On Memorising Music, Part 1

I’ve been having a number of conversations recently about memorising music, with both piano friends and choral friends, and reflecting on them has helped bring a number of things into focus for me. This post and the next cover general themes that apply across both worlds, and I’m planning a follow-up that specifically considers lyrics, since language is processed by the brain somewhat (but not entirely) differently from music.

For some people, a lot of the memorising process happens during the process of simply learning how to execute the music, without any specific attention to memory per se. For people who find memorising hard, this can seem like unhelpful information: that’s all right for them, you might think, but it doesn’t help for those of us that struggle.

However, as someone for whom that is sometimes, but not always the case, I think there are things to be learned from what’s going on when memorising comes readily to inform how to go about things when it doesn’t.

I usually play piano music from memory. I sometimes quip that it’s easier to memorise than to turn pages (and the passages around page turns are routinely the bits that get stored in my memory first), but actually it’s more the case that it just takes me so long to figure out the technical challenges of executing a piece that by the time I can physically play it, I know it very very well. This actually also sounds a bit facetious, but on reflection clarifies something important about process.

When something does not come readily, when you have to spend time taking it in tiny snippets, radically slowed down, you end up studying it in great depth. The technical problem-solving (what exactly do I need to do to achieve this?) requires you to think carefully not just about how your body works, but also exactly what this that you want to achieve actually is.

Deep work often feels like it’s more about skill than about musical content, but when you think carefully about what needs to happen at the base of your thumb in order to free the 4th finger to reach a major 7th away, and what you need to do with your right hip and angle of shoulder blades to allow that to happen, you develop a very clear concept of that 7th, how you prepare for it, and how you move away from it. The concept is multidimensional: it is strongly kinaesethetic (from the focus on its physical execution), it also auditory (as well as it role in the narrative/expressive profile of the piece, tone quality also tells you a lot about your physical set-up), it is visual (how it looks on the score, how your hand looks as it plays it).

Emergent from all these qualities is a kind of holistic abstracted idea of the musical element. For me this idea is partly synaesthetic (colour and flavour lurk around the edges of my sense of music), partly structural/theoretical, partly emotional/associative. Once this kind of deep concept of the music develops, I don’t subsequently need to memorise it, it is fully internalised through the process of learning how to play it. It may look like memorising comes easily in this context, but it’s only because actually playing it comes so hard.

For easier piano music, and most vocal music, I need to give separate attention to the process of memorising, as the process of learning to execute it doesn’t take either the length of time or the depth of study when the required skills are already securely in place as it does when working at the edge of one’s ability. This is probably the dynamic at the heart of the truism that people tend to be good either at sight-reading or at memorising: if you’re a good reader, not only do you spend less time with the music than a slower learner, but you don’t have to think about it in such depth to bring it to a state of reasonable fluency.

So – and here at long last is the big penny-drop moment from thinking about all this – the key to getting music that you can execute quite readily internalised is to find ways to generate a deeper, analytical engagement. When you can’t play the music without analysing your technical engagement in detail, you have deep work built in to the process, which does a lot of the heavy lifting for memory along the way. But when you can basically execute it straight off the page, it kind of passes straight through you without having to be integrated into your sense of being.

The key thing to note here is that simply repeating the thing you can do already many times doesn’t necessarily help you get deeper into the music. Repetition without escalating the challenge, indeed, encourages the brain to disengage with the process: this is the fundamental dilemma of drill. If you are frustrated that despite listening to your part on repeat for hours, you still struggle to recall it in rehearsal, the answer isn’t more hours of listening, but to develop a wider repertoire of ways of understanding it.

This post is quite long enough now, so the next will look at how you might go about this.