Play, memory

I am good at sight-reading music.  You can plop a relatively simple piece of sheet music in front of me, and I can stumble through it at the piano.  (Mind, I am not great at sight-reading; I can’t do like Saint-Saens, and sit down and play from the score of a Wagner opera that I’ve never heard before).  This ability has stood me in good stead for most of my life, allowing me to fake my way through lessons I should have practiced harder for, and letting me accompany far more worthy musicians than myself.  But, I have found that it has shaped my musical abilities in ways that I don’t entirely like.

When I was a youth, my piano teachers didn’t particularly press me to memorize music.  I made a few efforts, because it was a thing people did, but I found it to be far more work than I was willing to put in.  When I did try to memorize, it was largely kinetic; my memory was a series of motions, and it would have to be uninterrupted.  If I were derailed, I would have to go back to the beginning and start over.  Perhaps “kinetic” isn’t the word—perhaps “ballistic” is more accurate, in that I would launch and from that point on the trajectory of things was set.  At any rate, my ability to memorize was never developed.

Now, in my 50’s, I am trying to learn to memorize music.  Partly it is a desire to keep stretching out my brain, maybe spurred by watching my parents succumb to Alzheimer’s disease.  Partly, it’s that I have a harder time reading music without my glasses on.  But there I am, struggling with memory.

My approach is somewhat different from what I formerly tried.  I am trying to pay more attention to the music, and why this note follows that note.  I try to shake myself out of a kinetic memory, by playing the same notes using different fingering, and by starting at different points in the music.  I try to pay greater attention to the landmarks, and how the composer gets from one place to another.  I see myself, as if I am walking through a landscape.  At the first, I can only see the most obvious features—a pass, a huge tree, a river—and I can’t see the trails from one to the other.  Learning the music is learning the trail from one landmark to another.  At first, I stumble around, sometimes on the trail, sometimes lost in the weeds, but as I get better, I can stay on the trail; as I learn and memorize the trail, I find myself paying less attention to the trail, and more attention to the landscape as a whole and the beautiful flowers and features that fill it.  Now, while I play far less music than I used to, I feel that I am playing far more musically than I did while reading music.  

The experience is similar to a mindfulness practice.  I have become much more aware of what’s going on inside of the music; I am able to pay attention to the things that need attention, and more critically see what I need to work on.  I am seeing longer lines, rather than isolated notes.  While I am nowhere near a great musician, I think I am better—and while I don’t feel that regret is a useful emotion, I do wish that I had spent more of my time properly memorizing music back when I could move my fingers to play Chopin etudes and such.  But, I won’t complain.  I am learning the Bach Partitas.  Learning and memorizing and polishing a page of music takes me a month, and it’s good.