Memorization: The Three Methods - PHH 026

Welcome to Practicing Harp Happiness, the Harp Mastery Podcast. My name is Ann Sullivan and I'm a harpist, teacher, and founder of Harp Mastery. I'm all about creating more harp happiness in the world by helping harp players like you play the music they want the way they want. But as a harpist who nearly flunked out of one of the most prestigious music schools in the world, I, although later not only graduated, but I went on to teach there. I know from personal experience that learning the harp is way harder than it looks. Here, each week on the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast, I show you how to solve the challenges of practicing and playing the harp. Whether it's about making your fingers behave or learning music faster, or getting your piece's performance ready, or just learning to enjoy your playing every day. Sounds great, doesn't it? Let's get started.

Welcome to today's show. Today we are tackling one of those tricky topics to talk about. We're going to talk about memorization. It's a hot button topic for a lot of harpists and I hope that we can make it way easier for you. Now, to give you just a little bit of an illustration of where I'm coming from with memorization, I'd like to start with a little story. Now, it's a made up story, but it might have happened to you. I know that it's happened to a lot of harpists and I can tell you it even has happened to me. So I know that this may resonate with some of you and this is the way I think we need to start our discussion on memorization. So just imagine this, put your mind in that imaginary mood and go with me here. So it was a beautiful dream. The harpist could not believe her eyes. She had finally made the decision to buy a new harp, the harp of her dreams. And here she was in the harp showroom looking at dozens of beautiful harps. And she was going to get to choose one and take it home with her. Excitement alone did not begin to describe her feelings. There was this sense of disbelief, of incredible joy as she stood looking at the display in front of her. It was her time. The time she had waited for, the time she'd longed for. Time to start that selection process. So she was invited to try one of the harps. She drew a deep breath and sat down at the very first one. And then her feeling of euphoria vanished as quickly perhaps as it had come, because she had nothing to play. Nothing. Oh, they. They came to her rescue all right. They brought over some sheet music she knew, but the joy had diminished just a little bit. Did she even deserve a new harp if she didn't have any music that she could actually sit down and play?

Well, now that's enough of that story. Let's cut that nightmare short right here. And of course this poor harpist in our story deserved her harp. Naturally, there's no qualification other than the required funds, of course needed to get the harp that you want. You deserve your harp for sure. But wouldn't it be lovely to be able to just sit down at a harp and play something? So many harpists cite their inability to memorize as the thing that holds them back from this it is my firm belief, backed up by my own teaching experience, that most people who say they can't memorize just haven't been taught how. And I hope to remedy that for you at least just a little bit today. I also want to make the case for practicing memorization regularly. Not because you want to play or perform without music, not because you have to have a piece memorized to call it finished, neither of which I believe is true. But because memorization helps you discover more about your music, it helps you listen with more understanding. It will, believe it or not, help you sight read better, it helps you learn your music more deeply. And it really has nothing to do with not being able to remember what you had for breakfast or forgetting somebody's name. In fact, the memorization techniques we will talk about today may even help with that too. But before we dive into today's topic, I just wanted to let you know that we are coming up on that twice a year period where I open membership to my Harp Mastery and I wanted to be sure that this was on your radar. Now my Harp Mastery is our paid membership community where harpists all over the world at every stage in their heart flying journey come to learn and grow and make progress and just be part of a community of like minded harpists. Now we'll be opening membership at the end of this month. We open it twice a year and I hope that you would consider members joining us. I teach this group and talk to our members live every week and so this is something that is very special to me. The community's been in existence since 2014, so we've been around a while. We're not going anywhere and we have some members that have been with me through the entire journey. It's just a lot of fun and what I'd like to do to help just stimulate your interest just a little bit is to share some very kind words that one of our My Heart Mastery members, Robin, had to say about her My Harp Mastery experience. She says, I've been reflecting on my harp activities since becoming involved with My Harp Mastery, and it seems that my life used to be just harp lesson in practice, and now it has bloomed into lessons, practice, Monday podcasts, Monday harp meetings, scales of success, concerts, books, articles, sharing my harp with family, and the list goes on and on. I just seem to be finding harp opportunities everywhere. Well, Robin, I'm so pleased for you. You're a stellar My Heart Mastery member. I'd love to see you on the calls and to get to chat with you. And I know you've also taken advantage of some of our other programs as well. But this, my friends, is what my Heart Mastery is about. It's about that Harp Happiness journey. And as I said, you can't join My Heart Mastery right now. It's a, it's a paid community and it's a subscription that, that you pay for month by month. Like, you know, your cable bill, whatever. Only a lot less than your cable bill, I'm sure a lot less than mine anyway. But we so I can't open membership for you right now, but I can be sure that you get on the list of people who are the first to know when we open it so you can look in our show notes for the link to join our first to know list so that as soon as I open membership, you find out about that. You can also find that link if you go to harpmastery.com and look in the header for My Harp Mastery. And that will take you to the same page and you can sign up there and we'll be sure that as soon you as soon as we open membership, you can get right in the door. So without further ado, let's talk memorization.

