Category Archives: musings

I am currently reading an amazing book by Daniel Kahneman called Thinking, Fast and Slow. He presents the idea that we have two systems for thinking – System 1 is effortless and intuitive (fast), System 2 uses deductive reasoning (slow).

An example of Thinking Fast might be in recognising something, a car for instance – we just know it’s a car! Thinking Slow might be finding the answer to a sum, say 18 x 23 – we know it’s a multiplication sum, and how to do it, but we also know that it’s going to take considerable mental strain to hold various subtotals in our head before we arrive at the answer – and indeed it does!

However, Kahneman goes on to suggest that, with sufficient training, we can reach a point where we have expert intuition. It strikes me that, in my own field, this might be called musicianship! I am particularly interested in how we can strive to attain this expert intuition, especially with regard to the transition from reading the score to memorizing it.

The quote on the front of this book – “a lifetime’s worth of wisdom” – is pretty spot on. There are numerous things to share, but I particularly like this line:

anything that occupies your working memory reduces your ability to think

In short, processing all of those notes on the page takes a huge amount of our working memory – in Kahneman’s terms, it takes a great deal of Slow Thinking to make it all happen. The better way, I’m sure, would be for us just to be able to trust our instinct and play, but realistically that’s probably not going to happen. Unless, of course, we have that expert intuition (aka musicianship). There are a whole host of ‘back up’ devices which the musician needs to develop, which support and ultimately should replace the note reading element in our playing. Individually they might all seem rather trivial stuff that we just have to learn; theory, aural, scales, diminished sevenths… But actually, these things are the building blocks which develop that intuition, that musicianship. If we can recognise a dominant seventh chord for instance, and know that it is likely to resolve to it’s tonic, then we will know that A7 falls to a chord of D – and then it is less of a surprise to find that we are playing notes which fit with D major. Of course we can read them too, but this little bit of learned knowledge gives us a hint of intuition to back up the reading bit; in other words, the notes which we play are not longer a random coincidence, but we actually understand why they are how they are! And if we can hear the dominant seventh as well, then our ear might also give us a few suggestions as to what sort of sound to expect next. A little harmonic knowledge and aural skills combined will go a long way, to the point that we may well find that we arrive at the right place before we even read the notes!

Even before discovering Kahneman’s book, I realise that I have subscribed to his way of thinking for some time. I have often thought of memorizing music as having installed it on the hard drive, as opposed to accessing a memory stick (oh, the irony of a name!) The difference is that we hear the computer whirring as it processes the information on the memory stick ie this is Slow Thinking. If we can install the notes on our hard drive, that is, memorise the music, then Fast Thinking becomes a very real possibility. And the way to do that is to develop an expert intuition, our understanding of how the music works – our musicianship.

By the way, the answer is 414!

When children first learn to read, they work out one word at a time, and it can be very obvious to the adult that, although they might eventually reach the bottom of the page, they haven’t actually taken in the meaning of the words which they have read. Reading each word has demanded their entire focus, and has not been understood in context. As they become more familiar with the way that language works, they become increasingly fluent, and eventually we hope that they will read with understanding, and with a rise and fall in the intonation of the voice which further enhances the meaning not just of the words, but of whole phrases and paragraphs.

My pupils are very familiar with the phrase ‘know it, don’t read it.’  In other words, if they are having to work out each note afresh every time they encounter it, how well do they really know the music? There are two distinct levels here: we might be able to play a piece faultlessly from beginning to end, and therefore know the music, in as much as we know what all the notes are, what order they come in, the correct rhythm etc. But in the same way as the child in the illustration above can read the words but not understand them, I would question the merits of teaching a student to play a piece without also helping them to understand the wider context in which the notes are found.

The simplest way to test whether our pupil really knows the music, of course, is to take the dots away!

I find that the first response is usually ‘I can’t do that!’ However, a few choice questions from the teacher might provoke a different response: ‘Can you remember what key the piece is in?’ What note does it start on?’ ‘Can you sing back the first part of the tune?’ Questions like these can help the pupil to realise that actually they can remember some of the music, but much more significantly, they might also find that a little theory helps them recall it. If the piece is in F major, it begins to make sense that the first bass note is F and the melody starts on A, since both fit in the chord of F major.

This is one tiny example – but I firmly believe that children can be stretched, and that they can and indeed enjoy being stretched – it’s exciting and enabling. Especially if they believe that their teacher believes that they can do it. And believe me, they can!

Taking the music away gives us all sorts of excuses to find endless ways of remembering the music; children are endlessly resourceful and they are also amazingly inventive, but whatever way they might come up with, they are now investigating the music in a new way. Before, all they had to do was decypher the notation, nothing more – a potentially daunting exercise but little more than that. Now, they have to enquire, to search their mind for connections between the notes in order to remember them. And it is this which will open their eyes and ears to the way in which the music is put together; keys and chords suddenly become useful guides, rhythms need to be internalised, the ear might remember something which the fingers did not. Pianists can look at the keyboard and see patterns there too.

This is how I love to teach music theory and aural. Not at a desk with a pencil and paper (although I do love that too!) but at the same time as learning the music. The music, not just the notes.

Don’t play the notes… Play the meaning of the notes
Pablo Casals

My current preoccupation with memory has not only had a profound effect on my own playing, but just as significantly, on my teaching too.

