Memorization Basics: How to Make It Stick - PHH 158

So much of the time our practice is like that. It goes right through us without stopping to leave anything useful in the way of information behind.

Welcome to the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I'm Ann Sullivan, a harpist on a mission to empower every harpist to experience more harp happiness. Over my decades long harp journey, I've had lots of successes and more than a few failures. And I know firsthand what it's like to feel that playing the harp the way you want may not be possible for you. Now, I play and teach all over the world, and I know what most harpists are never taught. The secrets to gaining the skills and confidence you need to play the harp with beauty, freedom and joy. That's what the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast is all about. Showing you simple steps to help you play the music you want the way you want. If you're an experienced harpist looking for that next level, or a harp newbie anxious to avoid the pitfalls, or a harpist who just wants more fulfillment and a little encouragement, you're in the right place, my friend. So let's get started.

First, I want to let you in on something special. I think the most important thing you can do for your harp playing is to develop the habits that lead to success. Whatever that looks like for you. All of us want to learn how to play the harp beautifully, how to play with confidence and enjoy making music. And if you really want to learn those things, videos are great. But live learning is is essential. You need to be able to ask questions and get answers. You can't do that with just a video, which is what makes the My Harp Mastery community so special. My Harp Mastery membership is for those who really want an online experience that lets them learn at their own pace and learn what they want and be able to learn live from expert coaches every single week. Plus, you get to connect with other harpists in the community who have the same desires for their playing. This is not only a powerful learning platform, but it's also the most generous community of harpists anywhere on the planet. They're harpists with a positive outlook, a growth mindset, and a spirit of support for their fellow harpists on the journey with them. We're ready for you. Join us just go to harpmastery.comjoin-now that's harpmastery.com join now. Welcome to the show. In a world of sticky notes, gorilla glue, and tape that can hold a leaky boat together, why can't we make a piece of music stick in our fingers? Does this sound familiar? We sit down at the harp on Monday with fresh spirit and energy, and we dig into the music that we want to lear. Tuesday, we repeat the process, feeling very virtuous. On Wednesday, we're a little disappointed that we don't see any progress from our practice. Thursday we decide that it just needs a little more effort. On Friday, it seems like our fingers have forgotten everything we've been trying to teach them. So we take the rest of the weekend off and hope that next week will be better. And if we're trying to memorize a piece, it can feel easy. Even more frustrating, it takes so long to see any progress. Our music just doesn't seem to stick.

