Knowing a piano piece by memory is a bit like knowing a poem. It is part of me, and its meaning can shift and deepen over time. It comes out differently expressed depending on my particular feeling to it on a particular day. It is a bit surprising that it has taken me until today to realize this.
I played a piece once with about as much rubato as I could without losing the flow of time. Nothing exaggerated, but with a definite feeling of freedom. Then I played it again more metronomically, with only the slightest variation of time at certain places. The piece can seem ethereal, or stormy, or detached, angsty, or many other things. I could exaggerate something in bad taste, or fail in my intention to communicate a given feeling, but I could also produce something satisfying to my mood of a particular day.
Someone else's recording of it does not shift like that. It is frozen, so of course I can get the satisfaction out of a version I like, recorded by someone else, but it will not have that organic relationship to my own subjectivity.
Most things I read about music don't talk about things like this. I have to discover anything truly important for myself. Even if this is well known to everyone, I'm assuming (though I learned it today), and probably easy information to find, it is hard to find this out.
3 comments:
I wouldn't say it's precisely about knowing the piece by heart. Memorization eliminates the distracting effort of reading, for sure, but it also makes it easier to just run through the piece "on autopilot", as my daughter's old teacher would say -- thinking through the piece freshly may require extra concentration.
As for whether this is well-known, I think it's a commonplace of commentary by classical performers, the sort of thing people will ask of Yuja Wang in an interview or that Brendel might have written about in his book. But of course even well-known truisms of art-making still have to be rediscovered by each practitioner.
Do you have a music teacher? A good one will have explained this.
Yes, but mine will let me discover it and then tell me I am right and then help me discover the next step in the process.
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