Olga Jegunova talks about Memorizing
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 4 ก.พ. 2015
- Welcome to my video blog ! Will try to share my experience on how to play the piano and how to overcome millions of problems that comes with it. Please do share your experience: books, articles, tips, videos, questions etc. subject of today : memory !
So nice and elegant at 6:75 "maybe you move forward maybe you do not - it is up to you" while playing it amazingly!!
I still think it's sad that you do not get more views! I'm learning Mozart's KV 331 because of your wonderful performance and everytime when I feel like I'm nowhere, I watch your video and I'm motivated again. Thank you not only for putting the perfomances online, but also for giving such helpful tips, I can see that they're coming from your heart! Greetings from Switzerland :)
Hello Olga,
(Sorry for my English which is very approximate)
I just discovered your blog and I really appreciate what you give of yourself. I saw your blog about memory and I have something to contribute to this memory problem.
I am a retired amateur pianist. I studied piano with a private teacher for about 12 years in my youth but I was very lazy and ultimately my level is relatively average. I will quickly tell you my “pianistic” story.
My level of music theory was really mediocre: I didn't know how to decipher the scores well, particularly the rhythms. So that when the teacher asked me to learn a piece of music, I had great difficulty deciphering it at home.
By listening sounds when deciphering it, I learned it aurally and also digitally and visually.
When I talk about auditory memory, I wish to say that I learned to recognize the gap between two notes, and the “special flavour” of each chord and/or dissonance.
Hence, I completely assimilated these differences in my brain and acquired very good “relative pitch” - I do not have absolute pitch.
When I talk about visual memory, I'm talking about memory regarding the position of the fingers on the keyboard. What is very surprising is that by dint of noticing my fingers, I learned to position my fingers on a third, a fifth and other gaps, in "easy" keys (counter- example: C sharp minor - I think of Rachmaninoff's prelude which brings tears to my eyes and not only for its difficulty).
For years, I had fun reproducing certain pieces of music by ear, and in particular pop songs. All this sharpened the auditory, visual and digital memory. The downside of all this was that when I learned a piece of music "wrong", the mistake was always repeated and the teacher had to correct me every time I passed in front of him for my lesson. At the end of the year, all the students had an audition in a concert hall (from extreme beginners to music conservatory levels). I obviously had to participate and although a score was placed on the sheet holder, I played by heart.
Where this gap played a very nasty trick on me was when one of my friends who was a harpsichordist asked me insistently to turn the pages for him in an amateur concert. And since I didn't know the score, I followed aurally what he was playing except that sometimes I was lost and I tried to cling to the score as best I could. EXCEPT at one point, I thought we were at the end of the page and I turned the page way too soon. I saw him very quickly turn the page back. Then I felt lower than the 3rd basement, so ashamed of my inability.
Since then, I have retired and I no longer have the courage to work on learning things “by heart”. So I took my courage in both hands and learned to decipher a little better to finally discover other musical works, like someone opening a book and tell a beautiful story (“once upon a time...”).
And the funny part of the story is that since I started enjoying deciphering, I have partially lost my memory of “by heart”. This shows that we can (and we must) work on our memory by trying to replay pieces - even if we make a mistake - by tying transpose them, by trying to find what I would call the “harmonic color” of each chord, and even more dissonances and their resolution - Just by their color, their particular flavor.
Best regards
This is so useful. Bless you
Thank you for your advice. You're so kind.
Humble and beautiful
I am now working on Bartok sonata. It is indeed a very difficult music to memorize. Here everything can help: memorizing hands separately (depends of the music facture) or sometimes I learn different "voices" (horizontal layers) separately. If it is a strictly harmonic structure, analysing the harmony is really helpful. Visual memory is def a big step forward, but also aural impression is a lead. Understanding the structure of the piece, the form and more precisely, the phrasing, is a very important factor, too. Hope this helps! x
really good advices! in fact is not just memorizing, because when you understand harmony, and melody it helps with the performance and the particular things. Thank you very much for sharing this advices!
I'm currently learning the piano concerto no 23 mov 2 by Mozart because of you, tanks a lot for this channel. You're so intelligent and beautiful Olga. :) :)
I deal with acting so I was curious to see what you have to say. Funny enough the issue of memorizing and preparing a piece seems universal. I came up with a structure of preparing the text, splitting it by beats, analyzing the wants and intentions all before memorizing. My practice based conclusion was that memorizing can't be done without preparing the under-text, and more than often the intention of it ( that is action, which leads to an emotional response) is the key ingredient to success.
