Resources or methodologies for memorizing difficult pieces faster?

kapustinsane

I am learning Kapustin's Concert Etudes Op. 40, as well as Variations, Op. 41.

I am good sightreader, and with each of these songs, after a week of listening ON REPEAT, I was able to sit down and slowly knock each one out, ensuring I got most notes correct, but of course playing at a VERY slow speed.

Now after 9 months of practicing (most of them—I skipped Raillery, as I honestly don't love it—I can play a few of them quite well at a decent speed with good accuracy.

The problem is MEMORIZING them.

I am finding it very, very difficult to memorize these pieces. Perhaps they are more difficult to memorize than the much more systematic music of Beethoven or Mozart...

Does anyone have any resources for memorization methodologies that might be able to help me with this?

ShiroKuro

kapustinsane Hello and welcome to Piano Tell 🙂

Hopefully someone else can offer some Kapustin-specific advice (I don’t listen to Kapustin very much and those pieces are well beyond my playing level) but I have a thought a lot about memorizing and decided many years ago (probably 20 years ago now) that I would not make memorizing a priority but instead would prioritize reading/playing from the score, because I found it helped me maintain pieces longer and score-reading helped me more easily maintain a repertoire with more pieces in it. And it also removed one element of perfomance anxiety, which is the fear of a memory slip. When I started reading from an iPad, then I didn’t even have to worry much about page turns either.

But again, the music I play is no where near as difficult as Kapustin!

So first, I would ask, why do you want to memorize? Will it help you play those fast pieces faster or give you more tempo control? Or do you hope to have more control over the elements of musicality by memorizing? If so, maybe @twocats can join this thread becuase I believe she can comment about these things? 🙂. Anyway, if you haven’t already, articulating your specific goals for memorizing might help, because maybe it will clarify what needs more attention.

Another question is, are you comfortable memorizing other composers? And if so, what’s different about them? Is it just that other pieces you memorize are easier? Or as you mentioned, is just that there some systematicity that makes memorizing easier, and that’s missing in Kapustin?

Lastly, what have you tried so far in terms of approaches to memorizing? For example, here is one idea (apologies in advance if you’ve already tried this). First, add your own “rehearsal marks” to each piece. These marks can be A, B etc., but where a section/theme repeats with subtle variation, be sure to use labels like A1, A2, B2 etc. so that the marks also help you highlight those musical connections. (In other words, just going through adding rehearsal marks is itself a kind of analyzing the score)

Next, on a sheet of notebook paper, write down those labels, and while looking through the music, give each label, or each rehearsal mark an additional label that is a word, not letter. These word-labels could either be a musical description, something about the notes, key or other musical feature, or a more impressionistic description (e.g., stormy section, day break, twinkle lights) or maybe one that even tells a story, even if that feels silly or cheesy. Example: clouds roll in, thunder rumbles in the distance, rain starts, sky clears…

Now, away from the piano, look through those descriptive/story labels, and try to play the piece in your head. You can refer back to the score sometimes as you go. Then go back to the piano, and instead of having the score on the music stand, put your notebook there and try to play from those descriptive/story labels. Peek at the score to give you some hints here there, but put it a way again. Have as a goal to play one or two sections of decisive labels, and then expand slowly from there.

Let me know if you think this idea might help, or if you think it wouldn’t apply to Kapustin, or if you’ve already tried something like it!

rsl12

kapustinsane welcome fellow Kapustin lover! I've played a few of his pieces, and memorized zero! I agree that memorization of his pieces is harder than most other composers, and I've never bothered.

To echo Shiro, what I want to know is why you want to memorize everything. Are you preparing for a concert? It's going to be a lot of effort to memorize everything, and a lot of maintenance to keep them memorized!

pianoloverus

I can't suggest help with the memorization but just want to say you have a great/clever screen name.

BartK

Isn't it standard practice these days, even in professional concerts, to perform modern music with the sheet music? I think memorizing something like these etudes would be a nightmare.

TulipAcid

I read recently we have Clara Schumann to thank for the memorization craze. Apparently, before her, all the pro’s played from sheet music?

But then there’s that pesky page turning.

pianoloverus

BartK sn't it standard practice these days, even in professional concerts, to perform modern music with the sheet music? I think memorizing something like these etudes would be a nightmare.

I think that even though Kapustin only recently passed and in that sense fits in the modern category, his compositional style is not very contemporary as it basically uses the jazz idiom. I don't think it's atonal. I have only heard a few of his pieces performed live in concert around five times, but the pianists didn't use the score. OTOH in those performances the pianists only played one or two of his pieces.

I heard this performance live:

pianoloverus

TulipAcid Clara Schumann and Franz Liszt.

ranjit

kapustinsane The hardest pieces I have memorized are Prokofiev sonata 3 and a Rachmaninoff Etude, which are probably similarly hard to memorize, so I think I can weigh in here.

