, of course) helps to avoid any reliance on tactile memory.
2. Slow metronome work helps to avoid sentimental practice.  It's easy to get caught up in the emotions of our music. By forcing a slow tempo, we can focus just on making sure that we know the notes.
3. Slow metronome work makes sure that a piece is rock-solid. Every note goes where it should metrically, and that insures that every note is properly memorized.

As you can see, I don't have much use for non-slow metronome work, except when I'm trying to find the optimal tempo for a piece. From the standpoint of learning memorization, a slow metronome is the best tool.

I haven't written too much yet about working away from the instrument, but one of my favorite techniques is to work with a slow metronome. The metronome is very good at keeping my mind from wandering while I'm mentally working my way through a score. It keeps me from mentally rushing through my well-memorized passages, and, just as when playing, it makes sure that every note is sitting in the correct metric place.

Do you use a metronome to help your memorization practice? Or do you have some metronome techniques for any type of practice, memorized or otherwise? Post your thoughts here!

Why, according to me: Chapter Two

Aside from creating some general ideas about the benefits of playing from memory, my return to memorization practice did something for that that was completely unexpected: 

Practicing--with the goal of playing recitals by heart--forced me to recall and follow all of the good things my best teachers taught me! 

In other words, playing from memory forces good habits. 

I quickly learned that, if I don't follow those good habits, I will fall flat on my face in performance. (Remember all of those early lapse experiences? I hadn't yet recalled those good habits from my conservatory days.) This is all to say that not playing from memory for so many years had allowed me to become apathetic in the practice room.

(Let me interject here by stating that I already had a pretty good career as a harpsichordist and general musician. I certainly never considered myself apathetic, and I don't think that my colleagues would have considered me apathetic. However, we musicians must always strive to be better, and doing the bare minimum is never good enough.)

So what were these good habits that resurfaced?

• Written/consistent fingering. (Wasn't it Wanda Landowska who said that fingering is the strategy of the hand?)
• Using a metronome.
• Slow practice.
• Creating a practice log/journal
• Studying the score away from the instrument.
• Playing programs for others before making public appearances.

I did all of these things (more or less) when I practiced to perform from score. But playing from memory has made them essential, indeed, mandatory. 

When I finally get around to the how to part of this blog, I'll go into greater detail about how all of these elements (and more!) figure into my daily practice.