Memory Fading?

Hi everyone,

Today I have a rather serious subject to pick your brains about. I'm currently trying to memorize the entire Pictures At An Exhibition for my next recital, and I hope to finish the process before booking a hall to play it, as I don't want the anxiety of forgetting the music to harm my degree recital.

However, I think I'm running into a problem. I'm doing well with the opening Promenade and The Gnome, but once I get past the second Promenade and into The Old Castle, I feel it's difficult to retain the music. I would listen to the recording / slow playing (like this video several times, even trying to play this sequence in front of my keyboard, and miss how certain passages are repeated / presented. I've been stuck for a few days on this seemingly simple movement. This semester is flying by, and I don't want to not play a recital this semester. But if I'm like this, how am I ever going to finish this half-an-hour piece? Is this a sign of my memory fading?

I can't possibly tell my parents or professor, they wouldn't understand. My parents also want me to play a recital this semester. I can't tell them that I'm having trouble with memorization…

Anyway, I'm sad at what's going on at the moment. I had easy times with Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, even Bach… But now with this? I can't believe myself!!!

Thoughts?

David Lai

sometimes it happens david, it's not a sign of the memory loss but instead a sign that we're humans, btw i don't wanna waste your time with my bs here, when i was learning how to sing, my teacher used to send me some hour long warm up method that i had to memories the whole thing and sing it to his face
sometimes i couldn't, it was hard and if you know how complex the persian music is, you'd know what crisis i was facing back then

i used to use his own vocals (that he sent to us for training) in my headset and singing it in real time for him, although it wasn't the best idea, it made me going,
so you know the music you wanna play like i did, so maybe this technique can help you as well
but before using it on a Stage, do some practice please (with the headsets on)

i know you'd probably laugh at me because of my ridiculous idea but anyway, here you have it my dear friend😂

You're too young to have memory issues that would result from a neurodegenerative disease. Most likely it's the music and arrangement that's causing you problems. Or it could be some external factor/stress in your life. First examine your lifestyle habits. Has your diet, sleeping, exercise, or other routines changed recently? All your lifestyle choices will contribute to your brain health. If everything is normal and you're getting proper nutrition, exercise, sleep, etc., then it most likely is the music and that particular arrangement that is challenging your memory.

I can't offer suggestions with that because what you're playing is way above my ability and experience. The longest songs I ever play are just a couple minutes. I can only offer up my prayerful support as you work through this particular arrangement. I'll be praying for you. 🙏

God Bless,
David

pianow i used to use his own vocals (that he sent to us for training) in my headset and singing it in real time for him, although it wasn't the best idea, it made me going,

Interesting. Thanks for sharing! Well, that really made me feel a bit better, thank you. Maybe I should continue digging at it till something happens.

David B Honestly David, your comment made me almost want to cry. Thanks for your support!

Now, I am a bit stressed. It's my (hopefully) last year in the program, and there are qualifying exams, remaining 2 recitals (one of them a lecture recital) and the piano essay waiting for me, and I want to be able to find a good job here in the States after graduation. I don't want this semester to go by without taking care of at least one thing on my remaining plate. Maybe the lecture recital. I could probably find something within my repertoire and play that in a couple of months, but I also find the thought of learning something 100% new exciting. But, I don't trust myself to be able to finish everything before the recital in such a short time. Even my professor suggested pushing the lecture recital to next semester, but my parents suggested that next semester will be so busy that I may not have time for it… Anyway, I guess I'm tangled now.

This happens to me when I don't have a clear enough map of large scale structure of the piece in my mind, as opposed to the details. Could the different versions of the promenade be messing things up? Partial repetition is harder to memorise than entirely different material. I like to jump back and forth between repetitions skipping the bits in between.

Johnstaf That's a good thought. And The Old Castle Has these repeated passages, too.

David Lai
sorry I can't do more buddy, i wish i was a serious pianist like you so i could speak from experience but I'm not, btw I love ya and i hope you'd do great🤍

Hello,

@David Lai ,

Between the lines I read stress:

• Pressure from yourself;
• Pressure from others (perceived and/or actual) such as the school context and your parents.

These are not helpful influences and pressure leads to stress, stress doesn't help your memory nor any other form of clarity, sharpness, let alone joy in your music!

I'm so sad to read that you cannot share these challenges with a professor/mentor and not with your family. You should!

