on memorization
Oct. 15th, 2002 01:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mamajoanIn trying to learn the Bach fugue in e minor (#10 from Book 1 of the WTC), I've been musing on the topic of memory and memorization and how it becomes permanent.
When I start a new piano piece, especially a hard one like this, I usually at first think, "I'll never memorize this piece. I'll just always play it from the sheet-music." And I do that for a long, and at some point this weird thing happens where I start to remember it in parts, usually the beginning at first not surprisingly, and then usually the parts I like best, and eventually, I suddenly realize that I know the whole piece and can close the book and play it from memory (although it takes me a long time after that to get comfortable with closing the book).
I never set out to memorize something. I mean I never say, "OK, today I'm going to work on memorizing this section." I just play the whole piece through, for my own enjoyment, and after doing that often enough, I find the memorization just happens on its own.
And I guess this is a form of what they mean by rote learning, where you just do something over and over until you've memorized it. But you know, that method doesn't work as well for me with other things. With memorizing poetry or lines from a play, or whatever, there has to be a pattern or I can't do it. Like, in high school I had to memorize a couple of Shakespearean sonnets, and I did it by repeating the quadrains until I knew them, but now when I try to recite them I have to sort of reconstruct them by rhythm and rhyme ("How careful was I when I took my way, each trifle under truest bars to thrust..."). With presidents (for example) it's even harder, because there's no pattern at all. Sure, you can memorize the names in order as a meaningless sequence of syllables and that would qualify, by a fourth-grade teacher's standards, as having memorized the presidents; but you're not really doing anything important, you're not learning anything significant, and you can't start in the middle -- e.g. you couldn't answer the question "Who was President after Cleveland?" without reciting the entire list up to there* -- and in a few months or years you'll have lost the whole thing anyway.
*and even then you'd be in trouble because Cleveland had two non-contiguous terms, so the correct answer is "Which time?" but you wouldn't know that if you were just rattling them off because you'd get to the first one and stop.
Of course, music has a pattern built right into it, obviously. And playing the piano is a combination of muscle memory, aural memory, and what for lack of a better word I'll call intellectual memory; the fingers can feel when they've done something wrong (if they know the piece well enough), and the ear can hear when something sounds wrong, but the brain also needs to be engaged to figure out what was done wrong. The entire process of learning and playing a piece engages those three very distinct aspects -- the hearing, the feeling, the thinking -- and this is perhaps what makes it so fun, challenging, and interesting for me.
(Understanding the construction of the piece helps as well; recognizing primary and secondary themes, harmonic changes, thematic divisions within the piece, all very important not only to understanding the piece and locating oneself within it, but also to getting deeper into the emotional affect of the piece, which of course is also very important in terms of performance.)
But my overall point, I guess, is that how I memorize a piece is kind of a mystery to me. I can't just call it rote because I think a lot about the piece, analyze it, try to understand it; and I can't even call it hard work because I mostly just play for my own enjoyment and stop if I'm not getting pleasure out of it. It just sort of happens.
And sometimes I wonder whether it works that way for everyone or whether I'm just weird. ;)
With every new piece that I tackle, I think "this is the hardest I've ever played!" Rationally that can't be true in this case, especially as the e-minor fugue is only in two voices and I already play the F-Major in three and the g-minor in four. But it always feels that way, which I guess is just a quirk of perception. :) (Musing for another day: does it help or hurt to be familiar with a recording of the piece before trying to learn it?)
When I start a new piano piece, especially a hard one like this, I usually at first think, "I'll never memorize this piece. I'll just always play it from the sheet-music." And I do that for a long, and at some point this weird thing happens where I start to remember it in parts, usually the beginning at first not surprisingly, and then usually the parts I like best, and eventually, I suddenly realize that I know the whole piece and can close the book and play it from memory (although it takes me a long time after that to get comfortable with closing the book).
I never set out to memorize something. I mean I never say, "OK, today I'm going to work on memorizing this section." I just play the whole piece through, for my own enjoyment, and after doing that often enough, I find the memorization just happens on its own.
And I guess this is a form of what they mean by rote learning, where you just do something over and over until you've memorized it. But you know, that method doesn't work as well for me with other things. With memorizing poetry or lines from a play, or whatever, there has to be a pattern or I can't do it. Like, in high school I had to memorize a couple of Shakespearean sonnets, and I did it by repeating the quadrains until I knew them, but now when I try to recite them I have to sort of reconstruct them by rhythm and rhyme ("How careful was I when I took my way, each trifle under truest bars to thrust..."). With presidents (for example) it's even harder, because there's no pattern at all. Sure, you can memorize the names in order as a meaningless sequence of syllables and that would qualify, by a fourth-grade teacher's standards, as having memorized the presidents; but you're not really doing anything important, you're not learning anything significant, and you can't start in the middle -- e.g. you couldn't answer the question "Who was President after Cleveland?" without reciting the entire list up to there* -- and in a few months or years you'll have lost the whole thing anyway.
*and even then you'd be in trouble because Cleveland had two non-contiguous terms, so the correct answer is "Which time?" but you wouldn't know that if you were just rattling them off because you'd get to the first one and stop.
Of course, music has a pattern built right into it, obviously. And playing the piano is a combination of muscle memory, aural memory, and what for lack of a better word I'll call intellectual memory; the fingers can feel when they've done something wrong (if they know the piece well enough), and the ear can hear when something sounds wrong, but the brain also needs to be engaged to figure out what was done wrong. The entire process of learning and playing a piece engages those three very distinct aspects -- the hearing, the feeling, the thinking -- and this is perhaps what makes it so fun, challenging, and interesting for me.
(Understanding the construction of the piece helps as well; recognizing primary and secondary themes, harmonic changes, thematic divisions within the piece, all very important not only to understanding the piece and locating oneself within it, but also to getting deeper into the emotional affect of the piece, which of course is also very important in terms of performance.)
But my overall point, I guess, is that how I memorize a piece is kind of a mystery to me. I can't just call it rote because I think a lot about the piece, analyze it, try to understand it; and I can't even call it hard work because I mostly just play for my own enjoyment and stop if I'm not getting pleasure out of it. It just sort of happens.
And sometimes I wonder whether it works that way for everyone or whether I'm just weird. ;)
With every new piece that I tackle, I think "this is the hardest I've ever played!" Rationally that can't be true in this case, especially as the e-minor fugue is only in two voices and I already play the F-Major in three and the g-minor in four. But it always feels that way, which I guess is just a quirk of perception. :) (Musing for another day: does it help or hurt to be familiar with a recording of the piece before trying to learn it?)
