Klarinet Archive - Posting 000038.txt from 1998/09

From: LeliaLoban@-----.com
Subj: [kl] Memorization
Date: Wed, 2 Sep 1998 08:50:35 -0400

The suggestion to memorize by backing a little farther away from the music
every day sounds great for you younger folks. People my age (50) see the
music _better_ as we back off! ;-)

But seriously.... My piano teacher in days of yore taught me to mark the most
difficult passages with brackets in pencil, then give those passages extra
work every day. He warned me to keep changing which measures to use as the
beginning and ending of a problem passage, so that I wouldn't learn those
sections as separate little pieces instead of as part of the whole. He
thought those transitions were the most likely places for memory lapses under
stressful audition or performance conditions. He also said, "You want to make
it look smooth and confident. You don't want your audience to see you gasping
up a big breath before you dive into the waterfall." (An ominous metaphor!)
He communicated his own dreadful stage fright to his students, so it's
possible that he taught me to foul up in easier measures just before or just
after the difficult passages, because he got me worried about them, by putting
the idea into my head and then anxiously emphasizing the point over and over
(the old "Don't think about elephants" syndrome), but in fact, when I played
in public, I did make my worst mistakes just before or just after the sections
I had worked on the most. As first clarinet in my high school orchestra, I
had the embarrassing experience, several times, of sailing through a solo that
scared me half witless (things I worked on so hard that they've stayed
memorized to this day, even though as an orchestra grunt I was playing off the
score and not deliberately memorizing), only to lose my place in the music and
tank the subsequent tutti so atrociously that the conductor gave me The Look

These days, I make a habit of beginning the practice session by playing
through the entire piece, or at least an entire movement if it's something
long. I end the practice with another complete run-through; and in between,
I'm doing a lot less obsessional slaving over the minutiae of the difficult
bits. Interestingly, I'm finding that I memorize far faster now than I did as
a kid, even though, theoretically, kids have better memories. Evidently my
memory works best if I perceive a piece of music as a whole, rather than as a
collection of parts--as a story instead of as one letter or one word at a
time.

Lelia
LeliaLoban@-----.com
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"Of all noises I think music the least disagreeable."
--Samuel Johnson
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