How To Memorize Music - With Numerous Musical Examples

HOW TO MEMORISE MUSIC.

I.

THE subject of memorising music is of paramount importance to all who have in view the concert-platform as a means of earning a livelihood; and even those pianists whose ambition does not lead them before the public gaze cannot afford to neglect this branch of their Art. Most of us have, at one time or another, witnessed the confusion of pianists who, on being asked to play, murmur gently that they have left their music at home, and, on further being pressed, are obliged to confess that they cannot play without their notes. Could anything be more humiliating than for a pianist of advanced technique to have to make an excuse of that sort? And yet it is being done daily by thousands of musicians who either will not take the trouble to memorise a dozen pieces, or do not understand how to go about doing so. Some pianists even go so far as to confess that they are utterly unable to memorise anything; in cases of that sort we may assume that they have never tried, for all intelligent musical people have it in their power to commit a few pieces to memory if they only exercise the faculties Heaven has bestowed upon them.

I remember once hearing a lady of this description play at a musical evening. She was a proficient player, she was mistress of an excellent technique, but, alas! she had neglected to commit any music to memory. She made the usual excuses, and then boldly confessed that it was not in her power to memorise a piece of music of even ordinary length. In spite of this, however, she was pursuaded to go to the piano, and we were treated to the strangest jumble that it has ever been my lot to hear. She began with a Polish Dance of Scharwenka’s, after playing sixteen bars of which she tackled Godard’s second Mazurka, and finished up with the latter part of a Chopin Nocturne, and a little thing of my own, you know. Needless to say, her reputation as a serious student of music was destroyed from that date forth, and she has never consented since to play from memory.

Memorising music does not call for any extraordinary talent; it merely requires—like almost everything else—practice and common sense. If only pianists would realise this, there would not be so much cause for complaint. And if a pianist, in the ordinary course of his study, is able to memorise half-a-dozen pieces, how many more will he be able to master when he has given special attention to the subject!

Fifty years ago it was quite the custom for pianists to play in public from printed music. No one thought of calling them slovenly for doing so: it was recognised as being quite the proper thing to do. But gradually a change took place. It began to be recognised as a truth that more pianists could play their music better when they had memorized it than they could when playing from the printed sheet, and then competition set in. First one pianist would give a recital entirely from memory, and then another; finally, it became the general custom, and those artists who, either through indolence, or because they had allowed their faculties to rust for too long a period of time, and were consequently unable to keep up with their more fortunate confrères, were allowed to drop out of rank, and the public knew them no more. Specialisation of talent may be carried too far, but it is possible for it not to be carried far enough; and the piano-playing of the fourth, fifth, and sixth decades of the nineteenth century would have been far more advanced if only the element of competition had entered into it to the extent that it does in these days.

Pianists of former days must necessarily have recognised the enormous difference there is in the quality of the playing of those who are content to interpret their music directly from the printed sheet, and the quality of the playing of those who perform from memory; but their indifference with regard to their own improvement is hard to explain. For there is no doubt that there is a vast improvement in the playing of a piece when it has been memorised perfectly. I have heard persons contradict this, their argument being that, having once memorised a piece, one’s playing of it becomes mechanical and indifferent. They