Memorization Benefits (for ME)

[the elephant]

I suffer from mild dyslexia. By "mild" I mean that it can be debilitating for me at work, but it is very spotty. Things make it worse. Things make it better. I have never been able to figure out which things do what, and I am 60 years old now. So it is a tough nut to crack.

One thing I have learned from my four decades of professional playing and teaching is that I played like a demigod when marching in the Army and in DCI but was only "okay" in other marching bands. I have determined that the main reason for this was the lack of music in the Army and drum corps. When I "memorized" stuff in school it was quickly and at a surface level. In the corps everything was so deeply memorized that I can still walk trough all the drill and all the alterations to the drill from 1984. I can still play the entire show from beginning to end, along with many of the changes to the music that we made on the road. The Army placed some strict and very complete expectations on use for a certain amount of material to be committed to memory, ready to play at zero notice, to fill time or cover for some error by a presenter or by our operations staff. It was for about 30 minutes of music and it saved the situation many times. We would have to play these off to the commander in his office with our section and squad leaders present, and it had better have every symbol on the page covered, and phrasing and style had better be correct! Not like most high school or college bands, where all the notes and the big dynamic changes are all that really ever get memorized.

Okay, so with that being said (which is merely my opinions based of my long-term observations) I PLAY BETTER WHEN IT IS DEEPLY MEMORIZED.

Due to my experience with having to deeply and completely memorize a lot of music, I am very good at it. I memorize every fine detail. It takes more time, but in the end it nets a much more professional performance. This is how concert soloists memorize things. They will never forget how to play and interpret the pieces they have committed to perform for a living.

As my vision fails I am having to quickly memorize a lot of my sheet music for work because it is way too small or badly printed for me to read. (I have other things I have to do, but memorization of passages is my main trick to stave off blindness.)

Knowing that, due to my dylexia, I perform really difficult material when under high pressure much better when I eliminate the visual aspect of the equation. When I have to solo in a traditional jazz group I have to stop reading the changes from the leadsheet and close my eyes. I already know the tune, the changes, etc. and getting the confused, dyslexic mess that I see on the page is totally freeing for me. Transferring this to being onstage with an orchestra — say the Scherzo from Mahler 5 or even Fountains — when a truly physically hard piece is coupled with lots of fast notes, lots of accidentals, lots of printed information my eyes have to sort out at speed, I see something different on the page every time I play, and pressure makes it worse. So I memorize these licks and mark my part with big, red circles to show where I need to be looking when I focus on the written part again.

I have done this for decades. It works for me and has helped to keep me employed for many years.

But it takes a lot of time and effort to do this. When we did Prokofiev 5 recently I started memorizing various excerpts months in advance. I nailed it, too. It went much easier for me tnis time around because I spent the needed time doing this when we performed if about ten years ago. This time was more of a review.

In my work to get the Broughton prepared I had to fully relearn it as I had always worked on this piece on a CC tuba. This time I am using my F tuba, so BOOM everything is new.

Excep that it isn't. The music is the same, just the fingerings are different… and the multitude of quirks of F versus CC tubas.

I have discovered that in this preparation I have FULLY MEMORIZED this concerto, when I did not intend to do that.

AND I PLAY IT MUCH BETTER WITHOUT THE MUSIC. The timing between fingers and tongue is much cleaner, all the little things I have to adjust get adjusted. It is far more relaxed feeling.

I will still use the music, but now it will be there for reference. I won't really be focused on it all that much. I need it there because I did not set out to memorize it. I had wanted to initially, but time got away from me and I had to focus solely on preparation and not memorization. Now I do not trust the depth of the memorization enough to play sans music. But I probably won't be reading it that much.

Just a very surprising result of my practicing last night without music. I was sitting on the bed rather than in my studio, and I wanted to work some of the difficult low register licks slowly, over and over, to clean up any hesitancy in the old digets. And Lo! I could play the whole, dang thing. And it was really good, too.

Go figure…

What have you had to memorize that you can perfectly play today, even decades later? What have you "memorized" but have now completely forgotten? I can't remember most of what I had memorized in the UNT marching band, and some of what I learned in high school is still there, but much of it is gone, too.

EVERYTHING I had committed to memory in the Army is still there. All the DCI stuff is still there. Four Ruffles and Flourishes and The Admiral's March? The Marine's Hymn? Eternal Father, Strong to Save? Bravura? No problem. Joyce's 71st NY Regimental March? Easy. New York, New York? Got it.

What have been your experiences with so-called "deep" memorization versus more cursory efforts.

[the elephant]

A few helpful tactics if you want to know how I approach this…

Divide the music into excerpts, just like we do with orchestral music, even if it is a solo. Cut and paste each excerpt onto a separate page. Put them in order with a big number in the upper, right corner. Stack them in reverse order. Work on memorizing them one at a time. Do not mess with the other ones until you can play the whole excerpt with 100% of the notes AND music solidly in place. Be as thorough as you can be. It ALL has to be there, with or without the music. (If it isn't 100% there with the music you are not ready to memorize anything.)