Another thought that crept in while reading your post:

• Is this a piece you enjoy? Do you feel this music? Do you feel an urgency (and I mean urgency in its empowering meaning) to play this and to convey whatever essence is in it to your listeners/audience?
• If not, maybe you need to reconsider your choice of what to play for the recital -- or any performance for that matter.

As you undoubtedly know, when you grow in your music (or any art, craft or discipline) towards mastery, the bigger challenges are no longer the notes, the instrument, the technique. Instead, it is about learning to know yourself, your emotions, managing your mind and state of being, overcoming challenges in all those areas. And, the interesting news is, if you aim for mastery and a life devoted to your deepest love, these challenges will never go away. They'll reappear over and over and over again, each time at a subtly higher/deeper level though.

Music is emotion, and that is a challenge in itself.

Cheers and hope there's encouragement in these words (there is! 🙂 ),

HZ

PS My greatest love is photography. I know what I like, want, and can do. I've been published. Yet, starting on any next photograph, all the way to the print and at any and all stages in-between, I fight with despair, hopelessness, feelings of inadequacy, seeing no subject at all, messing with my gear in clumsy ways, making mistakes which I detest myself for, cursing, screaming, and so on, and so on, and so on. It'll never seize, and be more and more and more challenging the more you truly bring yourself into your craft to the fullest. And then… magic may happen… on some days.

HZPiano

PPS I applaud you for starting this thread, which I presume took some courage in itself?

Cheers again,

HZ

If it were me in that situation, I would be inclined to agree with David B and Johnstaf: it would be the music itself that was posing the problem.

I find that when I "know" a piece of music, I couldn't possibly get lost in it, because the whole work exists as a perfectly simple structure in some abstract part of my mind. But until a piece of music does exist there, I will easily get lost.

I have in the past had completely crazy difficulties in learning Grieg's Ariette, BWV 999, and Satie's third Gnossienne, spending many times more effort getting them right than on any other pieces. For some reason, I just could not get my head around them: I didn't "get" them. Eventually (after having dropped them twice, and taken them up again for a third time) I did get them, and now they're rock solid. (Rock solid that is, if my mind is at ease: all bets are off if I am preoccupied with unresolved issues in other areas of life, of if I am sleep deprived).

A couple of comments about memory fading, so that you have some peace of mind…

Firstly: you are still at least 20-25 years away from having any form of memory loss, and the majority of studies show that habitual memory training (such as music memorization) helps in delaying the onset of memory loss of that particular type of memory…

Secondly: Memory loss is usually event arbitrary and category stable, ie, you tend to forget the same kind of things (either names, or familiar objects, unfamiliar objects, locations, musical memories vs word memories…), but within a particular category the forgotten items are random. You say that you have consistent problems with one particular portion of one particular piece. That is a sign of poor memory formation not memory loss.

Third: forgot the third… I am over fifty after all…

Bottomline: relax because the problem lies in the piece not in you.

There is only one proven solution: sleep. And then sleep some more. If it does not cause you excessive stress, you may want to briefly practice that section just before going to bed.

Finally, you may want to set a deadline for commiting to that piece. By that deadline you either decide that it is a go because you are confortable, or scrap it because you are afraid of having a blank during the recital. There is too much at stake on this recital, as you acknowledge, and you may want to play it safe (no pun intended).

There is little I can add here that had not been said already, and I particularly agree with comments from David Bello, HZPiano and Vagfilm. I've experienced all of those things myself, either directly or with friends.

It has been already said, but I will stress it: the typical "memory loss" happens for memories which are well formed (say, you forget the name of your friends or of everyday's objects), whereas you are struggling with memory (trans)formation transforming a temporary memory which you remember "now, for few minutes" into the "permanent" status. This happens during sleep. If you are sleeping less than 7 hours a day, you are hurting yourself. If you are sleeping less than 6 hours a day, you are severely hurting yourself. If you are learning many things you need to sleep at the very least 8 hours per day and probably longer. Two anecdotes:

