Classical music performance as an exercise in memorization

Cafe Society
21

I exaggerated a bit in my post. My teacher wanted me to be able to resume at the beginning of the phrase where she stopped me, not at the exact beat. Or even to just back up to where I could restart. Just in my case that was always the beginning.

The problem was when I was a kid I was good at sight-reading, at least for the Schaum method books. I was never asked to memorize anything during those 3-4 years of early lessons. Adults I knew would praise the ability to read music and poo-poo the ability to play by ear. No concept of music theory at all.

In contrast, when my son took piano lessons (at the same time, at the same music school, and with the same teacher I had as an adult) he had to take a separate music theory class, was taught with real music and not kiddie music, was required to memorize from the beginning, and was taught to play through mistakes (I had a habit of stopping and restarting at mistakes, probably because I was expecting Sister Mary Elephant to whack me in the knuckles at every mistake).

I was incredibly jealous. The he dropped piano to switch to guitar.

22

What I had in mind was not (just) sight-reading, but any situation where the musician relies on the sheet music rather than memory/practice/familiarity to know what notes to play.

23

I tend to memorize pieces very quickly partly because I’m lazy (I hate sight-reading), partly because I need to look at my hands while I play. So, the sooner I can get my eyes off the sheet music, the better. Honestly, it’s not that difficult, especially if you know how the music goes.

I have exactly the same problem and it drives me crazy, especially the randomness of it. For instance, it can take me months or even years to play a piece flawlessly, but if I mess up only once, then the mistake is immediately ingrained in my muscle memory and I have to go back to practicing whole passages that had never posed any problem before. How can hundreds of perfect executions vanish and a single mistake become automatic at once ?

I was going to mention him. More information here.

I don’t find this really interesting, or pleasant to listen to, but Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski experimented with “controlled chance”, much more successfully in my opinion. For example, his cello concerto contains clearly defined passages were the notes are fully written out but not the rhythms. The idea is for the musicians to start together and end together, but play all the notes in between however they want. I think he extended this idea to his string quartet, but there the whole work is like this, not just sections. I find this approach much more expressive (the plaintive glissandos, the brutish brass!) and therefore more satisfying.

24

I’ve been playing piano for decades and, because I’m strictly an amateur and hobbyist, never required to memorize anything. I have, over time, memorized some pieces that I have played a lot which isn’t surprising. Partly, I read music fluently, and I also know the keyboard by touch and almost never look at my hands so my eyeballs are free to use the sheet music as a reference as often as I want/need.

Even with music sitting there, performing a piece well still involves a lot of muscle memory, especially for advanced or intricate music. Still, since I never have to perform in front of an audience I like having the reference there even if for some pieces I really don’t use it much any more.

I have to contrast this with my late spouse who was a professional. Any sheet music in his possession tended to be covered with notes before he was done with it, and as others have noted there was an insane amount of repetition involved prior to memorization. Working with him in a band is the only time I’ve been asked to memorize music (not piano) and, again, a lot of muscle memory was involved along with that repetition. I found, in the end, I didn’t enjoy it as much as playing solely to please myself

The main difference is that pros have a level of dedication and concentration that us hobbyists don’t, as well as a drive for perfection. It’s also the way in which they practice and drill, aiming for precision. Yes, at a certain point innate ability is a factor, but moderate talent that works hard is going to beat natural talent that is lazy.

What I can’t do is play by ear. It’s just not a skill I’ve ever developed. My spouse? He had perfect pitch. No fair!

25

It depends on how advanced of a pianist someone is.

My wife is a classically trained pianist who taught all of her life, and it amazes me that I can hand her a piece of nontrivial sheet music in some random key and she’ll play it at tempo the first time through, occasionally pausing to figure out what some crazy chord high up on the ledger lines is.

But she regrets that she hadn’t learned more to improvise and play by ear. For her, she is simply transcribing what is on the page to the instrument. The grass is always greener on the other side–many musicians who perform with us admire her reading skills, while she admires their improvisation and ear training.

I was chatting about this with a friend at work and he said “So it’s like us typing at the computer?” and I was surprised at the parallel. For her it is exactly like a fast typist transcribing a document. She doesn’t even look at her hands as she’s “typing away” at what is on the page.

And I watch on in envy as a bassist who only has to play one note at a time and struggles with that.

When I was a teenager I learned Morse code as part of getting my ham radio license. I had to send and receive at 5 words per minute for the Novice license. That was plodding work, decoding the message letter by letter, writing them down in a notebook and watching the message slowly develop over the next several minutes.
But that’s not what true experts in the field hear: they aren’t hearing “.-” and thinking “A”; they are hearing “A” directly, and eventually they are hearing full words and phrases instead of dots and dashes.

