Music or Memory IV - looking back

The last note of “Liebestraum” faded, and Natalie and I made our last bow, exactly at 3:30 last Sunday. We hadn’t timed our program of Folk Tales from the Rhineland and Romantic Piano Music exactly, and we were both a little nervous about that. But it had come out perfectly, and we were looking at a lot of applause and smiling faces, in spite of the grim spectres the stories had conjured up, as would be appropriate for Halloween . Several residents of Amsterdam House talked to us and asked us to come back; one of the visitors even summarized her impressions in the following lovely note:

“Ladies,

What a wonderful afternoon! You both work beautifully together. I’m here to visit my husband. The stories were absorbing - what a good actress - speaker you are! And the classical music so enjoyable.....

Thank you for everything. You are appreciated.”

In spite of that, I was completely exhausted after the concert. It’s not just the playing that counts, but the circumstances as well. Taking the bus at 10:30, to allow for plenty of time, in case we hit traffic on the road. Picking up some lunch on the way, then heading for the venue, to have enough time to set up, do a sound check with the microphone, get used to the piano. 

Visiting a retirement home naturally means to touch base with declining health and the last stage of life. The kind of energy you sense is very different from that of a concert hall, and the perspective of an approaching performance heightens sensitivity, making the impressions even stronger. 

The “Green Room” was the best ever: trees and fresh air, and what a view!

View of the Cathedral of St John the Divine from the garden at Amsterdam House

I was glad that I had visited the premises before, and tried the piano so I knew what I was getting into. I knew I would have to sit higher than I usually do - but I didn’t remember it was that high! The restless spirit of a long deceased piano tuner must have visited the venue well in advance and screwed up the lowest c- octave - the lowest note was about a fourth of a step off. I needed it repeatedly, and it added a real touch of Halloween to the sound. 

Fortunately, I was ready for that.  Spending an hour trying to coax sounds out of an instrument that aren’t really there made me even more grateful for the instrument I have at home, and wonder whether the pianists who play in concert halls on beautiful concert grands appreciate the luxury they are enjoying. 

Under these circumstances, I was glad to play from the score, to have something outside myself to hang on to, and it helped me to stay focussed.

And yet, the next day, it was the greatest relief to put the music away and play the repertoire from memory. It adds a touch of freedom I’ve rarely been able to achieve when playing with the score. Something shifts in my brain the moment I take my eyes off the score and look at the keyboard, with nothing to follow but the music I hear in my mind.     

Music or Memory III - Transcending the Score

“ I think you are onto something.”, my friend Gladys Odegard commented on my last blog entry - she lives in Canada and has been teaching and performing for many years. “ The immense amount of time and energy it takes to commit a score to memory is beyond belief and the older you get the harder it is.  Why not be happy to perform with a safety net and know when you are looking and when you are not.  Anxiety severs all connections with the music.”

“The score can do that, too,” I want to add. As a child and as a teenager, I never played from memory. I didn’t start it until I was in college, and playing from memory was required. Nobody really told me how to approach the task, so, at some point, I would just put away the music, see how far I got, and the rest was a lot of repeats. I managed (with a few exceptions, Bach among them), and memory slips were not a big issue. Since I didn’t know how it worked, though, I was terrified. I knew one thing: the moment I looked down at the keyboard, I had a good chance to crash.

Seymour Bernstein was the first teacher who invited me to look at the keyboard, e.g. when we changed hand divisions. Then, one day while I was memorizing, I realized that all I needed to do was visually memorize the patterns of black and white keys, and see them pass in my mind’s eye like a movie. The method has proved reliable, and, at this point, even replaces the image of the score which I used to see in my mind. Of course, keyboard patterns do not replace either aural - , or motor-memory, they only support it - but the beautiful thing is: they allow me to be “in the music”, while the score used to bring up a lot of unwelcome “thought” distractions. 

My musician friends have often reacted slightly puzzled and confused, when I reported this experience. The first person who understood what I was talking about was my writer friend, Mary Ashcliffe. Like me, Mary is a fan of intricate knitting patterns. She called my attention to the fact that pattern memory or memory of images is a right-brain activity, while, at least for me, decoding a score is a left brain activity, involving a lot of analysis and "thinking" - or that’s how it used to be.

During the summer, when I was practicing Preludes and Fugues, which I don’t usually memorize, I suddenly discovered that I was able to do this without falling back into “thinking” - as if something “clicked” and said : “These are just signs for sounds! Stop thinking, you know the piece, all you have to do is play and listen - or, more precise, listen, and play.” 

