Repurposing of musical passages -- especially repeating a passage modified with a different continuation -- was useful efficiency in the writing of music to be read by amateurs in the living room. Those same ways of constructing phrases pose memory puzzles for the professional player delivering the music in a public concert. Scripts of old plays were memorized by actors, making use of all the considerable techniques of the memory arts of the … [Read more...]
Scoreless
Just before playing a program that began with Chopin's Opus 45 Prelude, I started to think through the beginning of the music. Backstage in the green room, I had no piano and no copy of the written score -- and I couldn't recall the spacing, the exact arrangement of the notes, of the first chords in the piece. Solo pianists who play a lot of music by memory tend to be concerned about forgetting. For many pianists, it's the main focus of … [Read more...]
One day
When I was a kid I read a lot of books about musical performers, books filled with fantastic tales, of adventures on tour, of transcendental virtuosity -- in the pre-recording era. This stuff can fire a teenager's imagination. After reading about Arthur Rubinstein learning Franck's Symphonic Variations on a long train ride (he went from the station to the first rehearsal), and Josef Hofmann performing a short piece after only hearing another … [Read more...]