We saw a Performance on Sunday of Beethoven’s piano Concerto No. 5 (“Emperor”). And while I was of course impressed by the skill and talent of the pianist, and genius of Beethoven… I am always struck by the fact that the soloist is performing without the benefit of sheet music.
And this is typical: any solo performance you see (concerto or Sonata) the soloist practically never has music in front of him/her.
This seems a superhuman feat. How many times would you have to play through a piece this long and complicated with music, before you’re confident to perform it in public without?
My wife plays classical guitar. Classical guitarists hold their instruments in an unusual way, with the guitar at a steep angle and the fretboard and stock almost touching their face. They often have their eyes closed, so they couldn’t see the music even if they had it. We will occasionally find on YouTube a video of a classical guitarist playing a long and very intricate piece. I am awestruck by the prodigious memory it must require to play a complicated piece and to know their instrument so well that they don’t even need to look at it, even occasionally. It’s like the instrument is an extension of their body. I envy people who have that kind of talent.
In my experience, there isn’t X amount of times it must be performed, or anything like that—you just repeat it until you don’t get it wrong.
There’s a saying I’ve heard that speaks to the process, “The amateur practices their music until they can play it right. The professional practices until they can’t play it wrong.”
Part of what makes music appealing to us is that it has patterns in it. And the existence of those patterns also makes it easier to memorize. You could, in principle, compose music with no patterns in it (choosing the notes by rolling a die, say), but such music would both not sound very good, and be very difficult to memorize.
I am not a pianist, but I did take piano lessons as a kid. I think it would be a lot harder to perform a complicated piece by decoding sheet music in real time than by relying on muscle memory.
Yes, by the time you’re performing at that level you’ve practiced the piece until it’s basically muscle memory.
There are a couple of piano soloists (e.g. Garrick Ohlsson) who are the go-to people for performances of the Busoni piano concerto. 80 minutes long, incredibly complex, and always done from memory.
What you’re describing is “sight reading”, which is another skill. Certainly every musician decodes sheet music on first seeing a piece – and then, it becomes muscle memory.
And note that any professional musician has many many such pieces memorized. Amazing.
Muscle memory I can get, as a non-musician, I actually find playing a very fast and intricate piece just from the sheet music the more incomprehensible skill.
But I guess the OP is not suggesting someone actually reading the sheet music, but rather having it there as a crutch in case case they forget something, or for very specific difficult parts.
AIUI professional pianists can improvise in the rare instance where they forgot a couple of notes or made an error, in a way that few in the audience would notice. And outright forgetting where a passage is going is very unlikely with how often they practice. It would be like forgetting how to drive from your local supermarket to your house.
Proper memorization of this sort is more than muscle memory. Despite many years of piano lessons, as a child, in college, and as an adult, I was never able to memorize anything but the simplest music. I always needed the sheet music in front of me, even though I may have spent a lot of the time not looking at it - I needed it as a prompt for what comes next.
While taking lessons in college (as an engineering student working on a music minor) I was very proud when I was finally able to play a relatively simple piece (a Bach two-part invention) without the sheet music. The second time I played it during a lesson the teacher said “stop” at a random point in the piece. Then she told me to start again from that point. I couldn’t - the only way I could play was to go back to the beginning and start over. I was relying on 100% muscle memory. I didn’t really have the piece memorized.
Flash forward 30 years, I am taking lessons again as an adult. I think I have the opening movement to a Beethoven sonata solidly memorized for an upcoming recital. I go up to the piano sans sheet music, get about halfway through, then go blank. Can’t remember what came next. Go back to the beginning, get stuck at the same place. Go back to my seat, grab the music, play through without any problem. Again, my “memorization” was purely muscle memory.
Watch a video of a concert pianist rehearsing a concerto with conductor and orchestra. They are constantly stopping and restarting, repeating phrases as the conductor works through the piece. That’s memorization. (I always thought it unfair that only the soloists are expected to play from memory, the orchestra gets to have their sheets in front of them.
By that point of displaying talent it’s likely all muscle memory. When it over it’s likely they are kicking themselves for hurrying the fourth movement or whatever no one else could detect.
Perfection is a mirage, it just looks like magic to anyone not there for decades in the practice room.
As a kid, I played piano. When there was a recital, I didn’t have any music and I could still play the pieces from memory decades later.
My grandfather loved classical music. I remember once when we had a couple of pianists playing a local concert and he was dismissive of the fact that they were using music.
But, really, rock musicians can play their music without resorting to music stands, either (some can’t even read music). It’s no different: when you play something enough, you can remember it without propting.
Nope. I was right; I was thinking of Schoenberg and 12-Tone Technique. From Wikipedia:
The twelve-tone technique —also known as dodecaphony , twelve-tone serialism , and (in British usage) twelve-note composition —is a method of musical composition. The technique is a means of ensuring that all 12 notes of the chromatic scale are sounded equally often in a piece of music while preventing the emphasis of any one note through the use of tone rows, orderings of the 12 pitch classes. All 12 notes are thus given more or less equal importance, and the music avoids being in a key.
I am far from a pro, but I’ll offer this possibility - how many times do you need to LISTEN to a piece to know how it goes? To some extent, when a musician is playing something they know, their mind is essentially listening to the song, and their hands go where they ought almost automatically. They aren’t saying, “Put that finger THERE!”
Be sure you do not underestimate the crazy amount of time concert soloists have played their material - giving even more reps to any particularly challenging parts.
For me, I play best when I am in a sort of middle ground - concentrating enough - but not too much. If I’m really thinking about what is involved in playing something, that is a sure way to trip up. But if I’m not concentrating enough, I’ll space out. In the sweet spot, the music is basically playing itself, and I’m just thinking about what I can tweak here or there.
Some people have a lot of difficulty getting off of the music. I’m not sure if they are incapable of doing so, or just haven’t practiced that aspect correctly. I play both in bluegrass jams and a community orchestra. It is funny that some really good orchestral players say they could NEVER play w/o their music. And many good folk musicians say they could never play the orchestral music. Me - I just hack them both up!
The kind of brainfart Marvin describes is really weird. Almost like your memory has a scratch, or some erasure that brings you up short at the same specific spot. I believe I’ve also read that even (most?) pros are not able to start from ANY spot in the music. Instead, they can start from a great many “signposts.” But not just from some random spot.
Indeed, 12-tone serialism is all about specific patterns. Tone rows are constructed very precisely so that they can be used in all sorts of ways; backwards (retrograde), upside down (inversion), transposed all over the place, and do that internal divisions (trichords, tetrachords, hexachords (divisions into three, four, six notes)) also follow precise patterns that comment each other and the full row.
Schönberg also composed in what’s sometimes called “free atonalism” which is less structured, but still highly pattern based (one of my college theory profs called it "contextual music).
John Cage composed a piece called “Music of Changes” based on the I Ching. Not many patterns there.
That all said, while patterns are certainly helpful, at the end of the day memorization, especially memorization in a specialized area, is a learned skill. It’s something that musicians are taught, and as time goes by becomes a natural part of the learning process. When you practice the same things over and over again, the memory builds itself, and specific memorization effort, while important, is more of a reinforcing process.
It was the dice reference that made me think you had them confused. I have a copy of Schoenberg’s “Fundamentals of Music Composition” sitting on my shelf, so I’m familiar with his approach.
