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I have changed my strategy for memorizing a solo on trombone. In the past I memorized by traditional methods, playing short sections, working from the back, etc. A good part of it was actually visualizing the score.

Now instead I try to learn what it sounds like and then play it by ear, rather than trying to memorize it. I hadn't tried this until recently because i always assumed ear playing was beyond me, but it turns out I can do it (having worked on it pretty hard).

That's an easy strategy on a monotonic instrument and it's very resistant to memory lapses, which greatly reduces the stress. Piano seems an order of magnitude harder, to my brain, so I have no idea whether this can work.

Well ... it works for me, on piano and guitar, as well as on monophonic instruments (such as violin, bagpipes, recorder and trumpet).

Five or six lessons in with my current teacher, I discovered something I had never realised before: that note names never even enter my consciousness when I play something from memory. I just listen to my internal representation of the music, and I play that. So then, when I play a wrong note and my teacher asks, afterwards, what I think it should have been, I can *sing* the right note, but not name it.

At one point, I said to my teacher rather incredulously: "You mean that when other people memorise, they memorise *each individual note* in the piece?" And she said yeah, that's how it usually works.

Which is ... weird and unfathomable, to me. That would be like trying to memorise a poem written in a foreign language I don't speak: not knowing the context, I'd be forced to memorise individual, none-sensical words, rather than sentences that tell a story. That seems like a very daunting task, indeed!

So, further thoughts on this ...

TimR speculated, in one of his earlier posts, that people who memorise music easily have "memory tricks", similar to the tricks that make memorisation of random lists of numbers or names or objects easier.

Which made me think. What are my tricks?

I've often been asked by fellow students (and sometimes by teachers!) how I memorise so quickly. I've never really been able to come up with an adequate answer to that question. To me it feels like something that "just happens", whether I want it to or not. In fact, since I took up piano again, I avoid certain radio stations like the plague because in listening to those, I might "accidentally" encounter one of my pieces (or one of the ones I plan to tackle in the near future). Already, I don't read much. When I have a fresh memory of a professional recording sitting *right there*, I won't read at all.

TimR says that for him, "playing by ear" yields better, more stress-resistant results than trying to memorise a piece note by note. That makes a lot of sense to me, for reasons already mentioned above: memorising individual notes is like rote learning a poem in a language you don't know. The context is missing. It's easy to forget individual elements if you can't make sense of where exactly they fit in the finished whole. If, on the other hand, you have the overall "shape" of the music in your head, that gives you context: the same kind of "context" that you get when you turn your grocery list into a story, and/or a mental image. It'll be much easier to spot a missing element!

I believe that students, as their familiarity with musical idioms grows, will have an increasingly easier time with memorisation: that kind of familiarity creates context, much like learning the language the poem was written in.

As long as the "musical language" isn't quite there yet (or not enough of it to make a difference), teachers might be able to replace it with something else. This is where creating logic that makes sense to the *student*, even if it doesn't necessarily make sense to someone who does have the "musical language", might help. Story-telling. Finding physical and/or visual patterns (I remember I had an "aha" moment not long ago, when it finally dawned on me that in a particular study I was practicing, and kept stumbling on despite having it memorised, all I had to do was keep my right thumb on A throughout, and everything else would fall into place). Relating passages to other things the student already knows (a dance move, a particular way of walking, the rhythm of that leaky faucet in the garage, the feeling of moving with a galloping horse, ...)

A classroom of kids can't memorize "Fuzzy Wuzzy" (the one about the bear). To facilitate their learning, I start by teaching these kids how to analyze the poem's structure:

The number of verses: 3

First verse: 5 words
Second verse: 5 words
Third verse: 6 words

Pattern recognition: all three verses start with the same two words.

Rhyme: the first two verses utilize end rhyme; the third verse utilizes internal rhyme.

None of this helped. So I ask these students to draw a picture for each of the three lines. I guess they are visual learners.

These students are unable to draw. They don't know how to turn words into pictures. So I drew three pictures for them, one picture representing a line of poetry.

They chuckle at the comical nature of the three pictures. But when pressed to recite the poem, they still can't.

Not visual learners, eh? Okay. Let's try bodily-kinesthetic learning style. We play charades. We act out every single word in the poem. Then we put together the movements and gestures into a choreography, set to someone rapping the words.

None of this helped. The students still cannot recite Fuzzy Wuzzy from memory.

OK, AZN. Point taken. Either:

a) They hate memorising (and/or poetry)
b) Their mental capacity is limited, or
c) Both

/me shuts up now .

Although, ETA: a *whole class* of them? How old were these kids?

I don't think that this approach would prove anything. I think the only conclusion will be that if you let people do the same thing that they don't like over and over again, you probably won't get anywhere.

The first step IMHO should be that they love piano. Maybe the teacher can make them love it even more.

Hmm.

Do you have to love math to pass calculus?

Do you have to love history to be able to memorize the 50 states or the Presidents?

No, but it certainly helps .

And what's the point of playing the piano if you don't love it?

Seriously? You don't think there can be any benefit from music lessons for the average kid? Only for those few that become passionate?

On the contrary, I think there are many potential benefits to music lessons for any kid. But not if you have to drag them there kicking and screaming. Then you're better off helping them find a hobby that they do enjoy, and which may provide some of the same benefits.

Re: Fuzzy Wuzzy

Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear
Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair
Fuzzy Wuzzy wasn't fuzzy, was he?

I remember this poem from school in primary school. It was given to us by a fascinating substitute teacher at the same time as:

A tutor who tutored the flute
Tried to tutor two tooters to toot
Said the two to the tutor,
Is it easier to toot -
Or to tutor two tooters to toot?

