3 Ways to Memorize Music When Nothing Else Works

Lydia wrote an interesting comment on my 2007 article about memorizing music:

I notice that many of your tips for memorization include the word memorize in them. "Run the piece from memory, mistakes and all, keeping track of all the slips." In other words, memorize where you messed up. "Memorize, the articulation, memorize the dynamics, memorize the work away from the piano." These are all suggestions I've heard from my teachers for years, but my question is always HOW? HOW do i memorize the dynamics, HOW do i memorize the form, HOW do you expect me to remember where I messed up after playing a piece? These are not suggestions for people who have difficulty memorizing. These are variety exercises for people who are already decent at memorizing. Do you have tips for people whose brains simply refuse to remember these things?

What an awesome comment! Lydia asks some completely valid questions here. There are indeed times when absolutely nothing works. In the 11 years since originally writing that article, I've found this to be the case with myself, especially as I age and tend to think a little differently.

The situations that Lydia describes are places where thinking laterally can work. Rather than a full frontal memory practice assault, consider working in different ways. Here are some ideas:

1. "How do I memorize the dynamics?" Dynamics aren’t just a volume dial, but a way into playing with different tonal colors, textures, shades, and moods. All of these colors can be accessed through varieties of touch, and you can commit them to memory by remembering what the touch feels like. Practice with the music, not just reading and listening for the dynamics, but feeling the speed of attack and quality of touch. This is something that the body can remember. And if the body remembers it, the senses and emotions are never far behind. How does a piano feel? What about pianissimo? Fortissimo? Dolce? Mezzo forte? What about crescendo and diminuendo? Being aware of the slight changes in touch and pressure with these dynamics in practice can unlock a way to perform with them as well.

2. "How do I memorize the form?" Get out a blank piece of paper and draw the form. Take what you know about the basics of the form that you’re playing, whether it be binary, ternary, Sonata, Rondo, or whatever. Draw the main divisions. Write the bar numbers, phrase lengths, cadential points, and key centres on the page. Then try to play from the piece of paper. Still confused? Write in as much information as you need. Your written-out form can serve as a cheat sheet.

3. ”How do you expect me to remember where I messed up after playing a piece?” Record yourself. It has been said that there is no more effective, blunt, or honest teacher than observing yourself play on video. If you’ve got the guts to watch yourself having memory bloopers in a run-through of whatever work you're preparing, you can go a step further and figure out exactly when, where, how, and why the mistakes happened. Then figure out how to fix them. Then record/watch again and look for progress.

But to be completely honest, sometimes memory is simply not happening. Unless you’re in a situation where playing from memory is absolutely compulsory, consider using the music. There’s no pride lost in using the score in order to bring a work to life and feel confident in performance.

Yevgeny Kutik on Practicing

‘Practice’ has become a very misleading word. What is practice? It took me a very long time to figure this out. As an advanced student, practice is often little more than playing the violin for long hours, repeating motions to build muscle memory, and attempting to correct mistakes (which often go unnoticed) over and over again. It’s mindless and painfully boring – but frankly, easy. Dissecting and rebuilding technical issues step-by-step, making instantaneous corrections and decisions, structuring your time effectively, learning how to convey an idea — this is incredibly hard work. It also happens to be the better definition of ‘practice.’ Good practice is incredibly hard work.

Violinist Yevgeny Kutik's words on listening as a path towards developing objectivity in the practice room will be useful to many of us who fill practice sessions with repetition rather than awareness.

Effective practice is an art form that must be cultivated and perfected - The Strad

Pamela Frank on Practicing

Wise words on practicing from Pamela Frank: it's about quality, not quantity.



(Via Elaine Fine)

Practicing Just Got Social: Three Services To Help Both Students and Teachers

Remember the days when practicing an instrument required enforced seclusion from everybody else in your life? My early years of practice were rich and rewarding, but I tended to keep all my observations entirely to myself. With a new crop of online services, the inner life of practicing is quickly becoming a highly socialized activity, subtly intertwined with their teacher's agenda, the educational aims of software, and the game-like activity of watching one's own practicing in relation to what others are doing with theirs.

