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What is the best way to memorise music?<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>
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Yet this memory fetish wasn\u2019t always part of musical culture. It began in earnest with Franz Liszt<\/a><\/strong>, in his solo concerts in the early decades of the 19th century. Liszt\u2019s piano recitals were sensual rituals of super-virtuosity, in which his audiences were transfixed by his ability to produce whole repertoires of music on the spot.<\/span><\/p>\n
The pianist Stephen Hough has written about this turn to memory, great for Liszt but anathema to others: \u2018Chopin would not have approved.\u2019 In fact, Chopin<\/a><\/strong> \u2018chastised a pupil once for playing a piece from memory, accusing him of arrogance\u2019. And why? Because \u2018in the days when every pianist was also a composer, to play without a score would usually have meant that you were improvising. To play a Chopin ballade from memory might have seemed as if you were trying to pass off that masterpiece as your own.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n
That\u2019s the hubris of playing from memory: pretending as a performer that you\u2019re making it up on the spur of the moment is an affront to the composers who toiled over their pieces.<\/span><\/p>\n
And there\u2019s another problem with memory. The condition for a culture that demands that soloists learn their parts off by heart is that there must be a fixed historical repertoire written by other people for them to learn. And since the majority of them are now dead, there\u2019s no real danger of anyone mistaking the performer for the composer. Our insistence on memory comes at the cost of new pieces becoming part of the repertoire, composed so quickly there\u2019s no time to memorise them. <\/span><\/p>\n
So next time you see a soloist playing with the sheet music, it\u2019s not that they haven\u2019t learnt the piece: they\u2019re restoring musical culture to a state of potential creation, not a mausoleum of memory in which every note is fixed in advance. While memory can be freeing for some musicians, we as an audience shouldn\u2019t demand it of all of performers. When memory becomes an ideology, we might be losing more than we\u2019re gaining.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
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More by Tom Service<\/strong><\/h4>\nWhy modern technology is ruining the way we hear music<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
Is music ACTUALLY that good for us?<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
Which came first, music or language?<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
Will we run out of new music?<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>
<\/p><\/div> <\/section>
Illustration by Maria Corte Maidagan\u00a0<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p><\/body><\/html>\n
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By Tom Service Published: Tuesday, 28 June 2022 at 12:00 am Why do professional classical musicians do it? Why do they memorise entire pieces, from violin partitas to piano concertos, from sonatas to symphonies? All those thousands of notes, every single one of them going into the brains and bodies of soloists, singers, orchestral players […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":16745,"template":"","categories":[1],"acf":{"readingTimeMinutes":"3"},"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2022\/06\/why-do-musicians-memorise-music-and-should-they-scaled.jpg",2560,1972,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2022\/06\/why-do-musicians-memorise-music-and-should-they-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2022\/06\/why-do-musicians-memorise-music-and-should-they-300x231.jpg",300,231,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2022\/06\/why-do-musicians-memorise-music-and-should-they-768x592.jpg",768,592,true],"large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2022\/06\/why-do-musicians-memorise-music-and-should-they-1024x789.jpg",800,616,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2022\/06\/why-do-musicians-memorise-music-and-should-they-1536x1183.jpg",1536,1183,true],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2022\/06\/why-do-musicians-memorise-music-and-should-they-2048x1578.jpg",2048,1578,true]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"importmanagerhub@sprylab.com","author_link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/author\/importmanagerhubsprylab-com\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"By Tom Service Published: Tuesday, 28 June 2022 at 12:00 am Why do professional classical musicians do it? Why do they memorise entire pieces, from violin partitas to piano concertos, from sonatas to symphonies? All those thousands of notes, every single one of them going into the brains and bodies of soloists, singers, orchestral players…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed\/16744"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/rss_feed"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}