And another one about "When Pop bottles pop bottles, pop bottles pop!"

And I think the other was about a "gittle lirl chewing gubble bum" (little girl i.e. spoonerisms).

Now, why do I remember these poems decades later? We were not required to memorize them. Because they were interesting and this teacher engaged us in the material. The fascinating thing about "fuzzy wuzzy" that the last line "fuzzy - was he?" sounds just like "fuzzy wuzzy". You hear someone speak, and you wonder what he means with:

Fuzzy Wuzzy wasn't very Fuzzy Wuzzy?" - you puzzle about it, there is a light bulb moment (teacher elicits the light bulb moment with good timing, like a comedian, giving gentle guidance) - Hey! "was he" sounds like "wuzzy". You would need to have a class of mostly native speakers to pull it off. It wouldn't work for 90% ESL.

My most successful lessons were when my grade 2's marched off into recess chattering about what we had just done - once they marched out chanting some poem, reminding each other of the words, and keeping it up all recess.

What dawns on me as I'm writing this is that they wanted to memorize whatever it was, and they came up with the strategies. In my case with Fuzzy, it was so cool that every time I forgot, I worked to remember it, because I liked telling people about it.
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Addendum: There was also a reason for that teacher giving us those poems - they teach something about language, and he presented it in a fascinating way. It was meaningful and "cool".

I don't put piano in the hobby class for kids (though I do for the adult amateur musician). I consider it part of a rounded education.

A flea and a fly in a flue,
Were imprisoned, so what could they do?
Said the fly, "let us flee."
Said the flea, "let us fly."
So they flew through a flaw in the flue.

This brings up something else - the thing should be meaningful, and it should have some depth to it (sort of the same thing). We didn't have to memorize presidents, fortunately, and we don't have such an incredible number of provinces as you guys have states. But we had a teacher who made us memorize the countries of the world. I hated geography, hated history, tuned out both despite my best intentions, and got close to fail grades in both. Sometimes I did fail.

So decades later while starting music history, my lack of geography and history were a stumbling block. How do you trace the beginnings of music in Mesopotamia if you haven't a clue about that part of the world? I began to study history for real, as well as geography, and discovered they were fascinating. In fact, I felt cheated.

How on earth can memorizing the names of presidents, or of countries of the world, ever be fascinating? Compare discovering fascinating things to doing so for grades - abstract numbers which over time become meaningless.

Perhaps those were bad examples.

But in every field of study, there are concepts to be understood, and facts to be memorized.

When I was in college I tended to neglect memorization. In hindsight I grossly underestimated the size of that component, and the extent to which it would have aided the concept part. If I had known anything about strategies for memorization, many courses would have been far easier.

True. However, that doesn't change what Keystring said.

Have you ever heard of Bloom's taxonomy of learning objectives? In the revised version (2002, see here for more), six levels of cognitive learning strategies are distinguished: remember, understand, apply, analyse, evaluate and create. Many aspiring teachers (yours truly among them) were taught to plan their lessons using a grid based on this framework, where the objective should be to strive for lessons (or lesson sequences) that encourage students to use *all* of these strategies, instead of just one or two of them.

Why? Because (thank you, Captain Obvious) research shows that the higher-order strategies tend to promote meaningful learning (where students can ultimately do something useful with their knowledge) and long-term retention to a significantly higher degree than rote learning (memorisation).

How do you promote meaningful learning when it's just a list of States and their capitals? You don't. You use the memorisation as a stepping stone to something more fascinating or, as Keystring's story suggests, you may be able to work the other way around: find something that's fascinating, and work your way backwards from there. If a student writes an essay on the genesis of the United States, (s)he is almost inevitably going to learn the names and capitals of the States, while figuring out the order in which they were incorporated into the Union, and the story of how and why that happened. Understand, analyse, create. And yes, there will be some memorisation somewhere in there, too.

I think the problem is not with memorisation in and of itself, though. Knowledge of facts and figures is useful and necessary. The problem is with the way these things are often still taught in school: here's a list, drill it in, we will test you, and that will be that. Memorisation is only one strategy, and it's not even the most effective one we have (not by a long shot). It can't stop there!

As for how this relates to music, well ... first, teach the student to understand, analyse, evaluate and create, I'm inclined to say. And then work your way backwards to memorisation. For some students, by the time you get there, it will have happened spontaneously, much in the way that writing that essay inadvertently taught our imaginary American History student more than he ever wanted to know about the fifty States.

Part of the problem is that drilling is the worst way to memorize, and the only way most children are taught. If more effective methods are used it not only becomes easier and quicker, but it may relate better to concepts.



Referring to the bolded part: that's memorization through drilling, and we want to avoid that.

Easy - in competition. It's amazing how that can motivate kids. (some kids)

I don't think so.

My point was that if you can get a student to truly understand the music, to analyse it and apply the knowledge gained in other contexts, to evaluate other people's playing of the same or similar music and put their finger on what's missing, to improvise (create) on a familiar theme, ... by the time you've done all that, drilling will no longer be required.

There are a lot of problems to this supposed type of "motivation". I saw it in the classroom as a teacher (having inherited kids who were "taught" that way prior to my getting them), and then heard of the problems through others. Anyone who might actually be motivated has interest killed off.

And besides. What for? What is the point of memorizing presidents, or countries, or anything else? And what does that do to things that could be interesting or meaningful as per my previous post?

Um ... you had me, until you suggested that memorisation is never useful. Imagine an ER doctor who would have definitely corrected your metabolic acidosis before it killed you ... if only he could have remembered the formula for calculating the correct medication dosage.