Unfortunately, if you are not already an excellent memorizer, I find that the real answer is to get on with it and force yourself to memorize. It is really uncomfortable, but set smaller targets -- a page a day -- and make sure that it is memorized. This might take an hour or two. Immediately try to play the page from memory the next day when you start your session to see if it has been consolidated in memory. It will require some maintenance afterward. I find that if I memorize a page of music securely, I can usually bring back the notes from memory without consulting the score for a week or two. It will get quite a bit harder from day to day.

Constantly testing your memory is the best way to make it better. If you can play it on the keyboard, try to play it faster, or slower, or starting from a random section, or mental practicing.

Make sure to note the structure of the piece, and any patterns that seem useful. Useful patterns are ones that are simple enough that they can be immediately recognized and related to the music in real time (so complicated score analysis tends not to be that useful because it's impossible to do in real time). Stuff like -- that's an Eb scale, those are ascending seventh chords starting on C, etc.

I know this sounds counterintuitive, but I find that the biggest barrier is psychological, especially for a piece that you can actually sight read. I find that committing to a schedule and keeping an hour a day for memorization, ensuring that you can play one section (such as a page or half-page) well a few times in a row, ensuring that you find the necessary "hooks" that make memorizing it easier is a great way to approach the task. It takes away the "overthinking" aspect of it, because "see this page, memorize it today" is about as straightforward a target as you can get. Your brain will fight you every step of the way, so making the learning process a lot more complex will likely make you take shortcuts even if it's more efficient in theory.

Only once you can do this reliably with a section would I move on to trying to learn more. The "one page" number is just a suggestion, so adjust it as needed.

ShiroKuro

ranjit reading about your process is super interesting! First the part about it being uncomfortable, I wouldn’t have thought to describe it that way, but that’s really what it is. It’s hard work, and just knowing that it’s hard probably creates a psychological barrier.

One other thing that caught my eye was this:

Useful patterns are ones that are simple enough that they can be immediately recognized and related to the music in real time (so complicated score analysis tends not to be that useful because it's impossible to do in real time).

It’s interesting to think about looking for “simple patterns” in such complicated music, but that’s a nice way to break down any piece and make it more approachable.

pianoloverus

Since Kapustin's works use jazz idiom and harmony, I think understanding those would be a major help in memorizing his pieces. Most classical pianists would not be very familiar with jazz harmony so that could be the reason his music is hard to memorize even for a very advanced pianist like the OP.

ranjit

ShiroKuro It’s interesting to think about looking for “simple patterns” in such complicated music, but that’s a nice way to break down any piece and make it more approachable.

I think the secret is that most music is "simple" at some level. If it were not, pianists could not play them confidently in recitals.

For instance, for these measures of the Kapustin:

First measure, I'm immediately thinking "weird Bb7" (i.e. Bb7 with the 7, Ab in the bass). I also make note of what appears to be the key, "Eb".

There is a lot that is rolled into that statement. I guess it could be unpacked into something like: In order to make it sound jazzy, Kapustin will use different voicings than I'm used to of chords, so the chord voicing is what I need to consciously pay attention to memorize. There will be a clear melody. The melody will be rather simple and diatonic, so it will not be difficult to memorize. Having heard the recording, I know how the stride rhythm sounds, and how the melody sounds, so they are less important to consciously make note of. I will likely remember that the piece has stride bass because it is so prominent in the recording etc. So immediately, you think of the harmony, and you know it will be something rather unfamiliar. I realize that the Bb7 with those Ab octaves in the bass is the interesting bit that can be easy to misremember (at least for me). And then you try to condense that insight into as few words as possible ("weird Bb7"). I was also considering "Bb7/A", but that is a generic chord that happens in all kinds of pieces/situations and so doesn't convey that the chord is "weird" for the first harmony of the piece.

similarly "Bb C D" -- I know that there are three melody notes accented that are accentuated further by octaves. Knowing that these are the 3 notes immediately places them into context. Maybe this could be further simplified into "Bb" -- the first accentuated octave note -- because I know by ear that the rest just go upward stepwise in an Eb major tonality.

Then, there is the rhythm itself. Typically, once I know the rhythm, I don't need to revisit it except for minor corrections, so disregard that also when trying to simplify the measure.