To start our discussion. I want to be very clear about what I'm talking about when I talk about memorization. I mean, yes, I'm talking about playing without music, but I'm not talking about memorization as a learning method. There are some people that memorize their music because their note reading skills are poor and they think that it's a faster way for them to learn their pieces. It may be that way in the short term for them, although increasing your note reading skill will allow you to learn more music faster. So as a learning technique in that regard, I do not recommend memorization. Memorization is also not a technique that you use at the beginning of the learning process for a piece. It may seem on the Surface like it's an efficiency to say, well, I'm going to learn these two measures, and I'm just going to get those memorized, and then I'll add on the next two measures and so on and so on. But what happens is that when you learn a piece that way, you don't get to the real music of the piece before you're sick of what you've already been working on. It's a very slow process as a learning tool, even for people who memorize fairly quickly. And if you think that your memorization is a little on the slower side, I certainly don't recommend that. I think that one of the proofs is that this is not the way to memorize a piece, is that this is never the way memorization is taught.

So I would steer clear of using memorization as any kind of learning tool. So what is it? Well, certainly it is a performance skill. I mean, having a piece memorized and being able to play it for someone else from memory is a wonderful performance skill to have. It reduces the likelihood of errors, particularly for those of you who, like me, have aging eyes. You know, shifting back and forth between the music and the strings can be very disconcerting. It can be more difficult to play in different lighting situations. So when you don't have to look at music and the strings, but can just look at what you are doing on the harp, it will reduce the possibility of errors and will make things much easier and less complicated for you. It also creates a certain level of confidence to know that you know your piece well enough that you don't need the music to play it. And of course, it allows you to be freer in your playing. You know the piece well enough that your expressive connection to it much deeper, and it allows you to put more of yourself into the music. So I think those are very real benefits. And whether or not you're performing, for anyone else, just knowing a piece that well is very freeing, and you will probably find it extremely rewarding. But memorization is also valuable as a practice technique. It can help you to hear patterns in the music. It's very easy to get caught up in looking at all the notes that are on a page and forget to look at the patterns that they form. Whether we're talking about chords and harmonies or just finger groupings or maybe even repeated sections, it can be very easy. As I have said or said not too long ago on this podcast, it can be very easy to see the music instead of hear it and to practice it that way. So when you're playing even a few measures from memory, you get a different sense of the music and you connect to it with your ears instead of just your eyes. It also can give you a bigger picture of the music. You get a sense of the whole thing and a sense of what all those notes on the page add up to. When you remove your eyes from just reading the dots in the fingers, it gives you a completely different idea of the piece. And this allows you to do what I call intentional learning.

It's the sort of learning that you create instead of just have happen to you, where you can say, oh, look, there's a pattern and now you know something about the piece in a different way.