Then another thing I came up with is a chain link memorization - something I developed thinking of Stanislavski's idea of beats, which goes with splitting the text. With script you have human thoughts so arguably you have an unit: the thought. Music or dance can be similar, I think. So, you learn the first thought, and you repeat until you burn it in your body/mind. Learn the 2nd, and burn it. Then repeat 1 and 2 until you burn the link. Then learn 3; then 2 and 3. Then 4 and 3-4. And so on. It takes patience as it is ridiculous micro management. It seems slow, but in the long run it sets deep groves. memory is about proper repetition. For example in acting when someone says something wrong and goes "shit, fuck, oh, uhh, no no" all that affects the memory pattern with divergent information. Same with music when you fudge something (I play guitar). So slow chain link, burns it steady but surely. What you said, seemed to touch some similar points so I felt like sharing in the name of art.
Thanks for the great advise Olga. I love the way you play.
Thank you for your tips, they helped me very much to study and memorizing!
Again, thank you for sharing your knowledge and experience as a great pianist!
thank you for an interesting video blog! Very useful tips and great presentation!
thank you so much for sharing!
Thank you so much Olga! You are a wonderful teacher.
Jerry Watkins I am glad you find it useful!
Thank you for sharing your tips with us! I've found them very helpful.
beautiful and instructive
Memorizing seems to be very natural thing for me since I was a child. I heavily rely on my ears. However as the pieces I learn are getting harder, understanding the harmony progression and the structure of the pieces is definitely necessary to achieve accuracy and confidence. My teacher introduced to me a very useful way of memorizing but it takes a lot of patience, and time to do, which is learning bar by bar, with hand separate. It really works like magic!
L Cheng be patience and I am sure you will make it!
sooo beautiful!
Hi there! I'll really keep this in mind, it's quite helpful!
In my experience, I can memorize pieces but after I play an entire page I suddenly realize sometimes I don't even know what I'm playing when I'm playing it. So I have to force myself to look at my hands playing and say: OK, this is a C, this is an A, and analize it, as you say. Somebody told me it's a "musle memory".
I've set my mind on being each time more and more aware of what I'm playing, so that leads to a confident performance, and not as my teacher says, "shy".
Mariana, loosing yourself in the middle of the page is a loss of control. There can be different reasons: maybe you are memorizing only selective fragments or maybe you never play "through": as a result you don't see the piece as a bigger picture...
Hello! I'm not a very good pianist (yet!) since I stopped playing for almost 8 years and only just started learning again a couple of months ago, but wanted to let you know that I love your playing and I very much hope you continue to publish your video blog. :)
Can't wait for your CD!
AONomad Thank you for your message. And thank you for all mega kindness, too. CD and video blog are in progress. Stay tuned and enjoy music!
:D
To improve my memory I find it quite helpful to avoid things like MSG, gluten... junk food in general, full of chemicals. Meanwhile, trying to eat things that can really nourish the brain. Raw organic cacao is amazing...
If you have amalgam fillings, that would be also something to look at.
Thanks for the video!
I am glad you have found your way to be healthy (and happy)!
Thank you so much!!!
Trillizasv :)
By the way, Olga, I love your blog. Please post more of your tips. Could you talk about how to play Mozart, specifically, in articulation, phrasing and most importantly, pedaling. I love your performance on Mozart Sonata K 331 in A major. How did you play it so excellently...I really want to know!!
L Cheng Thank you for your message! It is a live long question: How to play Mozart? It is like" to be or not to be?".. I wish I knew how to play Mozart. Still searching.. I guess what we need to look for is a stylistic precision together with a very sincere attitude. Pedal, articulation etc comes after. In order to understand stylistic background, we need to know His operas, symphonies, letters, jokes.. For the sincere performance you have to be very passionate about the music and then share it....Good luck!!
Have you ever tried going to sleep at night listening to the piece you want to memorise? Maybe easier for solo pieces than concertos, but it would work ok for the opening of Beethoven III I think? Maybe also easier for peaceful lullabies like Schubert Impromptu G flat? Slow movement Mozart 24? I fall asleep to any of those.......
I wonder if there's any correlation between sight-reading and ability to memorise? I imagine an expert sight-reader will have less impetus/need to learn a piece by heart.
Just one problem! How do I get to the point where "a minor" really means enough to me to be helpful in memorizing?! I have been playing for many years, not necessarily very well, but know very little about harmony. Are there any short, concentrated, courses on harmony etc in the London area?
+Geoff Cox minor and major is like day and night - it is very very very basic music theory. Remind me to explain this to you next time we meet - it is super easy!
+Olga Jegunova will do !
hahaha....this is totally my biggest weakness...it's very hard for me to memorize
oh yo´re so beautifull, married me :)
Rodolfo figueroa Thank you! But I am already married... to Bach, Beethoven, Schubert etc..