Wednesday, May 2, 2007

More memory

I've been finding a lot of good information on memorization, and will try to put it together soon. In the meantime, I recorded myself playing (from memory). Memory issues have improved greatly, but my intonation was appalling. Back to work!
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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Did you see this interesting article in the Guardian about memorising music?

http://music.guardian.co.uk/classical/story/0,,2060997,00.html

May 9, 2007 at 5:43 PM
Maricello said...

Hi Erin, Great article! I will show it to my teacher. But she is a firm believer in memorizing as a learning tool. I think the Suzuki philosophy is that you memorize the piece first and then work on fine-tuning and polishing it, without the bother of having to focus on note-reading while you are polishing.

My argument was always that I was coming from a different direction--I could already read music. And it is not likely that I will ever perform as a soloist with an orchestra. It takes me much much longer to learn each piece because of the memory wok, and I am way behind (Suzuki book-wise) my friends who take from a teacher who does not require memorization.

There is also the danger of focusing on memory over technique.

However, I do love to "own" the music, so to speak, by memorizing it, and I do need to memorize to play with the fiddlers (the short fiddle tunes are much easier to memorize though).

Maybe there is a nice midway point--memorize some, but not all Suzuki pieces.

May 9, 2007 at 11:31 PM

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