Memorizing

JUL 24, 2012:  If you can train yourself to do it,the most effective way to memorize piano music is away from the instrument---sitting in a comfortable chair or at a desk.  The more you do it, the more you can hear the music inside your head without actually performing it.

According to Karl Leimer in his book The Shortest Way to Pianistic Perfection (1930), the performer begins memorizing by learning short phrases or bits of music--and gradually learns to memorize in larger chunks.  The ability to hear music just by looking at the printed score is a cherished goal for any musician, I would imagine, and that is the secret of Beethoven's ability to compose after he became totally deaf. Leimer asserts that the performer begins to work out the details of the performance away from the piano "so that work which had at first been purely technical, becomes purely mental."  Sometimes even the fingering can be worked out mentally.

When I memorize, I don't use the metronome very much.  I even speed up the parts that are technically unchallenging and slow down the difficult passages when playing over a chunk of music I have just learned from memory.  But once the notes are all there--in the brain as well as the fingers---I get out the metronome.  Starting at a reasonably slow tempo so as to still get all the notes, I take the metronome up notch by notch until I reach tempo.  I would do that anyway, but the main difference is that there is no music in front of me.  I think it's important to keep checking it with the score so you don't stray too far from the printed page, but it's a fact that when a composer makes a "composer plays composer" recording for the general public, the score reader will usually notice a lot of small changes between what's on the printed page and what the composer actually does on the recording.  There's no reason you can't do the same within reason, assuming you have a familiarity with the style of the music and the composition itself.

Learning away from the instrument helps you see the structure.  Playing passages at different tempos insures the performer that they will be able to find things not obvious to them if they had chosen to stick with one tempo (usually the one marked by the composer).   You might think of those various tempos as different flavors of the same beverage.  But it goes beyond that.  If you understand what's possible at one tempo, you might be able to transfer it to another---not right away, maybe, but after putting in enough time.

The thing is to put in the time.