But let me be clear. This kind of memorization that I'm talking about is not accidental. It's not the way you learned as a child. If you learned to memorize music as a child, it's not something that just happens, and it's not something that is created solely through repetition. It's created exactly on purpose and with some fairly concrete and repeatable steps. And I'm going to be sharing those with you too. So memorization is intentional. It is wonderful for your practice because you'll learn more about your music, and it's wonderful to play from memory because it gives you so much freedom to express the music behind the notes. So memorization is good to do. So how do you do it? Well, therein lies the rub. But we're going to talk about that and I'm going to share with you right now the three most common methods of memorization and why two of them don't work.

Now, I hope that sentence got your attention, because if you think that you can't memorize that memorizing is impossible for you, most likely you've been going about it the wrong way. There really are any number of myths or fallacies or misunderstandings about how to memorize, and most of them are very well intentioned and very rooted in the learning systems that we learned when we were a child. You know, you think, okay, boy, if I had the same memorization capacity that I did when I was a child, if things came that quickly to me, everything would be great. And, and so you go back to those systems because that's what you knew. Guess what? They don't work nearly as well from an adult standpoint. And not because we've got aging brains or any of that, but because we have access to a lot of skills we didn't when we were children. So the techniques need to be different. But let's talk about that childhood way of learning. This was the way you were probably taught. Probably nobody ever taught you another way to memorize. So this may all be new to you. And if so, I'm really glad because now we get to turn a new leaf over in your memorization story. So let's take a look at that childhood way of learning. That's one Rote memorization. Memorizing by rote. And the key to rote memorization is repetition. You do it over and over and over again, and every time you do something wrong, you just do it over and eventually it comes together. Now, when I was very young and doing piano recitals for my teacher, you know, that year end recital, I. There was never any question in my mind about whether or not I had my piece memorized. I mean, I went every week for my lesson and my teacher made sure that I had it memorized. And truthfully, I don't remember even looking back through those very old lesson books and looking at my assignments. I can't find any indication that there was specific thought given to how I was memorizing. This wasn't because I had a bad teacher. I had actually an excellent piano teacher, but it was because I was young and this was appropriate. Then we were working on pieces in smaller sections, and this was how I was taught to memorize it. And it was definitely a function of repetition. It was effective in that, you know, the piece got learned and got played well on the recital. I don't remember ever having a memory mistake in one of those piano recitals. I can, however, remember my very first memorization mistake. And it happened when I was just 8 or 9 and I was playing a harp piece on a piano recital. I. It didn't throw me. I knew sort of how to deal with it, but I remember having made that mistake. It's a different level of preparation, and there were some things I learned from that for sure. But rote memorization relies on repetition. And the reason it's not so helpful for us as adults is because it's so inefficient. It's very dependent on the time you have to put in a lot of time. We necessarily don't have a lot of time to do that. And in fact, we don't want to just play one piece a year and have that piece ready for the recital at the end of the year. There's a lot of music we want to play. How do I know this? Well, I mean, I like to play a lot of music, but I hear from students all the time who are trying to manage, oh, well, I have these 10 pieces I want to play, and these 15 pieces I want to play, plus I want to learn these new ones. I know there's a lot of wonderful music in the world, and we want to play it all. Rote memorization is slow. It takes a lot of time, and it doesn't use what you know. I mean, you've become an adult, right? You don't have to learn like a child. There are things that you know now. You can recognize patterns, you can recognize chords. You can describe those sections for yourself. You have a lot of experience to bring to this. You can compare what you're working on, perhaps in this one piece, with something that you learned in another piece. You have a lot of points of reference that you wouldn't have had as a child. Learning by rote is like putting on blinders. You know, boom. You've got this little task in front of you, and you're going to do it over and over and over until you can get it right without taking into account everything else that is part of that piece of music.

So I really want you to consider giving up rote memorization if that's where you think you are. And here's one trap that happens to a lot of musicians, and it's key to. It's a key indicator that you've been memorizing by rote. That is, if you make a mistake in your piece, if you have to go back and start over from the beginning, that's because you haven't been memorizing in the best intentional method. And rote memorizers generally do only know their piece from the beginning. So that's sort of a dead giveaway if that happens to you. But all right, so rote memorization isn't right. But what about that other method that people use for memorization? Well, okay, there are two. But the one I want to talk about now, that is also not particularly helpful is the autopilot method. The one that says, well, I've played it enough that I know that if I don't think about it, my fingers will do it automatically. After all, I've trained them, I've practiced them. I've done the same fingering every time. I do this the same way every time. And so if I just get out of the way, they'll do it on their own.