We could put the blame in lots of places. The music is hard. We don't have enough practice time. We're too distracted with other things to focus. We're too old. Any of those things could be contributing factors. However, there are three important components in stickiness that don't have anything to do with with those issues. One of them we understand, one of them we reluctantly accept. And the last one is the one I want to talk about today. The three factors are time, persistence, which I am going to call pushy, patience and observation, which I want you to think about as active understanding. The three of these factors together will make your music sticky, or whether you are memorizing it or not. They aren't hard to understand in a theoretical sense, but you'll want to hear the practice strategies I use to help my music stick so that yours will stick too. Just a couple of Harp mastery news items I don't want you to miss. Our Chorale challenge is wrapping up, so get your entry in and get it Posted on the Week 5 challenge post in the Hub. Or you can email it to Amy harpmastery.com, it's all in the contest rules, which are posted right there on the Hub challenge posts so they're easy for you to find. Remember, this challenge works this way. I have given you my arrangement of this Passion Chorale and if you video yourself playing at least the first page of it and send in the video, you will be entered for a totally random drawing from all of those entries for a thousand 30 minute call with me. You can use it for coaching or conversation or whatever you want. So the entries are chosen randomly. I just want to emphasize that there's not a competition aspect to this. We're not judging your entries. If you get the required video in By May 31, we will get you in the drawing. Now the challenge posts in the Hub give dates in June that's because the hub isn't flexible enough for me to tell you when to get your entries in. So they are due by the end of day May 31st. So get those videos in and I look forward to hearing your renditions of my arrangement of the chorale. Also, remember, my Harp Mastery Membership is still open. We're so proud of our brand new website and I can't wait for everybody to become a member to get in there and try it. And I'd love to invite you. So go to heartmastery.com join now and take a look at what my Heart Mastery Membership is all about. And then go to YouTube, look at our YouTube channel and check out the unveiling party where I walk you through the brand new website. It's a lot of fun and some really, really interesting things. So I invite you to become part of our My Harp Mastery Membership community. Now back to today's topic. Time, persistence, and observation. Those are those three factors that are so important for today's discussion. And today's discussion is focused on memorization. But it doesn't just apply to memorization. It applies to all of our music learning. And that's because memorization is really just a deeper learning. We're no longer reading the music we're playing by heart, right? We're playing music that we have absorbed, that we have learned so thoroughly that it's deep inside us. This is what makes memorizing an important skill. I know people either like to do it or don't like to do it. And of course with memorization, there are some possibilities for slipping up. I mean, you might forget what comes next, but we make mistakes in playing with music too, so it could be a toss up there. It's a little bit more work, but it's also a skill that you can develop because the more you memorize, the better you get at it. And working on the three things that we're talking about today, that's going to help you memorize more easily in addition to retaining it longer. That's the sticky part. So memorization is just this process of learning things more deeply. And in fact, when you do that, it teaches you more about the piece, you learn more about it, and in fact, you learn more about music in general from it. So it's a very good skill to develop. And if you have to memorize or you want to memorize, you're going to find this discussion really helpful. If you don't want to memorize, you, you're still going to find a lot of things to learn. So I Want to start by talking about time. Time is perhaps the easiest of the three factors to talk about because we understand it when we're practicing and when we're learning something and especially trying to memorize it. It takes a lot of time. I mean, when I'm on purpose memorizing something, I look at two, three or four measures and I play them through and I'm looking at the music, playing them through, and I turn the music stand around and then I them, but I can't play them all the way through. So I turn it back around and I see what I need to know and I try it and I do it again. It takes time. It's all trial and error. Learning anything takes time. It takes time to absorb it, it takes time to consolidate it. It takes time to truly know it. It's kind of like, you know, love at first sight. That attraction is there, it's real, you know, you're in love, but. But it's all impressions and surmises. You really don't know that person yet. And the real knowledge of that person that you love comes over time. And even after that knowledge is gained, it takes time to keep refreshing it, right? Absence may make the heart grow fonder, but maybe that's just because we've forgotten some of the things that annoyed us. But with anything, whether it's music or learning a foreign language, or learning your multiplication tables, if we don't keep that connection strong, we lose it. So memorizing or learning a piece takes time, takes time to learn it. And then it takes time to keep relearning it, refreshing and reacquainting. So that piece that you had memorized so well a couple months ago, and you could play it cold when you sit down those couple months later, it may or it may not still be inside you and still in your ears and your heart and your fingers. It may be there, it may not. But don't let that discourage you. Just reacquaint yourself with it. Remember, it's going to take that amount of time. The learning the on purpose memorization is a slow process. Now, I'm using the word on purpose memorization, because lots of times memorization is sort of accidental, right? You know, if you've played something a lot of times, you just might have some of it memorized and you haven't had to work at it separately. But if you've been playing a piece, particularly if it's a big piece or a long piece and you need to memorize it, then you're working at it. On purpose. And you're looking at those measures, learning them, trying them without the music, bringing it back, looking at the music, trying without the music. It's that long process. So