Memorization (when you hate it)

twocats I think my struggle is definitely going to be doing "bite sized chunks"

I did some work away from the piano to define my sections for Chopin Ballade 2; hopefully others can learn from my mistakes!

I made the initial mistake of creating a forScore "page layer" when what I wanted was a "score layer" and had to redo some work. And then another mistake of defining chunks that were way too short in the easy part. I ultimately decided on shorter chunks for difficult sections and natural phrase breaks for the easier sections. Hopefully that amounts to a reasonable amount to memorize in a day. There are 30 total sections but there's some repetition, so when I encounter a repeated part that I mostly know I'll just work on an additional section on that day!

Update: I think having the ability to do layers is very powerful but the forScore implementation kinda sucks. Now that I'm done marking up my sections, I have to manually select the page layer on each page to get back to my original layer! I will have to double check at the top of the page to make sure that I'm marking up the layer that I intend to.

ShiroKuro @Animisha and @Josephine I think I reach the stage where a piece becomes a part of me only after playing it a lot (and I don’t mean practicing it a lot), combined with recording or performing it for others, and also after learning it, polishing it, forgetting it and then bringing it back again.

The only two pieces that stuck around since I was a teenager were pieces that I worked on for at least a year back then (and when you're young a year feels like forever) and memorized! I have to say that they're indeed a part of me because everything else has gone away but I can't seem to forget these if I tried.

@Animisha and @Josephine I do think it's possible for you to reach that stage, but you would have to keep working on a piece over a very long time, as SK said not just "practicing" but "playing". And I also agree that the act of putting something away and bringing it back solidifies it (Greg N. also talked about "forgetting" a section and "relearning" it).

ShiroKuro Anyway, I think, for me anyway, all this means is that I should choose the piece to memorize carefully, so that if my aim is to practice memorization as an exercise in and of itself, then I should pick a piece that I only have to “learn to play it,” rather than a piece that I have to “learn how to play.”

I'm doing both-- I can play the fast parts of Ballade 2 but slowly. It'll take a lot of work to get it up to speed, but I have stuff like fingerings and phrasing figured out already (Greg N. can do that on the fly but better for us if it's figured out in advance, I think). I'm hoping that the memorization will also help the learning process but we'll see!

ShiroKuro re the layers in forScore, that sounds frustrating, if you haven’t already perhaps you might try to google some how-to to make sure there’s not a trick you’re missing?

I'll Google, the software can't be that stupid, can it?

twocats I'll Google, the software can't be that stupid, can it?

I was thinking that the solution might be to only use score layers even for my markings (forScore defaults to a page layer) but apparently if you use multiple score layers there is a long-time bug where they might compress into one big score layer and you can't get it back. Or it doesn't save and is lost!!

And there's a person who reported that all their page layers got merged into one as well. I think it's minimal risk for these particular markings as they're easy to erase if needed but it looks like using layers for anything complex may be a little risky. I'm going to be backing up my .4sc individual annotation files more often!

twocats Now thinking I should change it to what SK suggested, this is too many sections to track. I should do A1, A2 for every time the same theme happens. I can use a different color pen to create the subsections for the smaller memorization chunks, because those are temporary.

Done, and I like this so much more! I think this method is the winner. There's really only 3 distinct main sections and two of them are repeated but with variations, and I wanted to represent that in a way that made sense. So I called the main themes A/A1 and B/B1, etc (thought about calling it "Theme" and "Presto" but it felt too wordy, I can easily remember that A means the original theme and B means the Presto), and called the end Coda because that's what everyone calls it rather than to make up a letter name (even though it happens to be C). And instead of more letter names for the different transitions I called it "A1 bridge". I think these will stay in my memory far better than assigning numbers or letters.

I used a different color marker to break down the chunks for memorization. As I learn these I may erase what I currently have and merge them into bigger phrases. But visually and organizationally this makes so much more sense and should help it get locked into my brain.