Learn these from end to beginning, as I said. Most memory failures are close to the end as you get fatigued, physically and mentally. If you memorize the ending first, then stack previous excerpts on top of that, every time you learn the previous excerpt you then need to play the complete piece as you have it memorized from that point to the end, over and over, full-out, as in a performance. Then you move to the previous excerpt (the next page in your booklet).

If you memorize each excerpt like this, and keep adding to the stack, eventually you make it to the beginning of the piece. By the time you have the first excerpt committed to memory fully the end is so deeply ingrained in your brain that you just about CAN'T forget it.

Good luck!

[sweaty]

Those are great ideas. Even without dyslexia or vision problems, reading and counting takes brain power which is a distraction from making music. There is a reason all the great string and vocal soloists memorize their performances.

[bloke]

Yep yep yep.

I've talked about the much higher level of memorization as simply "knowing", whereas knowing is a higher level of (well...) knowing than is memorization.

There is sight reading, there is rereading, there is reading to a level of competent performance, there is memorization, and then at the top is knowing.

You still know the steps and musical phrases from your corps shows, but the ones you memorized for college marching band, those temporary files that you stored in your mind for that are gone.

With memorization, there can be spots where the memorization fails, but when someone really knows a piece, a poem, a speech, or an entire play or book, they're not going to forget any of it.

That's not to say that someone isn't going to make a few little flubs when they fully know a piece, but actually they're far less likely to make any.

Further, it's just like having a really great mouthpiece and a really great instrument: When a piece of music is completely known, the player can have some fun with the phrasing and subtleties, rather than simply trying to play it off the page or remember how it goes - along with other lower level types of struggles.

At a huge risk of sounding elitist, I don't think in any group of players this type of communication and topic is going to speak to nor resonate with very many people.

I've memorized a few tuba solo pieces and know a few as well, but I know far more guitar solos, that I can no longer play them well, because the physical is required to display what one knows.

[the elephant]

Yes, yes…

KNOW the piece. Don't MEMORIZE it. KNOW it.

Lower-order difficulties versus higher-order difficulties: Remove the brain-drain of the lower-order, unnecessary-for-performance visual aspect by fully KNOWING the piece. This frees you to focus on all the higher-order needs.

Remove the written page in order to more effectively communicate what is represented by that page.

[Schlitzz]

I remember having most of the pouch memorized by my 3rd year in the Navy fleet bands. Nothing like banging out the Jack Tar at 0930, on an NAS Oceana Friday. Just had to watch if the MUCS was going to give the Stinger. That’s how he got the band to pay attention.

Meanwhile, in the Army…….

[media] [/media]

[York-aholic]

Meanwhile, in the Army…….

[media] [/media]

There went two sousaphones…

[tofu]

I did not realize that dyslexia varied from day to day. My brother in law is dyslexic - I’ll have to ask him if that’s true for him as well. He’s a mathematician and was an actuary for BCBS. There are if I recall 12 different exams for actuaries. Similar to the CPA exam except you take and pass them one at a time and you don’t have to ever take and pass all of them - most people only pass a basic few - but it will hinder your career if you don’t pass them all. His dyslexia never was a factor for him with math and he is a brilliant mathematician.

The first 6 tests if I recall were all math, but the last 6 are written essay tests. This is me recalling from 40 years ago - so it may have been he passed the six math tests first - I’m not sure if there is a sequence. But I remember he passed all 6 of the math based exams in a breeze - but it was incredibly difficult for him to take & pass each of the 6 essay exams as they would not allow extra time for dyslexics for the exams like they did for people with other disabilities - such as migraine headaches. It wasn’t that he didn’t know the stuff - it was just the time it took to read, understand and answer the questions within the time limit. He did finally manage it, but it was not easy with the dyslexia.

But the dyslexia didn’t stop him from working his way up to being a managing director before leaving to join a medical start up and now since retired from that. He volunteers as a math tutor at the local HS these days. Driving with him is an adventure though - as between his color blindness and dyslexia he drives very cautiously and slowly - which on Chicago Expressways (where nothing less than going 80 (in a 55 or even 25 mph zone ) will get you run over) is like dodging bullets. I always offer to drive claiming I love driving versus I want to survive the trip.

I seem to recall seeing a study a few years ago that folks with dyslexia seemed to end up in one of two camps - the dyslexia would force them to become either high overachievers or low underachievers and it was like 50 - 50 which way they ended up with few folks in the middle.

It’s funny about the stuff I have ever memorized. I have found that I just over time absorbed the stuff without deliberately trying to commit it to memory. From grade school on you had to play the solo contest solos from memory. They don’t require that anymore here - I’m not a music educator, but I think it’s a mistake for the kids to play the solo with the sheet music in front of them. Solos I haven’t thought of in decades I can still just play the whole thing like I played it yesterday at the contest.