that's the time factor. And as I said, I think, you know, we get that right. And obviously, if you're working at something over time, it's going to require persistence. When I've talked about this topic before, I've used other words instead of persistence. I've talked about patience. But oh, my goodness, patience just makes it seem like you're really going to be in there for the long haul. And of course, it's not just persistence, because we know we can persist and continue in our quest to play the piece or to memorize it. There's also a process that we have to go through, but I don't think the process itself really describes what we need to do. And so I have taken a couple of ideas and combined them. And for our discussion today, I'm going to call it not persistence, but pushy patience. Okay, you get the sort of pushiness that we get from persistence, but we have the patience, too, because we have to understand that this is a process, just like a journey that has hills and valleys. You know, sometimes it goes really well, sometimes it doesn't. You know, you're going uphill and it's hard, and then all of a sudden you get to speed downhill, and it's easy. And of course, there are potholes along the way, and things that went really well for weeks all of a su don't go well at all. Well, you just have to pave over them and keep on going. But the patience is simple enough because you're just going to have to be patient with the journey. But we don't want to just be patient, because sometimes when we're too patient, we don't make progress. So this is why I'm going to call it pushy patience. We want to push forward. So, yes, we want to absorb the piece, but I don't want you to memorize it by just playing it over and over and hoping that it's going to. Going to stick, hoping that it's going to sink in and, you know, you'll just magically get there. The. The system I was describing a moment ago, where I'd play the measures, turn the music around so I couldn't see it, but play the measures again and just back and forth. That's a pushy part, isn't it? That's pushing for progress. It's making sure that we're moving Forward. It's not just, well, I'm going to wait till I can play it. It's going to be, I'm going to figure out how to play it, I'm going to learn how to play it. And that's, I think, a part of memorization that some people don't understand. You can't just wait for it to sink in. Well, you could, but the longer the piece is, the more complex it is, the less it's going to just sink in, or at least the longer it's going to take. So we want to be just a little pushy because we want to get to the end, we want to learn the piece, we want to have it memorized. So that's where the pushy part comes in. So don't be satisfied with just playing it again and playing it again and waiting for it to happen. I want you to push through and start to learn it on purpose. Do this section, then that section, then the next section. And that's what brings me to the third factor. This is the one we're going to spend some time talking about, this one. And in the opening of the show, I called it observation. But this really is much more than just observation, although it's going to take observation to do this well. But it's about acquiring a very deep understanding of the piece. Acquiring it bit by bit, but an ever deepening knowledge, just like anything else that you learn over a long period of time, you learn more and more things about it, more and more of those little details. Think about when you start a piece, you've maybe heard somebody else play it and you get this very broad idea of what it sounds, sounds like. And then you look at the music and you see the details. Now it still may take a long time to figure out what all those details are, but you see a whole different level. There's more to it than that. And that's the beautiful thing about memorization and particularly the kind of observation we're going to talk about. It brings you more levels of understanding. Like those layers of an onion, you can just keep peeling them back and there's more, more and there's more and there's more stuff to love, more stuff to interest you. But so much of the time we don't practice in a way that brings us those levels of understanding. So here's kind of a fun example. Imagine the world's craziest weight loss diet. We're going to call it the cookie diet. And on this diet you can eat all the cookies that you want. Whenever you want, but all the calories, all the carbs, all that bad stuff from the cookies doesn't stick. It just goes right through you. You wouldn't gain any weight or retain any of the bad stuff from the cookies. Sounds great, right? Well, so much of the time our practice is kind of like that. It goes right through us without stopping and leaving anything useful in our brain. We aren't maybe practicing on autopilot, but we might as well be because we're not paying enough attention to what we really, truly are playing. So if our practice isn't directed at really paying attention to what we're playing, it's not going to give us very much. So as much as we talk about having music in our fingers, we really need to use our brain to focus in a different way because we need information that will direct our actions, that will help us store and retrieve the information about the piece that we need. And we're going to keep focused because of it. In other words, if we want our music to stick, unlike those calories from the cookies, we first need to know what needs to stick. And so we need to have some pretty serious observation going because we need to look for the things that are going to give us information and understanding about the piece. Things like, well, okay, the notes, that's fine. But the form of the piece, where are the sections? What does it do? How does it tell its story? That's sort of a big picture understanding of the piece. But there are the patterns, the small things that our fingers play, the harmonies that the notes form. Form, you know, the chords, maybe anchor notes between those chords, the style of the piece. Now, some pieces are naturally stickier than others, and they have very easily discernible patterns. Maybe they're familiar melodies. Maybe they only have a few chords in them. Maybe they're just shorter and so they stick longer. For instance, if I asked you to sing Happy Birthday, you probably could. It's pretty sticky. But if I asked you to sing the, you know, the first line of the Moonlight Sonata, maybe you could, maybe you couldn't. Maybe it's not quite as sticky. So what we don't want to rely on is what we often rely on, and that's just plain old muscle memory. Yeah, it's important. We want our fingers to know where they're supposed to go without our direction all the time.

