Overthinking the apocalypse

Saw a video about it and it doesn't cite sources but it sounded like plausible advice, so I'm taking notes to try it later.

1. Start memorising from session #1

Not: “I'll learn to play it first, then I'll work on memorisation”. Prime the mind to expect that this is what we're doing here; this is meant to be memorised. Of course you can't memorise a whole piece in one go, but work on at least one bar or at least a few more notes. Be in “memorisation mode” from the start.

2. Avoid automatism.

Just like skill-learning, memorisation ignores repetitive drills. People repeat music pieces in school through drilling them hundreds of times, then promptly forget them, just like everything else from school. You need a certain feeling of struggle, of endeavouring to commit; it's better to spend 5-10 minutes of active effort trying to internalise a passage, than 1 hour doing the same thing again and again at half attention.

One way to work on both #1 and #2 is: Always try to play from memory first, only then reach for the score. If you think you're misremembering something, try to recall it by finger and ear first, and only then reach for the score. Fight a bit. Keep yourself challenged.

3. Chunking.

You already know this from other memorisation tasks: It's easier to remember the piece if you name and group notes together. This can be from music theory (“after this comes the arpeggio”, “now it's the chord change”) but it can also be from song lyrics (“now's the ya-yo-i climb again”), or whatever name you make up for a passage that makes sense to you (“now it does that high trill again”, “only this time it's the spicy drop”).

Scan for patterns both identical and little variations (“now's the intro prologue but lower”).

4. Leave the comfort of the score

As soon as you can more or less play it from memory, stop reaching for the music sheet. Shelve away the score and keep it there, you only play this from memory now. Again, challenge yourself. If your goal is to play without looking at the score, looking at the score will stop you from that goal.

5. The show must go on

If you make a mistake, keep playing. Imagine you are audience and the musician made a mistake: you don't want them to stop playing and wince and sigh and self-denigrate etc., you want them to make it still work, right? There's no way to develop that muscle if every time you forget a phrase you stop everything to indulge in negative self-talk and start over trying to be perfect. Do the thing you want to get better at doing: performing music, not ragequitting. Put a plushie on a chair and play for the plushie and when mistakes happen (“when”, not “if”), try to make the most out of it and still come up with an enjoyable performance for the plushie.

Even the best professional musicians have made mistakes on stage, you're not going to be the first perfect musician in the world. Rather you have to learn to turn stumbles into part of the dance.

Realising this actually reconfigures the early stages of memorisation entirely. It's natural to find it grueling, since you keep making mistakes. But improvising a way to carry on from mistakes is a crucial skill; you have to be flexible; you have to absolutely master the art of creating beauty out of happy little accidents. And you can't practice that art with a piece you already know by heart, you have to actually stumble to learn not to wince at stumbles. So it's precisely in these initial stages of learning a piece that you can experiment with ways to patch over an error (fill in notes from the same scale? jump to the next bar? do improvisation techniques? fall back to a chord drone and let the other instruments take the stage for a bar?). Therefore the initial learning period is valuable; treasure it.

6. Go slow

This is the same as for learning the piece in general, or for any other skill where speed and timing is important (like martial arts). We have a natural tendency to want to go fast as soon as possible, and going slow feels effortful. But experiment with both approaches, and you'll probably find out that going fast doesn't really build the skill very efficiently, while if you do it in slow motion, all of a sudden you can go fast afterwards, in a much smaller total time than it would take if you kept insisting on training full-speed-with-mistakes from the start. (This seems to be an exception to the rule of “practice the actual thing you want to do”.)

This tricks me because often I see musicians saying “when I approach a piece I have to go as slow as 80bpm…” and meanwhile I'm already making mistakes left and right at 80bpm. I've had to slow down simple 4/4 tunes as much as 40bpm before I could do them without mistakes. At this slow motion speed it's barely registering as “music”. Yet this allows me to think, actively, about each note as they come, to really understand what's happening, without automatism. Once I can play a passage at 40bpm from memory without mistakes I find I can also play it at 80~100bpm without having to drill these speeds at all, and 140+ with only a bit of training.