Three services in particular stand out in this niche, each with their own take on the relationship of teacher to student, their take on the pedagogical process, and the degree of social interaction between students. 

Music Teacher's Helper

The most mature of the programs in this space, Music Teacher's Helper has been on the scene for several years now and has had time to branch out from a studio management, marketing, and invoicing service to one that embraces pedagogical tools as well. MTH's practice logging features can be accessed by both the student and teacher, as this tutorial video shows:

I particularly like the bar graph and how it shows consistency (or lack thereof). On the other hand, students' recording of practice on the service is limited to interaction between them and their teacher, and although it gives teachers a clear top-down view of how students are practicing, there isn't yet a way for students to see the practice habits of other students in the studio, nor to interact with them through MTH.

iScore 

A brand-new service by one of North America's most venerable musical institutions, iScore is the brainchild of a partnership between the Royal Conservatory, Queen's University, and Concordia University, growing out of the ePearl educational suite as an implementation tailored towards music students. iScore's practice-tracking process is a largely student-driven one, which utilizes the specific stages in learning a work to encourage students to both reflect on their practice and share it with others using an array of multimedia tools. Here's a short video about iScore:

iScore is a standalone pedagogical tool, without the other scheduling, marketing, and financial studio management tools that can be found in Music Teacher's Helper. From my initial look at the program a few weeks ago, it looks like teachers on iScore function more in an observational role - the onus is on the students to do both the practicing and spend the time learning the program so that they can engage with its numerous features. Because of its funding and development model, iScore is only available in Canada at present, and once the service gets going, it might provide ample reason for American music teachers to move north of the border.

Compound Time

Another new entry in this space is Michael Haddad's Compound Time (thanks for the heads-up, Erica), which is much closer to the spirit of an open social network such as Facebook. The Compound Time process emphasizes setting time goals and choosing repertoire, then setting a timer as you work on each work. Other users you have friended will also be able to see what you're practicing. Although Compound Time has by far the sparsest feature set of the three, it does have something dear to so many social networkers which the others do not - status updates, with the option to pull your Twitter feed into your profile. You can also use the service as a teacher, invite your students and then track their progress.

Depending on your agenda as a teacher, each of these services can fill a specific need in the potentially lonely life of the practicing student. The difficulty with any of them is that, in addition to motivating your students to practice, you have to make a case that they need to spend additional time logged in to a computer reflecting on their work and/or interacting with others. As the toolkits of these programs become more complex and integrated with the learning process, they require more time to both learn the program and put it into practice so that they can work their magic.

Music teachers: do you use any of these programs or others to track practicing? What rewards have you discovered? What challenges?

Music students: do you use an online service to track your practicing? Do you find it helpful for your process? Do the social aspects help to motivate you?

(Disclaimer: I'm on the faculty of the Royal Conservatory, one of the institutions behind the development of iScore.  I have a Music Teacher's Helper-enabled website, and have also been a member of the MTH blogging team for several years. I'm a member of MTH's affiliate program, and although you'll see affiliate links throughout this site, there are none in this article. I have a Compound Time teacher's account, but am not affiliated with the company in any way.)

Chocolate Cake vs. Ice Cream: Rethinking Balance at the Keyboard

Image by ralph and jenny

When you're creating your sound at the piano, one of the most important concepts is foreground vs. background. Melody vs. accompaniment. However, many pianists erroneously equate the idea of balance at the keyboard as the need to play all voices at the same level. As you play multiple voices, sameness of tone between the hands can often result in a bland sound with a melody that is much too soft and an overbearing accompaniment.

As pianists, we need to think like recording engineers. What is most important in a musical texture? What do you want the audience to hear? What technical decisions do you need to make in order to be able to bring out these differences? More often than not, performances that we dislike tend to be ones that all sound the same.