But that's not something you can rely on to get you out of difficulty. Because if you're just relying on your muscle memory, you're not able to step in if your fingers aren't quite sure where they go. If they slip up, you don't have the information you need to tell them where to go next. So we can't just practice without being truly involved in it, without truly observing what is going on. The more we observe, the more we learn. The more we learn, the more we know. And the good news is that although it's a little difficult at first to start paying this kind of attention, to be the sort of active observer that we want to be while we're practicing, the more you do it, the easier it gets and the more you are actually able to observe. So that you might just start out by saying, okay, well, oh look, I see all the notes are going up. But then later on you might be able to say, oh look, they're going up in an arpeggio. And the next step might be, oh look, they're going up in a C major arpeggio. And now, oh, they're going up in a C major arpeggio in first inversion. The more you do this, the more you're able to observe, the more you know and think about the information this gives you about a piece. When there are things you know about it, There are very few places that you're going to really slip up. I know that's our big fear about memorizing, that we're going to slip up. And mistakes happen. They happen whether you've got music in front of you or not. So yeah, there are mistakes and it's not a fatal error. You stop, you fix, you go on, that's okay. But we can go a long way to preventing those slip ups when we have the right kind of knowledge. And that knowledge comes from actively observing. Go back to the way I told you I memorize on purpose. I'll have that four measure section and look at it and I'll play it through. I'll turn the music around so I can't see it. I'll play it again. Oop. Okay, I messed up. I didn't remember everything. So I'm going to turn it back around and I'm going to look for what's there. I'm going to say, oh, okay. Rather than just playing it through again, I'm going to study just a moment and say, okay, my left hand goes to an A there. I wonder why it's going to an A. Oh look, it's just going up by step. So my left hand's going to go up by step and my right hand has the arpeggio. Oh, hey look, my right hand thumb is on An A the same time. My left hand is on an A. Okay, all right, I'll play it through again, turn the music around so I can't see it and play it through, reminding myself that, okay, this A and this A. And the left hand's going up by step. There's more that I know. Now this process is cumbersome. Yeah. But it's building that system. Now, having done that, okay, I. I observed all this stuff and I tried it again. Guess what? It didn't really stick. Okay, well, I have to turn it back around. I'll play it again and I'll look at it and learn it one more time, saying, okay, it's the A. It's doing this, it's going la la la. Those are matching up. And I'll play it through and I'll tell myself, like out loud. I'll tell myself, okay, A, this is what it is. And then I'll turn the music, stand around again so I can't see the music, play it again, telling myself A at the very same time. Now, this is the kind of focus that works for on purpose memorization. And this is what makes the difference between on purpose memorization, where you're really learning the piece, or accidental memorization, where you're just playing it again and hoping that it sticks. I'm actually learning how the thing is structured, how it's built. And it's a wonderful sense of security that you get from that because you know what's in the piece. Now, do I know every single note of a piece that I have memorized? No. And I know that I don't because I'll be playing it through for the umpteenth time, and all of a sudden I'll have a pothole. I'll have a moment where I've never made a mistake before, but now I've made one. And so now I have to go and take a look. Or with pieces that I have memorized over years and have played for a long time, I'll be refreshing it for a concert and all of a sudden I'll need to look, hey, is that supposed to be a G for my third finger? Is it supposed to be an F? And am I supposed to use a thumb there or not? You know, so I'm checking those details, but it's conscious, it's on purpose, it's by design. And it's done with the idea of creating knowledge, not just being able to play through it again and again and again, but understanding it. Now, of course, there are other things we do to help secure our memorization, we work in sections. We number our sections. We learn them in order and out of order. We create repair points. We give ourselves reference points and anchor points. We find ways to remember the different sections, whether it's a story or a mnemonic device, all kinds of tricks that we use. But the real important part of memorization is knowing. And without taking the time, without being pushing and patient, without really seeking to observe and to understand and to know what's going on in the piece, we don't have the deep kind of knowledge that we need to really feel secure in our memorization. Now, I suggest, whether you're working at memorization or not, that you start to incorporate these ideas of active observation in your practice. When you're looking at a section and you're about to practice it, whether it's the first time you've practiced it or you've practiced it many times, we'll just stop, take a look at it, and see if you can see what's happening. Can you describe it to yourself? It doesn't have to be perfect music theory kind of description. Describe to yourself what it is. Okay, well, the right hand goes up, the left hand goes down. The right hand goes up to this note. Oh, look, the left hand has the same kind of notes. Or this is a B chord, or this is a D arpeggio. Whatever you know is enough. Because the more you look and the more you try to observe, the better you'll get at it. And the more you'll see and the more you will learn. So taking these ideas and putting them in practice daily is going to help you not only memorize, but help you to learn any piece. You'll start seeing patterns faster. You'll have this as a technique to use to help you sort out a really difficult passage. Why is it hard? What's going on in it? Can you find a reason for the notes to do the things they do? Can you find a pattern? In midst of what looks like chaos? Can you sort it out? Being the observer and not just the doer is an extremely powerful way to learn, and you will know it. Now, please understand that my passion and energy for talking about this topic comes from my own experiences. Some good, some very not good. But those experiences taught me what I needed to know and how I needed to know it. And that's what I wanted to impart to you today. That memorization isn't just about rote memorization, but is about learning. It's about depth, it's about understanding, and it takes time. It takes some pushy patience, and it takes some active observation. And I encourage you to try these, no matter what piece you're learning, what piece you're playing. Try them today, try them every day. See what kind of a difference they make for you.

Of course, I also want to remind you that you are invited to enter our chorale challenge in the Heart Mastery Hub and that you are warmly invited to join us in the My Heart Mastery Membership community. You will find our all the links to those things in our show notes. If you want to go back and catch our unveiling party that we had for the new refreshed My Heart Mastery website, you can catch that on YouTube. Just go to the live videos tab in our YouTube channel and you will see it there. We had a lot of fun and we're very proud of our new website, particularly the My New Clone. So you can find out all about that as well. And, uh, next week on the podcast, I'm going to pose this question to you. Could you learn a piece in a day?

Okay, well, that's a. That's a question, but we're going to be talking about it. And whether or not you think you can learn a piece in a day, we're going to talk about how to speed up your learning systems. So that's next week on the podcast. And until I talk to you, then remember, every day is a day you can add more harp happiness to the universe, to your world, and to your spirit. And all you have to do is play. Thanks so much for listening and I'll see you next time.

Thanks for tuning into another episode of the Practicing Harp Happiness podcast. I release a new episode every Monday morning so you can hit your practice week running. Until then, remember to practice your harp happiness every day. See you next time.