On Memorising Music, Part 2: Finding Depth

My previous post on this theme came to the conclusion that the secret to memorising music lies in deepening one’s understanding of it. In music we find difficult, we can’t manage it at all without working in depth, but in music that comes more readily, we need to find ways to get inside it, in order that it might then get inside us. This post (and the follow-up dedicated to lyrics) is about ways we might go about this.

At the heart of all of these ways is the process of analysis. Molly Gebrian makes the point that all music practice is, at bottom, a process of creative problem-solving. This is as true of internalising music as it is of figuring out how to execute it. Studying our music should be a process of asking questions, hypothesising answers, and then seeing if the music detail supports our hypotheses: ‘What’s going on here, then?’, ‘How does this work?’, ‘Why is this note used here rather than that one?’

Also, I notice that when I want to do conceptual/memory work, I nearly always separate it from actual music-making. I may occasionally experiment with some fingering on the table-top, or conduct and sing short passages to myself while doing it, but that’s usually where there is some problem of execution I want to solve that emerges as I work through the analytical process. Studying music to understand its structure and content happens with pencil and paper.

The first thing I do, even with quite simple pieces, is to map them out. Having a concept of the overall form provides a framework for all subsequent work. As you then go on to focus in on detail, you retain a sense of where you are in the overall arc of the piece, and you have a place where you can mentally store the insights you develop about it so you that you can find them again. It’s like knowing where you keep your pastry brush so that you don’t have to rummage through the whole kitchen when you need it, even if you don’t use it very often.

Another thing I do at the very early stages is to identify repeated passages, and in particular where the repetitions are exact, and where they are varied. This opens up the first genuinely analytical question: why the variation? Sometimes there is an obvious practical answer (e.g. a lyric with a different stress pattern requires a different rhythm and possibly melodic shape from a previous verse). Other times one can only speculate about expressive intent by inference from one’s responses to the music (e.g. a substitute harmony with a higher harmonic charge suggests an escalation of emotional intensity).

As I get more familiar with the music, I start asking questions about expressive shaping. Where are the main points of arrival or release? How can I tell? What is the hypermetre doing? Should I be feeling accents on the odd or even numbered bars, and does that remain consistent throughout? How much rubato does the music call for, and where? Where are there obvious breath points, and where should we avoid breathing? Obviously as both a pianist and a conductor I have more agency concerning these kinds of questions than I do as a choir member, but singers within a directed ensemble still get to use their own hearts and brains, and when they bring their own considered responses to the music to the party, the whole thing comes alive a lot more.

Once you start asking questions as you pore over the music with a pencil, you brain starts chewing over the possible answers in the interstices of your life. And it’s in the shower, or walking down the street, that your brain reveals in its developing relationship with its earworms which bits you’ve already internalised and which bits are still hazy. And those are the bits that are calling you back for further study next time you sit down with the music.

And this is where the process of analysis interacts with memory work. Running sections of the music in your head without playing/singing (‘audiating’ is the technical term for this deliberate deployment of emerging earworms) is a good indicator of what has been internalised already and what is still approximate in concept. Once it feels like you can audiate a section reasonably confidently, it is time to try playing/singing it from memory.

This in turn gives you good information about the clarity/accuracy of your audiation. You can sometimes have a pretty good feel for general musical shape in your head but when you actually have to commit to creating specific sounds with your voice/instrument, you discover that your dum-diddly-um-pomming was actually a bit generalised. And again, this tells you which bits to go back to study. What exactly is it that my brain is letting slip by here, and why might that be? It’s rather like they way I used to think I was quite good at spelling, until the world transitioned from handwriting as default to typing and I had to commit to which specific keys to hit for every word and discovered that I had been flim-flamming myself rather more that I had realised.

A couple of key points about this stage in the process. First: practising memory is the process of practising retrieval. You have to do it without visual or audio cues for the brain to exercise the cognitive skill you are working on. Second, as a direct corollary: finding you forget bits while doing this is an integral part of the process, and not a sign of failure. I think sometimes people who are anxious about memorising experience these gaps as a sign that they are not succeeding, whereas all they are is useful information about what in the music needs attention. There is good empirical evidence that the work your brain does while trying to retrieve material that isn’t quite there yet is an important way to strengthen the learning.

We’ll consider the specific case of lyrics next, but in the meantime, the most important thing to hang on to is that memory is built upon understanding. When you forget bits, it’s probably not more repetition that you need, but more analysis.