In my current muni band I always have 16 -32 bars ahead in the music in my head without actually trying to do this. There are a lot of pieces that I’ve played so many times that I just naturally know them from start to finish and I can play them without ever looking at the music. I've found myself playing pieces without actually trying to play from memory and while watching the conductor it will suddenly strike me that I hadn’t been reading the page. It’s really useful to follow the conductor when your nose isn’t stuck in the page which is the thing you really notice how so many people in the band never look up.

[bloke]

Yes. There are quite a few pieces of music whereby playing through them is sort of like people driving to work every day.

There might be minor differences in how a performance goes, but the route is well known.

[Mary Ann]

I still have stuff memorized that I learned in grade school (piano.) High school, interesting, nope -- just parts of things like Pathetique Sonata and Gershwin preludes.

However, it was interesting to see your reference to "end first." With piano and classical guitar, I struggled like all hell to learn pieces because I would get finger-fumbled invariably but just keep ADHD going to the end. I'd have the pitches memorized but nothing settled physically. I also do not sight read piano or guitar well -- although I am ganbusters on instruments that just have one line to read, like violin, horn, tuba. I don't know how conductors do it, unless they prepare amazingly well ahead of time.

So I decided due to the finger fumbling stuff, to learn a piece of music from the end. As in, the last five notes or whatever, until I had those five notes under my hands physically. Then add another five notes or so, and of course always played to the end just because I could. I ended up learning difficult pieces in impossibly short periods of time, AND found I had them memorized. What suffered was the musical content, but that was easy to add once I could do it physically.

The same thing "works" on single-note-at-time music but isn't nearly as necessary for me, although with long difficult strings of notes I will learn the passage the same way, end first.

Wade, you must have a real Bench of a time sight reading, with the looking ahead that is necessary.

[the elephant]

Unable to look ahead. I read note-for-note, very quickly.

[Mary Ann]

My trumpet playing friend is incredibly coordinated physically. Bounced down the bumps on black ski slopes at 75 --- was a gymnast at Stanford. Well above my level of physical ability.

Yet he asked me to sight read so he could watch as he was floundering somewhat. I think it was on violin but could have been horn. He said that it was a pattern of looking at where I was playing alternating quickly with looking a measure or two ahead, back and forth. back and forth. I had not known how I was doing it, but realized that I would basically memorize what was coming up so I could play it when I got there, over and over. Not memorize to remember like memorizing a piece, but enough that I could unconsciously plan how to do it. He was reading notes as they came, and damn good at it too, but not as good a result as my looking ahead.

[the elephant]

I am profoundly jealous, and am unable to imagine what that might be like.

[Mary Ann]

Ha, just like I can't imagine his physical ability at sports. I could do a cartwheel and was a happy blue slope skier, but nothing like his ability to "just do it" out of nowhere without needing instruction. We all have our gifts and they can be dramatically different.

BTW, is that upcoming concerto performance going to be recorded, so that those of us who can't get there can at least listen later?

[the elephant]

I don't know, but I will check.

[bloke]

I'm sure Wade can think about two or three things at one time (though - in my experience - women are better at doing this than men), but what he's talking about is the challenge of viewing symbols and immediately correctly processing those symbols as one of the multiple things he's doing "all at once". I'm pretty sure that's the one that offers him - as well as many many others - difficulty.

I'd bet a nickel that were Wade asked to imitate what someone else was playing - but a measure or two delayed - by sound (perhaps a so-called "round" that he had never heard before), he would do a better job at that - compared to most other musicians... (By supposing this, I'm assuming that Wade doesn't have to transfer sounds to symbols in his head before producing those sounds himself.)

[Mary Ann]

No argument, but that wasn't the topic. I think most of us can do that, but also most of us can look at a page of music and it looks like a page of music, not some weird wandering stuff that has to be unscrambled to figure out what it means. To be able to do that AT ALL shows amazing drive and accomplishment.

[bloke]

I wasn't aware that anyone has control of "the topic", and nor was I responding to anyone in particular.

my apologies

[Schlitzz]

In my current muni band I always have 16 -32 bars ahead in the music in my head without actually trying to do this. There are a lot of pieces that I’ve played so many times that I just naturally know them from start to finish and I can play them without ever looking at the music. I've found myself playing pieces without actually trying to play from memory and while watching the conductor it will suddenly strike me that I hadn’t been reading the page. It’s really useful to follow the conductor when your nose isn’t stuck in the page which is the thing you really notice how so many people in the band never look up.

Not only has Night grown a head, we can clearly see one string player staring blankly, as there’s NO music on her stand.

[gocsick]

There was an app for sight reading I played around with a while... unfortunately I can't remember the name and I can't seem to find it anywhere. The idea was to train your ability to read ahead and remember music.

it showed you music, just a simple computer generated melody, and you had to play along with a synthesizer accompaniment. It gave you a little time to look then would black out everything but a small sliding window around the place you were playing. IT would stretch a few bars ahead and end right after the notes where you were. Then the next level it would put the black box just ahead of where you were... so you couldn't see the notes your were playing now only a beat or two ahead. Each level it moved the window farther forward and also the window got smaller so you could only see a few measures at a time.. but they were also several bars ahead of where you were playing.