The useful skill of MEMORISING YOUR MUSIC

The topic of memorising remains high on the agenda for many pianists. Indeed, in some cases it distracts from the arguably more important business of learning and performing music to the highest possible standard. The large majority of professional solo pianists memorise, a tradition that dates back to the times of the first virtuosos, notably Franz Liszt. Reeling off lengthy programmes of fiendishly difficult music from memory may have made performances by Liszt and his contemporaries seem even more spectacular, but there is a more practical musical basis for the emergence of this tradition. An accomplished pianist’s heightened awareness of the music’s textural, harmonic and structural patterns, coupled with the instrument’s tactility and the ease with one might ‘map’ notation from the page to the fingers, gives him/her a head start when it comes to memorising.

The names of Sviatoslav Richter, Clifford Curzon and Arthur Rubinstein are routinely invoked in any discussion of calamitous memory lapses on stage. Thankfully, I detect there is today a less sniffy attitude shown to those who ‘opt out’ of memorising (as Richter wisely did later on). We might bear in mind as well that prior to Liszt memorising was generally regarded as evidence of a slipshod, careless attitude, and emphatically not as the hallmark of professionalism.

There are pros and cons of memorising at the piano.
Memorising: the pros
• We are able to get ‘beyond the dots’ and enter a more holistic performance space, which may help the music making. Ideally, a player will be helped to achieve something akin to a transcendental, yet fully focused state.
• We get to watch what our hands are doing as we shift position around the keyboard. This is highly beneficial when executing large leaps or passages of extreme complexity.
• We won’t potentially risk distracting our audience by being absorbed by the score and we wont’ create an even worse distraction with the presence of a page-turner. Moreover, when practising, if we have memorised a piece, we can concentrate on the bigger picture without the frustration of wrestling with awkward page turns.
Memorising: the cons
• We may end up demonstrating what we can’t do, as opposed to what we'd hoped we might do.
• We may render a somewhat superficial performance, paying scant regard to the all-important musical detail.
• Memorising may become self-serving and over-prioritised in the lead-up to a performance.
• Fundamental errors can all too quickly become embedded in the playing, leaving the teacher powerless to intervene.
• If we have not fully memorised a piece, we may find ourselves in a quandary when it comes to choosing whether or not to use the score in performance. There is always the risk that in the heat of the moment we may become unable to locate the appropriate place on the page – catastrophe!

Herein lies a cautionary tale: I have enjoyed thousands of polished memorised performances while adjudicating and examining, but I’ve also heard a sizeable number that have become progressively bogged down by memory lapses, undermining the musical qualities that may have otherwise come to the fore. (It is not uncommon for exam candidates to place the score on the stand and proceed to playing without taking a single glance at it thereafter.) Perhaps this problem has something to do with the way in which some pianists learn. Some teachers emphasise rote learning during the first two or three years of piano study. Although in itself this is not necessarily undesirable, in later years an overdependence on rote learning may lead to a superficially memorised state and undermine a performance. When an important performance looms, commit early on to playing with or without the score – don’t hedge your bets!

Learning is memorising
Memorising takes various forms: analytical, kinaesthetic (muscular/finger memory), visual, auditory/aural and eidetic (photographic). In practice, these tend to fuse together imperceptibly, so that when asked how they memorise a piece, many pianists are not fully able to articulate their approach. If you are not a natural/subconscious memoriser, spend a little time away from the piano early on in the process, armed with an open score and a pencil. Try doing a basic analysis of a page or two of the music and aim to internalise its main landmarks; look for patterns and sequences, key/time changes, harmonic progressions, repetitions and shifts in register. Even more importantly, search out variants or moments where changes to the patterning occur. For these are your best allies when memorising, especially in rhythmically repetitive music, for example by Bart?k and Prokofiev, or in minimalist pieces by composers like Einaudi.

Most people should be broadly able to memorise where on the page notable events occur, and this can assist in building a visual picture of the music. Certain isolated chunks of a piece will likely stand out as important to memorise early on. For example, at tricky page-turns (pianists turn far more pages than other instrumentalists!), aim to memorise the final few bars before the turn leading into a bar of two overleaf to ensure the music retains its all-important momentum, and mark into the score precisely where you plan to execute the turn.

In the lead-up to a performance, I find myself doing at least as much ‘head practice’ as actual piano practice, and ironically it seems that the harder a piece is to learn, the easier (for me at least) it is to memorise. After all, when you think of it, learning is memorising. If you are attempting to memorise contrapuntal music, gauge your progress by seeing if you can play each hand separately from memory while silently ghosting the other hand and hearing the missing notes in your head (this works equally well with chord-based music). Test your memory regularly by placing the score somewhere at your feet, pre-opened to a particularly troublesome spot. This will force you to make a conscious effort to look down only when absolutely necessary. When you are able to launch confidently into any section, picking up the right tempo and without note searching or taking wrong turns at a critical moments, your memorisation is well on the way to being bullet proof. I like to internalise the trickiest dozen or so passages of a new work early on, so that I can annoy everyone by tapping furiously at the dinner table when I should be passing the sprouts.

In concertos there is an extra burden for the solo pianist – ideally, one ought to be aware of precisely what is taking place orchestrally at all times, so that one is not caught napping by an early entry from the clarinets! You might want to busk a paraphrased version of the tut

TO SUMMARISE…
FIVE TOP TIPS FOR SUCCESSFUL MEMORISING

1 Memorising might be regarded as an extension of how a piece is learned: learning is memorising.

2 Be guided by personal experience. If memorising proves too irksome or inconsistent, it’s far better to use a score. When semi-memorised, your performance is at its most imperilled state: can you quickly locate where you are on the page if disaster strikes?

3 Be methodical when memorising: test, test and test again.

4 Take practical and analytical steps to build effective memory from day one. Flag up important landmarks, beginning with page-turns, tricky technical passages and subtle variants in patterns.

5 Don’t be content merely to regurgitate notes/rhythms: if you’re unsure of the dynamic marking at the start of Variation III, you've still some way to go!