Here is some terminology that I've been developing over the last while in order to better explain this concept in lessons and classes:

Foreground	Background
Depth of tone	Lightness of tone
Superhero	Sidekick
Batman	Robin
$2.3 million star forward	$500,000 rookie defenseman
Mercedes	Honda Civic
Chocolate cake	Ice cream
Gwen Stefani	The rest of No Doubt
Sting	Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland
Bianca Castafiore	Igor Wagner
Bruce Springsteen	E Street Band
Business class	Economy class

When we listen to music, we need to hear its components in a hierarchy. Simply put, effective balancing decisions result in an attractive overall sound. Many apologies to The Police, No Doubt, and the E Street Band, all of whose music I admire and whose work is in no way demeaned by their inclusion in this chart. In fact, I admire the playing of Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland so much precisely because of the way that they put Sting's singing into such effective relief, and in a way that I feel has never been surpassed in his post-Police solo work.

A note for collaborative pianists: the concept of accompaniment is also by no means demeaning to the role of a pianist in an ensemble. Working with another musician is a prime opportunity to make decisions about foreground vs. background in the piano part in the ensemble. In string sonatas and chamber music, the melody is often in the piano and the rest of the ensemble needs to keep down. Even in songs and arias where the melody is exclusively in the vocal part, the pianist still needs to delineate between important and not-so-important elements of the score.

Do you use any other language or imagery to explain balance? If so, feel free to leave a comment and tell us about it.

Fixing, Flow, and Self-Nudging

Back from some much needed downtime, I would like to wish everyone a Happy New Year and I hope that your 2012 is safe, healthy, successful, and creative.

First of all, an interesting update on the recent discussion about practicing more effectively rather than longer. Study Hacks listed some strategies on practice from an anonymous pianist - here are all four:

1. Avoid flow. Do what does not come easy.
2. To master a skill, master something harder.
3. Systematically eliminate weakness.
4. Create beauty, don't avoid ugliness. 

I would agree with most of those four statements - the only one that I would disagree with is the avoidance of flow. My conception of Flow as it relates to the creative process (based on Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book) is not just the experience of playing the work, but the experience of engaging with the entire process of taking the work apart, working the small parts, putting it back together, and repeating the process en route to the best performance possible. 

A better way to understand flow in this context would be to add a fifth statement which would read something along the lines of "Cultivate flow as you observe the previous four concepts".

For those who can work their way through some complex concepts, an article by Penny Tompkins and James Lawley in the Clean Collection entitled Self-Nudging: unconscious decision-making and how we can bias our future self provides some very useful clues on how we can build a first-person support system. Rather than focusing only on goals, Tompkins and Lawley's NLP-based feedback system relies on targeting very small, incremental changes and becoming aware of them over time:

1a. Decide on the behaviour you would like to do more of (in particular contexts) =X.
1b. Identify how specifically will you know more X-ing is happening?  

2a. Identify what needs to get your attention in-the-moment (trigger and signal =Y) so that you automatically tend to do more X-ing? (i.e what internal conditions will nudge you to do more of X?)
2b. Identify how will you know Y-ing is happening more?  

3a. Identify several ways of practising how to get good at generating Y =Z.
3b. Identify undeniable evidence that will let you know whether you are making ‘incremental progress’ – or not.  

4. Do Z regularly  

5. Put yourself in contexts where X will likely be required – and notice what happens: If you detect incremental progress do more of Z until you have demonstrated you are good enough at doing X and it has become a habit. If you detect no, or decremental progress, identify what other Y and/or Z are likely to have more influence, and repeat using those.

(Via Get Everything Done forums and @mgr88)

Readers' Poll: When is your best practice time?

In a regular practice day, everyone has that über-productive time when your working process seems to come in place, you get into the zone, or merely have less distractions to deter you from relentless focus and pianistic awesomeness. When I was in graduate school at Eastman, it was always the morning, as early as possible. Afternoons work for many of us - on any given day across the planet, practice rooms are packed from noon to six for a reason. On the other hand, evenings are a quiet and peaceful time to get work done, whether you like to work North American style (practice your face off until the security guards kick you out after 11pm*). or European style (practice your face off until 10:30pm or so, then meet your friends for a nightcap and couple of smokes at the local Studentenpub).

This week's poll asks the question:

When is your best practice time?