At about the same time, I noticed that I was finally able to transpose by ear. I memorized one of the Czerny 8-bar exercises op. 821 every day and transposed it into all 12 keys. Of course, it’s not perfect, and I don’t know if I could still do it if someone was watching me, but by myself, I can do it, just listening to the sound in my mind, and imagining what it looks like on the keyboard. I had tried to do this about 5 years ago, and found it almost impossible. It was like pulling teeth, and eventually, I gave up - I simply didn’t have the time. 

In order to play successfully with the score and “be in the music”, you have to be able to transcend the score, get past the “decoding” of symbols, the playing instructions. The score becomes nothing but a written representation of the sound. While I’ve always been a good “reader”  and sightreader, it has taken me until now to “transcend” the score.

I have the impression that it takes most students a long time to come to the point where they can “transcend” the score - if they get there at all. Once you know the piece, it can be a lot easier to put the score away and trust your keyboard orientation. Black and white keys are what they are, they never change names or places, and in that respect, they are a lot more reliable than musical notation. 

Just this week, I had a discussion about that with one of my adult students, who is a very good “ear-player”. She had observed that it is very hard for her to play with the music, and “hear” and “feel” it as intensely as she does when she plays from memory. We simply agreed that she is going to perform from memory for the time being, but if we are going to approach the issue from both ends, and she also practices playing with the music, eventually, the ends will come together.

Having observed many students, I am quite convinced that the people who are more comfortable playing by ear than with the music intuitively “organize” the keyboard visually. They may not even be conscious of that themselves. 

When I teach young beginners, we usually start off playing familiar tunes by ear, on the black keys - or in B - major, F-sharp - or is it G-flat major? , at first with one finger. Who cares how it’s written! It is important to me that they hear and find their way around the keyboard before they start to read, in order to prevent the reading from being mechanical, without connection to the ear.

When I started to play the piano, I was not taught that way. My mother had apparently taught me to play songs since a very young age, but once lessons started, I never ever played anything by ear again, or improvised, or played without music. While I have no memory of my very early experiences at the piano, I do remember very well that having to play without looking at the keyboard and my hands felt as if someone had pulled the rug from under my feet. At that time, I started “thinking” while I played, and after a while, I got so used to it that I couldn’t stop it any more.

It seems to me that many adult players have been taught like that as children, in order to develop their feeling for the keyboard early on. While some people have that skill naturally, most have to train it. Since pianists have to read a lot of notes, it is an important skill, but “keyboard” skills have to be developed along with it, if not earlier. Otherwise, chances are that the result is a “deaf reader”, feeling his or her way around the keyboard, but disconnected from the music, sometimes to an extent that makes the music sound as if it were a foreign language a person can read, but not understand.  

Music or Memory II - a Message from the Composer

First of all, I have to make a confession: Once I’ve memorized a piece, I don’t always follow the advice of people who are wiser than I am, and stay in touch with the score. I mainly use the score to learn the piece, but once that’s done, it tends to get in my way. I get easily distracted by the part of the music that is “playing instructions”, or by comments that I’ve written into the score, and find it much easier to focus on the sound looking at the keyboard and listening to the music in my mind.  

Of course, I have the music on the music stand when I practice - most of the time -, and I refer to it to verify details when I need to, but I hardly ever “read” the entire piece. Now, the decision to play the upcoming “Halloween Program” with the music requires me to do just that.

A week into the project, I’ve made an interesting discovery: The score is inviting me to experiment - with the polyphony in Schumann’s music, for example, trying out different ways to voice a theme, sometimes doing it differently each time I play the piece. I take more time with rubatos than I would dare, if I were relying on my memory alone. It’s almost like a fresh start. Of course, I also found the inevitable wrong notes...

I am beginning to realize that my playing from memory was “memory” in the literal sense - something from the past, that I relied on every time I played the piece. Going back to the score puts me back in touch with the composer, and I’m getting some interesting new ideas. 

Music or Memory

After a little break on the blog during the last weeks of summer, the school year is up and running, and the next performance is on the horizon.

Last year, when I moved to Maplewood, I made a couple of calls in search of opportunities to play. Amsterdam House, a nursing home in NYC provides many musical programs for its residents. I had played there before, and they had one performance date open: Sunday, October 31st, Halloween. Figuring that I had a year to come up with an idea for a program that would fit the occasion, I took the date.