While typing this out, I actually ended up memorizing the measure away from the piano, so this was a nice thought experiment. It is easier at the piano. When I "see" this measure in this way, it becomes simple.

ranjit

Check these out:

Gieseking-Liemer : good resource on how to memorize music, although claims of visual memory are overstated

Denis Zhdanov: video on memory

Greg Niemczuk's video

I'm too lazy to find links but it should be an easy Google search.

thepianoplayer416

The first type of memory is muscle memory by repetition. People like myself don't have the inclination to memorize long pieces but only sections that are fast & technical since I don't usually read fast enough. Slower passages with a lot of repetition I'd read off the sheet.

thepianoplayer416

pianoloverus

thepianoplayer416 Excellent advice as is typically found on his videos.

kapustinsane

ShiroKuro So first, I would ask, why do you want to memorize? Will it help you play those fast pieces faster or give you more tempo control? Or do you hope to have more control over the elements of musicality by memorizing? If so, maybe @twocats can join this thread becuase I believe she can comment about these things? 🙂. Anyway, if you haven’t already, articulating your specific goals for memorizing might help, because maybe it will clarify what needs more attention.

Hi, and thank you for your generously verbose response, it means a lot to me!

I think for me, there are two main drivers of wanting to memorize them:
1. Purely pragmatic/practical: If I ever want to "pull a piece out of my pocket" at a public piano or something, and I don't have my iPad with me, then of course i need the piece memorized.
2. Performance: I also feel like performing a piece at a recital typically calls the performer to have the piece memorized, but I don't know if this is true or not. Most professional performances I have seen by piano soloists are done without sheet music. Correct me if I'm wrong.
3: Internalizing them (this one might be the most important), becoming "one with the music", and pure joy factor. The pieces I have memorized in the past are the ones that I grew to perform the best, since I internalized them. By memorizing them I also gained some insight into their structure. Finally, when I have a piece fully memorized and internalized I am able to focus on the expression of the piece, without dedicating brainpower to reading the notes. In my experience, memorizing forces you to integrate the fingerings mechanically/intellectually, freeing up some emotional power.

As an example, the piece that I have played more than any other piece in my life is Rachmaninoff's Prelude No. 12 in G Sharp Minor (Op. 32 No. 12). I memorized it when I was 17 or so, and it has become so much a part of me, I can play it with the utmost expression and I can "feel" every note. Runner-up might be Chopin Nocturne in D flat major. These two pieces I feel like I can "let go" and fuse with the music, letting it just flow right through me.

In contrast, I can play many pieces quite well with the sheet music, but I feel like I am somehow limited in my ability to simply channel the music and embody the full emotional expression when I play them.

kapustinsane

ShiroKuro Lastly, what have you tried so far in terms of approaches to memorizing? For example, here is one idea (apologies in advance if you’ve already tried this). First, add your own “rehearsal marks” to each piece. These marks can be A, B etc., but where a section/theme repeats with subtle variation, be sure to use labels like A1, A2, B2 etc. so that the marks also help you highlight those musical connections. (In other words, just going through adding rehearsal marks is itself a kind of analyzing the score)

Next, on a sheet of notebook paper, write down those labels, and while looking through the music, give each label, or each rehearsal mark an additional label that is a word, not letter. These word-labels could either be a musical description, something about the notes, key or other musical feature, or a more impressionistic description (e.g., stormy section, day break, twinkle lights) or maybe one that even tells a story, even if that feels silly or cheesy. Example: clouds roll in, thunder rumbles in the distance, rain starts, sky clears…

Now, away from the piano, look through those descriptive/story labels, and try to play the piece in your head. You can refer back to the score sometimes as you go. Then go back to the piano, and instead of having the score on the music stand, put your notebook there and try to play from those descriptive/story labels. Peek at the score to give you some hints here there, but put it a way again. Have as a goal to play one or two sections of decisive labels, and then expand slowly from there.

Genuinely great idea... I typically have tried going page by page, line by line and marking them off as memorized when I can play them ₅-10 times in a row without looking at the music. But the idea of marking them into labels and putting them in a notebook is brilliant. I will try that today!

kapustinsane

rsl12

Yes, I would perhaps like to perform them publicly at some point.

BartK

Is it standard practice to perform with sheet music these days? I remember growing up, every solo pianist I ever watched perform did so without sheet music. It was different with Chamber or Orchestral music, where everyone had a score (except for concertos—the soloist would always perform without sheet music).

kapustinsane

ranjit I know this sounds counterintuitive, but I find that the biggest barrier is psychological, especially for a piece that you can actually sight read. I find that committing to a schedule and keeping an hour a day for memorization, ensuring that you can play one section (such as a page or half-page) well a few times in a row, ensuring that you find the necessary "hooks" that make memorizing it easier is a great way to approach the task. It takes away the "overthinking" aspect of it, because "see this page, memorize it today" is about as straightforward a target as you can get. Your brain will fight you every step of the way, so making the learning process a lot more complex will likely make you take shortcuts even if it's more efficient in theory.

Really good advice also, thanks. This is really important. You have to be strict with yourself in order to successfully memorize a piece.

All the pieces I memorized as a kid were ones I was preparing for performance—that definitely provided a clear deadline and motivation.