Let’s suppose that a pupil is learning the melody line of a piece. The first objective would generally be to practise this line until it is fluent. But once they can do this, it is perhaps worth asking how much have they learned? Well, they’ve learned to process the notes so that they can read (accurately and in real time) what comes next, so that there are no mistakes and the melody flows. They might also have included accurate dynamics and phrasing, which will capture the necessary rise and fall of the line so that the composer’s wishes are fulfilled. Job done. Really?!

Now take the music away. Can the student remember which note the melody started on? No? So let’s ask the same question again – how much have they actually learned? I’d argue very little, if anything; they haven’t learned anything about the music – all they have been doing is reading it, but nothing has been retained, internalised, remembered. They haven’t learned the music at all, just how to play it; and these two things are very different indeed!

If they can remember the first note, how much more follows that? Not much, or a surprising amount? And do they know how they are remembering it? Is it because the melody rises in a scale, or maybe an arpeggio? If so, what key does that scale or arpeggio belong to? Can they tap the pulse?  Does a particular finger pattern help them to remember the next bit, or maybe, for pianists, the pattern is of all white notes except for the final one which is black? Perhaps their muscle memory fails them, but they can pick out the rest of the melody by ear? All of these are potential triggers to help the memory, but they also ensure that the student is constantly analysing what is going on, possibly from multiple angles. If this isn’t developing an enquiring mind, nothing is!

I am not suggesting for a moment that a weak pupil, or even a talented one for that matter, should be told that she should instantly be able to memorise a whole piece, with no help, all in one go, by analysing numerous, complex elements of music which they might barely be aware of. What I am suggesting, however, is that by introducing a little memory work into our lessons, we can ensure that our pupils are investigating for themselves how the music works. Over time, they will begin to develop an understanding of phrase structure, chords, sequences, as well as improving their aural and analytical skills – in fact, there is a pretty endless list of things, all of which will enhance their musicianship. That’s much better than just learning to play the notes with little idea of what is actually going on.

In terms of teaching time, I don’t find that asking a question takes any longer than giving an answer; ‘What dynamic does the music change to in bar 5?’ (said whilst swiftly covering up that bar) takes no longer than ‘Remember to play forte in bar 5′, but the difference is that the former requires the student to think, and thinking is good!

for further reading (!), follow this link to The 5Es for outstanding instrumental teaching

This is a tale of two halves.

A few years ago I was having difficulty sleeping at night, and someone suggested to me that the way to clear stressful thoughts was not to try to stop thinking, but to think instead of non-stressful things. I guess that’s where counting sheep comes in. I really can’t remember why, but I decided that I would memorise digits of Pi – just one long endless, random number which holds no fears.

3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971

See, pretty harmless eh? I started out learning 10 digits at a time, in groups of three, three and four numbers ie 141  592  6535, and would go to bed with the next ten running around my head, mulling over any triggers and patterns which might help me to remember them. I would then learn the next ten, and see whether I could add them to the previous set. All very stress-free. The thing is, after a month or two I had reached 500!! Five HUNDRED digits, recited in my head or out loud, from memory.

I learned two things from this exercise; the obvious one is that I have some obsessive tendencies (although to be fair I think I already knew that.) The other is that the human brain is simply extraordinary.

Actually, I suspect that in our modern world we are exceptionally lazy when it comes to remembering things. There are far too many easy options which lead us to bypass using our brains: reading and writing for instance – if we write something down, we don’t need to remember it. But if we really put our mind to it (quite literally in fact) we might be surprised by what we can remember.

Part two.

When I was in my teens I played piano pieces from memory, but this was only ever a rudimentary muscle memory which worked until the tiniest of slips occurred, at which point everything stopped very abruptly; no one ever taught me a systematic and fail-safe way of remembering music. Since then, as a schoolmaster, I have always been an accompanist first and foremost, and so I have always had the music in front of me. Until recently I had never considered that I might ever be a real pianist, since real pianists play from memory and I couldn’t do that.

Two years ago I had a conversation with a former music scholar at school here in the 1970s – a conversation which was to transform my musical life. He didn’t go into music but continued to play the piano, and in his mid 30s he decided that he was going to learn Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no.1 from memory, and give a performance with orchestra in front of a large audience of invited friends. It was an inspiring story, and left me thinking that if this man, with all respect just an amateur musician, could do this, then surely I could too?

Enter Mozart’s Piano Concerto no.20 in d minor, K466, a work which I have loved since my childhood. With a performance date set for June 2011, I gave myself six months to learn the whole concerto from memory. It was a thrilling a deeply empowering experience, and by March I knew that I would meet my target. By June I was as well prepared as I have ever been for anything, and I was very pleased with the performance, which I directed from the keyboard (I can’t think why, maybe just to make it a little more difficult!)

I learned two things from this exercise; the first is that, with a growth mindset, we can achieve things which are way, way beyond what we might at first imagine are possible. The other one is actually a question, and one which I now find myself asking, as a teacher, on a daily basis: why is it that we allow our pupils, whatever their level, to continue to read the same music week after week, sometimes even month after month? Is it because we don’t think it’s important to learn this skill (it is by the way!) or is it because we don’t think that they can do it? If we help them to really put their mind to it, we (and they!) might just be surprised by what they can achieve.

The numerous layers which go into forming that fail-safe memory are for another blog, but what I have discovered – sadly far too late in life, but I intend to catch up now! – is how liberating it is to really know the music which you are playing. One of the most exciting aspects of this, for me at least, is the intimacy which this creates; ultimately it’s just me, my fingers and the keyboard, which is so exciting.  And for a pianist, this means that you can watch the choreography of your hands (which is in itself a memory trigger) and, without the worry of having to work out what notes are coming next, you really can just focus on the music itself.