I suspect music is the same. Masters of the craft are seeing far more than a run of eighth notes going from B to G in the key of D. I have no idea what they are seeing, but surely they instantly grok the minor scale in the major key that they are playing and where it fits in the larger picture, while I am still looking at that first “B” note.

26

Yes. There’s definitely a lot of pattern recognition that is inherent in fluent music reading. As you say, easily recognizing strings of notes as sections of a scale, or some other sequence that sits atop the concept of scale and harmony that is happening in a particular moment. Like, “oh, that’s that sequence of notes that happens sometimes in this specific idiom/genre when moving from a iii chord to a VI, when the VI chord is going to serve as a dominant leading us into a new key.”

I try to work with piano students on recognizing vertical shapes, as I think that’s a more accessible version of pitch pattern recognition. Basic chord triads have a consistent shape in each inversion. If you confidently know the key you’re in, and you see the shape of the chord, you don’t have to read the pitches- just the top or bottom note and the rest of the chord comes automatically. That can then extrapolate to intervals- if you can play a root position triad by shape recognition, then you can also play a two notes a fifth apart by shape recognition. And if you can do that, you can learn to do it not just for vertically stacked (happening at the same time) notes, but for notes separated by time.

This is also how, when sight reading, one chooses fingerings and hand positions. If I’m registering that a particular sequence is going to end an octave higher than where it begins I might choose different fingerings than if it’s going to end only a forth from where it begins, or an octave and a half.

27

I once saw my ex do that in real time as she was sight-reading a piece I was working on. At one point, she changed her fingering without missing a beat and I could almost hear her brain going “Uh-oh, this fingering is convenient right now but it’s going to get me into trouble in two bars - better change it while I still can”.

28

From what I understand, from talking to quite a few musicians about this, there comes a point where the instrument becomes essentially an organ of your body and making it do stuff is like talking or walking - this is the muscle memory thing people are referring to, but in practice it can be as natural as singing, where your brain knows the sound you want to make, and the music comes out, but the process of arranging all the machinery isn’t consciously controlled at the detail level.

It can happen in other similar contexts such as typing or knitting or dancing - it takes practice and deliberate actions at the start, then it becomes a part of the vocabulary of your body.

29

For a couple of decades I made my living with typing skills. There is a strong parallel. When I was learning to type I advanced rapidly and the instructor asked if I played piano, saying that musical keyboard skills seemed to help with typing keyboard skills.

I don’t look at my hands when using either sort of keyboard, and I’m not consciously aware of “transcribing” what’s on the page to the keys (unless there’s something really weird and involved). It all just sort of flows.

Not that I’m the world’s best pianist or typist - far from it - just somewhat above average skills because I’ve been doing this stuff for 40-50 years and you do anything that long you tend to achieve some level of skill.

30

Others have hinted at this, but I’ll mention that, back when I played tuba, when I was sight-reading music, at no point did my brain ever go “B flat, C, F”, etc. Each mark on the page corresponded to a fingering and to a tightness of lips, and to some lesser extent to a sound, but never to a note name, because I didn’t need that.

I suspect that, for a better musician than I, the correspondence to a sound was probably a lot stronger than it was for me. I never got to the point where I could hear a tune and reproduce it on an instrument (any instrument) without experimentation.

31

This kind of segues to the tangential but mind-blowing ability to “hear” a tune in your head and put it on paper, without working it out on an instrument in between. Beethoven never “heard” anything he wrote for the last 15 years of his life, since he was deaf as a post. Or: the final scene in Amadeus, where Mozart is dictating his Requiem to Salieri. As he said in the film, a piece was finished in his head – “the rest is just scribbling”.

32

These another scene in Amadeus where Mrs. Mozart shows Salieri a handful of Mozart’s music. He briefly thumbs through the pages and then they fall from his hands as he sees the notes, hears the music in his head and immediately recognizes its brilliance.

I recently learned that this is called audiation. I can kinda, sorta do it a bit but not in real time. Real musicians do all the time.

33

Well, sure - it’s like how when you read print you don’t consciously decode words, you “hear” the words in your head.

34

Salieri also notes that he’s seeing the first and only draft. It went straight from Mozarts head to paper without any erasures or corrections, “like he was taking dictation from God.”

35

A slightly different perspective…

I’m not a classical musician, nor am I a very good reader, but I’ve been playing and performing music all of my life. What saves me is that I have a very good ear. I can hear what is happening with the music, even if I don’t have a keyboard in front of me. This allows me to learn songs by listening to them, often while driving to the gig where I will perform them that night.