The scary, tricky thing about autopilot is that it works for us at home when we're sitting in our practice space playing that piece that we know well, our Minds can wander. We can be thinking about what we're going to cook for dinner or isn't it a lovely day outside and what we're going to do later. And, and that doesn't seem to affect our playing at all. And our fingers just sort of go on autopilot. They go automatically, they go by themselves. And so it seems like we know the piece.

But that kind of autopilot playing almost always falls apart under stress. So that if you are, are playing like that at home and then you go to your lesson and you, and it just doesn't work the same and you're making all kinds of mistakes and it's not right. That's a symptom of autopilot memorization, where you are not really paying attention to what you're doing. And because you're used to sort of taking your mind out of what you're doing when you're trying to focus and do something right, your fingers are like, well, what is, what is brain doing involving itself in this? We were doing just fine.

But the second you try to focus, you lose the thread. This often happens in a memorized performance. And you know, it's happened to me the same way it's happened to lots of other people where you're playing and everything's going just fine. And then you think, oh, that's a terrible thing to do when you haven't been thinking in your performance. And then all of a sudden you think the first thing that happens after you start to think is, oh, I don't know where I am, I don't know, I don't know. And we doubt, we fear, and there's the mistake right there. We're, we're off our game already and it can be very difficult to recover from that. So relying on autopilot and okay, I'm just going to sort of close my eyes and, and go and trust my fingers. Relying on autopilot as a method of memorization is pretty scary and I do not recommend, has some serious flaws. So if you're relying on your fingers to carry you through.

I'd like you to think again. Which is why I want to talk about intentional memorization.

Intentional memorization is memorization that is done on purpose with a system. And it's much more about knowing what you're doing than about remembering your piece. It's all knowledge based, if you can think of it this way and think of it not as you're trying to stretch your memory. Although this is really very good for any sort of memory exercise, for sure. But it's about knowing. And once you can think of it that way, it's very freeing because we're going to be working with what you know, and we want to know our music. Now, there are a few different stages in intentional memorization, and the first stage is really not surprising. It's just all about practicing your music with the music. And practicing with the music is really important. And that's where this is different from that sort of memorizing two measures at a time sort of system.

Because when you're practicing with the music, this gives you an opportunity to observe with your eyes and with your ears what is there. You get to look for patterns, thinking about keys and chords and harmonies and rhythms and repeated sections. You get to look at all those things. So what you're going to be doing is, as you're practicing with the music, knowing that you're going to be memorizing it. You're not just repeating the notes, but you're going to be developing those finger habits that will help you as you play a piece from memory. You're going to be developing the sound in your ear. Because if you can't hear the piece, you're not going to be able. You don't know it well enough. That's simply it. If you can't hear it in your head, can't play it in your head, you don't know it. And you're going to be learning what all this stuff looks like in addition to how it sounds. So you're going to be creating very strong connections between what you're doing, what you're hearing, and what you're seeing. Now, whether you're a kinetic learner or an audio, you know, an oral learner or a visual learner, all of these skills will play together for you and they will work. You'll be able to connect to this music so that if one of your senses fails you, one of the others might kick in.

Now, as you're practicing, you're going to mark your music in sections. There will be big sections that have sort of a meaning in terms of the structure of the piece. And there will also be smaller sections, too. We'll get to the smaller sections in a moment. But with those big sections, I want you to label them and I want you to describe them. What happens in them? Would they be part of a story? Do they have a particular characteristic? Oh, this is the descending arpeggio section, or this is the section that. That seems to fade away into nothing. I don't know. This is the section where the the big bad wolf comes in. I don't know. Describe the section, give it a meaning. Something that's meaningful to you so that you have a way to relate to it. This will allow you to have those as landmarks when you're playing without the music as well. And I'd give you an extra step to take while you're working at learning your piece and practicing it with the music.

