Memories are made of this

With the right concepts and skills, any musician can successfully learn music by heart, as GERALD KLICKSTEIN explains

Imagine that you’re about to perform a solo that you have memorised. You begin to play, and the music soars. The absence of a score actually heightens your musicality and intensifies your communication with the listeners. Everyone is moved.

If that scenario doesn’t portray your typical experience when playing from memory, take heart. Both contemporary research and my 30 years in the performing and teaching professions have convinced me that proficiency with memorisation involves concepts and skills that any musician can learn. In this article, I aim to provide an overview of those concepts and outline memorisation strategies tailored to string players. Additional guidelines for practising and performing music can be found in my new book, The Musician’s Way.

MEMORISATION CONCEPTS
Is memorising worth the effort? For most musicians, it probably is. Not only do performers report feeling greater artistic freedom when playing from memory, but audiences also prefer memorised solos to those played from scores (see Aaron Williamon, ‘The Value of Performing from Memory’, Psychology of Music volume 27, 1999). Still, we need inclusive preparation if we’re to perform confidently without notation in front of us.

Secure memorisation rests on a foundation of deep learning. Adept memorisers absorb the musical and technical ingredients of a piece from the outset of practice, and they remain aware of those elements throughout the mastering process. Conversely, when a musician’s practice isn’t thorough – say, when phrasing is unclear – the confusion undermines any attempt at memorisation.

Although deep learning is essential, there isn’t any ideal memorisation method. We all have proclivities that affect our learning preferences, and we often come from distinct musical backgrounds. For instance, musicians who are well versed in music theory can use harmonic analysis to fortify their comprehension of pieces, yet students without such insight cannot. In sum, we all must develop memorisation strategies suited to our needs. These strategies will evolve as our abilities expand, so it’s crucial that we remain open to fresh approaches.

We should also be flexible about when in the course of learning a piece we start to memorise. Depending on the composition, some performers begin memorising at the outset of learning; others practise for weeks before they break away from the page. Nonetheless, I’ve observed that many students do best when they memorise a solo as soon as they can play it at a slow tempo. In that way, they promptly establish habits of playing without a score.

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