Our band has a list of over 200 songs. I do not use any notes, and we do not use set lists, so I may be called to play any of those songs with no warning whatsoever. For me, this is not difficult. We also may change songs on the fly, subtly altering chords or sections depending on our mood. This is also not difficult because I’m always listening intently.

Now, if I had to read charts or sheet music, that would be VERY difficult for me. Thankfully, I’m not asked to do that very often. The interesting thing (to me, at least) is that I’ve learned to play many of these songs while performing them in front of an audience. There are various “tricks” I use to accomplish this, but essentially, I’m using my ear’s ability to identify intervals and chord changes on the fly. So if, for example, I’m playing an F chord, I can hear instantly that the next chord the band plays is a 5th above, which is a C. My reaction may be slightly delayed the first time around, but I’ll have that change memorized by the second time. Or, if it’s a more difficult and unpredictable song, maybe the third time.

I dated a classical pianist for a few years. She got very annoyed at me because she could be working on a piece for weeks and, during that time, I heard it enough to learn it in my head. She would struggle with a section and I would say, “it goes like this” without looking at her music. She could play very well if that music was in front of her, and she could memorize it over time, but she couldn’t learn it by just hearing it. If I asked her to play a simple children’s song like “Mary had a little lamb”, she would struggle to figure it out by ear. We had entirely different skill sets.

All of that said, classical music is much more complicated than the music I play, and my skills will not get me a gig with an orchestra any time soon. But I suspect that there are few classical musicians who can do what I do. There isn’t the same emphasis on ear training in classical music as there is with, say, jazz, or in my case, rock and roll. And I really don’t know how I do what I do, but it’s worked for me and given me many years of enjoyment as a performing musician.

36

I have always been awestruck by this story from The Art of Possibility by Benjamin Zander, founder and conductor of the Boston Philharmonic:

In the middle of the slow movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet op. 95, just before his big solo, Lehner suddenly had an inexplicable memory lapse, in a place where his memory had never failed him before. He literally blacked out. But the audience heard Opus 95 as it was meant to be played, the viola solo sounding in all its richness. Even the first violinist, Rudolph Kolisch, and cellist, Bennar Heifetz, both with their eyes closed and deeply absorbed in the music, were unaware that Lehner had dropped out. The second violinist, Felix Khuner, was playing Lehner’s melody, coming in without missing a beat at the viola’s designated entrance, the notes perfectly in tune and voiced like a viola on an instrument tuned a fifth higher. Lehner was stunned, and offstage after the performance asked Khuner how he could have possibly known to play. Khuner answered with a shrug: “I could see that your third finger was poised over the wrong string, so I knew you must have forgotten what came next.”

37

I think we can sum up this thread as: musicians are freaks. :). But in the best possible way.

38

Which is why Salieri is the more interesting character of the two, at least in a tragic sense.

He is at the top of his game, universally recognized as one of the greatest musical minds of his time, getting commissions from kings. Yet, at that moment he realizes that Mozart is a once-in-a-century genius… and he’s the only one gifted enough to understand this.

It must be lonely up there when you alone realize that there’s someone else above, someone whose music will still be played when yours is pretty much forgotten, no matter how loved it is now.

39

Thanks for the post. SO many talented folk in this thread, I hesitate to offer my thoughts/experiences. But your comment as to the “different skill sets” reminded me of something I mused over recently.

I play upright bass in a small string band and several bluegrass/oldtime jam sessions. Generally, at the start of a song, someone will say the title and the key. Usually the leader starts playing and within a couple of notes/phrases, everyone else joins in.

Sometimes someone will not be paying attention when the key is announced, and they’ll be saying, “What key are we in?” Well, besides the fact that they should be able to read the guitar player’s chords, I found myself thinking, “Just listen. It is obviously in G.”. For whatever reason, whatever my other shortcomings, I’m able to figure the key in - at most - 2 notes. Just a clear example of a way in which different musicians in a single genre can differ.

Having said that, one thing that holds me back in soloing is not being able to find the note the melody starts on. Once I find that first note, the rest of the melody just lays out under my left hand. But way too often, when I’m hammering 1/5s at pace and someone looks at me and says, “Take it!”, I either just play pentatonic arpeggios, or throw up all over myself hunting for that elusive melody. And then afterwards pretend I was making a bunch of jazz-influenced bold choices! :wink:

40

I was a Computer Science major who took one music theory class, but one fact from that class has stuck with me all these years:

On a piano keyboard, if you start at C and play all the white keys going up: congrats, you’ve just played a C Major scale.

If you start at A and play all the white keys you’ve just played an A Minor scale

So the difference between major and minor keys isn’t the notes, it’s the intervals between the notes. (Mind blown.)