I'd like you to make it a goal to notice something specific about your piece in every practice session. It could just be learning the name of that note that has too many ledger lines. Or noticing an anchor note that happens between, between a common note between two chords. Or the note that you keep missing. Oh, I keep missing that. And that's because I keep reaching for an octave and it's really a seventh. Or maybe noticing a dynamic that you hadn't paid attention to before. Or maybe one of those foreign musical terms that you might need to, to look up online and, and get a definition for. But notice something every day and write it down in your practice journal. Because remember, memorization is not necessarily as much about remembering as it is about knowing. And knowing starts with observing. So you're practicing with the music, you're observing, you're noticing, you're developing those connections between what you're doing and what you're seeing and what you're hearing. And it's time to start memorizing. You don't have to wait till your piece is finished to start memorizing, but you want to have a pretty good groundwork because the memorization process goes a lot faster when you have a good bit of knowledge about the piece already, when your fingers are kind of used to it and you have a pretty good idea of what's there. So in this stage, you are going to be very intentional about the sections. So you've already outlined the big sections in your piece. Now make sure that you've at least numbered sections that have no more than four measures in them. You might have some that are smaller, but you want four measure sections because for most pieces four measures is a great chunk. It's the right size to try memorizing at once. Because now we're going to do some on purpose memorization. And you're going to take one of those four bar sections and you're going to play it a couple of times. Then turn your music, stand around, don't hit your harp, but just turn it around so you can't see it. You don't have to close your music or anything more dramatic. Than that, just turn your, stand around and try playing it that same section without the music. How'd you do? Well, turn your music stand back around, fix it, play it again with the music. Turn your music stand around. And that's how you start the on purpose memorization. Now, when you're, when you're finished working on that section and it doesn't have to be perfect, learn the next section as well so that you've got a couple. And then you can start chaining those together. Now it's going to take you a while. Some sections are going to come much more quickly than others and that's okay. You'll just work on them and keep on going. This does take a lot of repetition. But the difference here between the repetition we're doing here and the repetition that you did or would have done if you were memorizing by rote is that this is really focused. We're doing a small chunk and you're going to use these sections that, to create landmarks for you, which is very different from rote learning, so that you don't have to go back and start over. So we're going to work at these sections and remember again, observe when you've played it and you, then you turn the music stand around and you play it from memory. What went wrong and what do you need to know to make it go right? So that would be the second stage. This will take a while, obviously, doesn't have to take months, but it'll take a little while until eventually you're playing the whole piece. And then I want you to practice starting at any one of those sections in your piece. Mix up the sections. I love to do sort of the index card thing. Put the numbers of all my sections on index cards and mix them all up and put, you know, pick one and start from that section without the music. When I have a piece memorized, I know where my sections are. And. Oh yeah, section five. Boom. I can start there. Section 12. Yeah, okay, I can start there. What's so good about this? It's going to give you the inside out, in depth knowledge, knowledge of your piece. And that's how you're going to work. So that you could start from the end and work backwards section by section to practice it. You could start any place in the middle and play to the end. Those landmarks are going to help you stay focused, help you find your place. If you accidentally go on autopilot and you need to come back. Oop. Those landmarks are right there. If you miss a pedal, miss a lever Guess what? You know where your next landmark is and you can go on. So it's incredibly confidence boosting to be able to do this. But I have one more.