• I have a younger friend, professor at famous university. Earlier in his life (probably he was in his 30s) he "decided" that he had no time to do all his grants, research and other professory things, so I decided to sleep at most 6 hours a day. He acted, believed and claimed to be "just fine" but he could not remember anything new. I told him the very same things over and over, in person, every day (we were in the same town at the time) and he will always forget it as it never happened. On one hand it was funny, like Groundhog's Day movie if you know that. On the other it was very scary. He did not have any clue this was happening to him, and the problem totally disappeared when he went on regular sleeping schedule
• My doctor told me to set an alarm at night, when I am supposed to go to bed, and follow it strictly, rather than putting it in the morning when I need to wake up. If I need to wake up earlier, just set the night alarm earlier (since I have troubles getting asleep, I need to do that several days in advance, otherwise it's a moot point). I found that I memorize and remember things much easier that way, and that if I study a new thing (either for fun or for work), I automatically sleep more in the morning, compared to days when I just "perform tasks" instead. To avoid this automatic change to disrupt my daily life (e.g. time I need to be at work), I set up my schedule such as that if I wake up an hour or two later, I still am just fine (like it happened today, I woke up an hour "late"…. i.e. it's 7am here now, and if it were business days I was ready to go to work)

The "tricks" of knowing what you are doing of course can also help, for example knowing the structure of the piece, the "big picture" of the directions of the repeats, the harmonic progressions etc. And also, for this particular piece you are talking about, do you need a perfect note-for-note accuracy? If not (and perhaps even if so, depending on how you study) you can start with a "sloppy" version in which you just do arpeggios with the appropriate pattern/rhythm on the main harmonies for the offending part, and add a sketch of a melody later, and auxiliary notes at the end. Sort of like if you were memorizing a speech…. not sure if you have ever done that, but you never memorize it word-for-word upfront, you just make a plan for the main points you want to make and how they related to each other, and how you transition from one to another and so on…. (well unless you are one of those politicians who just babble randomly like if they were having a bad dream, but I digress 🤣 )

Hope this helps!

HZPiano Thanks, HZ Piano! Exactly what I've been thinking over the past few hours as I, well, slept. You know, the easy way out is to select a piece well within my repertoire (about half an hour long) and do a lecture recital from there, which I might take and play it safe because of time. But I want to probably talk with my professor about this before carrying out this option. Meanwhile there's a concerto competition I'm playing next month, gotta practice for that.

My dad, especially, wants me to have a plan for my future, what I'm going to do in the next few years. That's not how I like doing things, because thinking of what's to come would make me more anxious. I prefer to take things one at a time and focuse on the issue at hand.

HZPiano PPS I applaud you for starting this thread, which I presume took some courage in itself?

In a way, yes. But I like talking things out in one way or another. I like this forum, and the people on it. You've also heard me play, both acoustic and acoustic simulators, so you know my playing, so it feels comfortable to share with you.

QuasiUnaFantasia I find that when I "know" a piece of music, I couldn't possibly get lost in it, because the whole work exists as a perfectly simple structure in some abstract part of my mind. But until a piece of music does exist there, I will easily get lost.

That's exactly me right now!!! I'm glad I'm not having a fading memory yet, what a comfort.

vagfilm Finally, you may want to set a deadline for commiting to that piece. By that deadline you either decide that it is a go because you are confortable, or scrap it because you are afraid of having a blank during the recital. There is too much at stake on this recital, as you acknowledge, and you may want to play it safe (no pun intended).

Thanks for your reply. Yeah, I think it's just stress caused mostly by my parents, and the effect their words have on me. I also find that a brand new piece of German / Austrian music speaks to me more than other genres / national characteristics of music (think Schumann, Brahms, Bach, ETC), but I guess it's a me thing. I need to break that.

RIP Thanks for your 2 anecdotes, very useful and interesting. Maybe I should start doing this, too. I always set an alarm in the morning, and end up waking up feeling, well, not wanting to get up sometimes, LOL.

But I always try to sleep at least 8 hours a day, and not napping during the middle of the day, unlike most Chinese I know, who do.

Hi, David,
You might find it interesting to read some sections of Molly Gebrian's book "Learn Faster, Perform Better: A Musician's Guide to the Neuroscience of Practicing" https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0D8JLD27J

The research on the effect of sleep seems quite interesting, as is the stuff about "interference" between passages that are slightly different from one another. And I've been experimenting with a few of the practice strategies she describes.
But then, I'm 77 and need all the help I can get 😕

Jane Thanks for the book recommendation, Jane! It may be just what I'm looking for. I'll try searching it in the library for a digital copy.