The program will feature piano music by Schumann, Chopin and Liszt, and a selection of Hero Tales and Legends from the Rhineland, where I grew up. The tales are rather grim: people selling their souls to the devil, dancing skeletons, knights disappearing on the crusades and lonely maidens left behind. What else is to be expected on Halloween? 

In the 19th century, when the music was written, people felt very much attracted by the dark and eerie, and tales like the ones I chose inspired composers to write music. 

I find it hard to split concentration between speaking and playing. So, I’m glad my friend Natalie Lebert, who is an actress, will do the reading. The question left for me to decide was whether to play with the music, or from memory.

Playing for people who are struggling with health issues or dementia can be quite different from playing in a regular concert setting. There may be some coming and going during the program. It is possible that people react to the music physically or hum along. 

The last time Natalie and I performed there, an old lady in a wheelchair next to the piano kept tapping her foot in rhythm to the music. Her caretaker told me later that she was going to be 102 years old the next month. I thought it was great that she was at the concert and reacting to the music, but I’m not sure my memory will hold up with ad libitum participation from audience members.

While I have not been able to train my cat to turn pages, Cappuccina takes it on herself to provide distraction here at home, so that I can test my ability to stay focussed. Can I keep playing while my mind wonders whether she has just shut off the recording machine when she jumped on it, or whether she is sitting on the microphone? 

Can I play the Revolutionary Etude with a cat on my lap? The results were not too convincing, and finally, I decided to save myself a great deal of performance anxiety and put the music up on the music stand. 

Playing this kind of music with the score has its own challenges. It was clearly composed with the keyboard in mind, and watching your hands while moving through fast passages and suicide leaps feels more secure. If you play with the score, you have to exactly know where you look at your hands and where you look at the music. 

“Oh, I’ll just put up the music for the performance”, inexperienced students often say. It is one of the most dangerous traps to fall into. Not accustomed to finding their way around the keyboard without looking at their hands, they’ll take their eyes off the music, only to find that they’ve lost their place on the page when they look up again. Often enough, that’s the moment where everything stops - the worst nightmare of every performer.    

Frankly speaking, I find it much more comforting to look at the keyboard, while I play, at black and white keys that always remain the same, than at a page crammed with notes and full of sharps, flats, double sharps, double flats and natural signs. Not only were the romantic composers drawn to the dark and eerie, they were also very much attracted by the keys with many flats and sharps, chromatic passages and every possible way to move around the circle of 5ths.

Of course, you don’t “read” the music, when you play with the score, at least not in the sense of figuring out what you have to play. You hopefully know that by the time of the performance, and the score only serves as a visual support. Nevertheless, I’ve often noticed that my brain has a tendency to fall back into “decoding” mode under the pressure of a performance, asking questions like “Is that a black key, or a white key?” while I’m playing - and the only way out of that is to know the answer to the question. 

I’m glad I have a couple of weeks to work on it.

How long does it take to learn a piece?

Yesterday, I had a long conversation with one of my students, who is a graduating senior. In fall, he will go to college to study music education. 

He discovered music comparatively late, and much of his piano playing is self taught. He has great ears, and through immense commitment and many hours at the piano, he got his fingers to reproduce the music - the melodies, the harmonies. He is fascinated by Glenn Gould, and he likes to play fast.

His deficiencies in reading music have been a grievance to him and to his teachers. Being a good reader does not automatically open the ear and the heart for the music, but for a poor reader, it is difficult to find the subtle messages composers convey in the score. 

My student is working hard to catch up. Most of all, he hopes that improving his reading will make him learn faster. “There is all this great music I want to play, and I want to be really good,” he said, “It takes me so long to learn something.”

How long does it take to explore and to own a work of great art? We talked about that. You can read a play by Shakespeare, a novel by Tolstoi in a couple of weeks, but trying to “understand” their true meaning is a task for a lifetime. It is the same in music, where the truth is communicated through the way you play. 

Decoding a musical score requires meticulous attention to the details and endless patience, looking for ways to produce the sound you hear in your mind. You need to absorb yourself in the work to a point where “real time” disappears. 

The process of exploring the work sets the pace, and that’s the only thing that counts. As you return to the piece at different times of your life, you’re bound to find something that you didn’t notice before. You never come to an end, and that’s the beauty of it. 

At this point of his life, it is difficult for my student to imagine that he might work on a piece for a year. Despite the demands of a curriculum, I hope he will have the chance to explore his own pace of learning in college.  He was open to the idea of growing from a musical athlete into a musical artist - a performer who becomes a medium for the truth conveyed through works of great art.