Oh, thought that I'd like to add. I want you to embrace failure during this process because the memorization that goes so well today isn't necessarily going to go well tomorrow. You're going to find potholes, things you've never done wrong before that all of a sudden go wrong. That failure, those potholes, that's part of the process. All that is is a weak spot that's showing up. And it's showing up so that you can shore it up so that you can find something you need to know. It's a spot that you didn't know anything about, or at least you didn't know enough to prevent it from being a pothole. So it's an opportunity to learn a little bit more about your piece. So when those potholes come up, celebrate them. I mean, I know you're not going to say, woohoo, I found another pothole, but that's really what it is. It's a chance for you to fix something. So don't think that that's a sign of not being able to memorize. It's a sign of you have it partly memorized and you need to know at least one more little thing. So that's intentional memorization. In the very shortest little nutshell I could give it to you. You're going to practice with the music and observe what you can because your knowledge is the basis for your being able to play without music. Then you're going to have those sections of your piece so that you can be assured that you know your piece inside out. You can start anywhere. It's not just like a, you know, one of those little wind up dolls or something and you wind it up and watch it go, right? It's not an Energizer Bunny kind of thing because the Energizer Bunny starts and then it just goes until it wears out. We want you to be able to start anywhere and to play from anywhere and not worry about your batteries or your memory or anything else running out, right? So this is about knowing your piece. And that's where this kind of memorization is so different from just learning by rote. It allows you to control the process. It allows you to take the reins into your own hands and feel confident in what you know about your piece. To know that it's not accidental. To know that it's not. Well, all right, if as long As I don't think about it, I'm okay.

It's. It's on purpose and it's inside you. It's just music that you know by heart, right? Not by accident, not by. Well, from. From measure one. I'm good.

But you know it by heart. It's inside you. And you can play it so that you never have to be without a little something to play wherever you are. Right. You visit somebody's, you know, a friend's house who has a harp there, another harpist, and they say, oh, sit down and, you know, try my harp. Well, you have a little something at least you can play. Which is why, for those of you who are my Heart Mastery members, early on in the scale of success, I ask you to memorize a couple short pieces because the memorization itself is a valuable skill and because I never want you to feel that you don't have something you can play at a moment's notice for, you know, that neighbor that comes to the house, oh, you have a harp. How wonderful. Could you play something for me? Sure. Just a little something that you know and you can whip off and sit down and play. And you know that it's going to be just fine because you know it. All right, let's just do a real quick recap. So memorization is not a learning tool, but it is a wonderful practice technique that you can use to help you learn your music. Whether you ever play from music or not. Having the freedom that comes from knowing your music well enough that you could play without music, having the confidence and the knowledge and all that good stuff about your piece is incredibly freeing, and it's certainly a key ingredient in harp happiness. So I would encourage you to try memorizing your pieces, even if you're never going to play without music. Do some of this in your practice and find out how much you can learn about your piece from doing these kinds of techniques. Now, I have a couple quick reminders for you too. We have a webinar coming up on the 22nd of this month. It's sort of a wrap up webinar for our Walls of the Flowers cadenza challengers and the My Heart Mastery members who've been doing the challenge right along with them. But even if you didn't participate in the challenge, do come along to the webinar because I think you'll be able to learn what the challengers are going to be learning that day about applying the techniques that we've learned in working through this cadenza to learning other pieces of music. So you will find the link in the Show Notes to register for the webinar. It's called Cracking the Nutcracker Code and I certainly hope that you join me for that free webinar. Don't forget to join the first to Know List for my Heart Mastery so that you can be part of that community when we open membership up again the end of this month. There are a couple other resources in the in the Show Notes as well, particularly a blog post that I wrote some time ago about memorization that may help you with some more of the details for things we talked about on today's show. On next week's show we will be Curing the Christmas Carol Blahs it can be very hard to practice Christmas carols. We know them too well and yet.

We need to practice them right? We know them so well that we wish we didn't have to practice them, perhaps. And yet they need practice because we know that other people know them really well too, and we really don't want to be making mistakes in these pieces. So how do you practice a piece that you know too well? How do you encourage yourself to put in the practice time if you're not sure that something really needs it, or if you're not really interested in practicing it? So while we're talking about this, this applied to Christmas Carols next week. It can help you with some other practice dilemmas that you might face at other times of year as well. So we'll be talking about those curing the Carol blahs next week and I certainly hope you join me for that show. Thank you so for listening today. As always, if you have questions or comments or suggestions for the show, hop onto our email@podcastarpmastery.com and you can submit those there. I look forward to talking with you again next week. Have a wonderful week. Until then, bye bye. Thanks for tuning into another episode of the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I release a new episode every Monday morning so you can hit hit your practice week running. Until then, remember to practice your harp happiness every day. See you next time.