You can find the poll near the top of the sidebar on any page of the blog or vote here. The poll will be open until Sunday at 9pm EDT.

*Then again, many of us at Eastman learned that there are places where the security guards rarely venture to go, such as the depths of the bomb shelter basement of the annex, where you could theoretically practice all night long. Once I discovered this, I could even fit in rehearsals past midnight on those extreme workaholic days. Since I've officially slipped into the years which one might call "mid-career", I have the luxury of scheduling rehearsals at more sane times of the day, rarely going past 9pm unless it's tech week.

Staying Off Autopilot

A recent Op-Ed article by David Brooks in the New York Times looks at current thought regarding excellence and how to get there. What seems to be the consensus (espoused in books such as Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success) is that our concept of "genuis" might seem like a God-given talent, but is actually the result of a lot of hard work over the course of many years. Brooks writes:

The latest research suggests a more prosaic, democratic, even puritanical view of the world. The key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark. It’s not I.Q., a generally bad predictor of success, even in realms like chess. Instead, it’s deliberate practice. Top performers spend more hours (many more hours) rigorously practicing their craft.

But it's not just the hours logged in the practice room. The work has to be conscious:

The mind wants to turn deliberate, newly learned skills into unconscious, automatically performed skills. But the mind is sloppy and will settle for good enough. By practicing slowly, by breaking skills down into tiny parts and repeating, the strenuous student forces the brain to internalize a better pattern of performance.

If there was ever a true case for slow practicing, this is it. Mindful practice requires more effort up front and a lot of taking apart further into the learning process, but the rewards more than repay the time invested.

(Via From the bench)

Previously on the Collaborative Piano Blog:

Slow Practicing
Non-Structured Practice Time
Technique Week
15 Reasons Why Practicing Technique Can Improve Your Time at the Piano

That Gentle Nudge

I recently ran across piano with nicole, a piano pedagogy-oriented blog written by Wichita pianist and teacher Nicole Dyson-Smith. Among her articles, I particularly enjoyed reading How to encourage your child to practice the piano. An excerpt:

Performances are also motivating to piano students, because none of them want to be embarrassed or unprepared in front of their fellow students and peers. For this reason, I notice a dramatic increase in students’ practice time in the weeks leading up to a recital or some other performance. This is a good thing!

Many piano students are also inspired by hearing the performances of more advanced students. I remember being awed by my teacher’s playing when I was a student, so I try to perform myself for my students at least once a year on a big recital.

Creating motivated students is the holy grail of piano pedagogy--young pianists who are motivated to work hard, enjoy the process, and love to play at any level...

How Much Improvement Should You Expect From Practicing?

An article by Tom Ervin in the Online Trombone Journal entitled If You Practice looks at what students can realistically expect from different levels of time spent practicing. Although the article is geared toward trombonists, what Tom talks about can be applied to any instrument. Here is what he says about a half-hour of daily practice:

...you will slowly learn the notes and some rhythms. You can develop a fairly nice midrange sound if you simulate a good example, like a teacher. You can have fun. Many beginners, junior high trombonists, and some high school players practice this way.

On the results of practicing 10 hours per week for several months:

...you will notice some important and valuable developments in your playing. You will become more "fit." You will handle 5 or 6 books at a time, or more...Your reading will really improve! You won't be sore the day after a big blow. You will use the metronome, mirror and tuner properly and do dozens of flexibility routines, scales and arpreggios. If you find something really hard, you will have time to work it out, and work it up. There will be time to solve bad playing habits.

As well as the pride of learning an instrument well and the satisfaction of playing great music at a high level.

Edward Gates on Slow Practice

An article by Edward Gates in the May 1998 Piano Pedagogy Forum has some worthwhile insights on those interested in the benefits of slow practice. An excerpt:

I understood immediately that the hurrying mind, rushed in its thinking, is the bane of practicing - and of performing as well. When the mind is hurried it does not have time to notice what is really happening. It does not focus well and many of the details of the music go by unnoticed. One has only the feeling, "I got it," but the experience of the music is shallow.