One of the biggest stumbling blocks for my students, and for a lot of modern pipers, is the problem of memorization. The bagpipes as an instrument are a marching band tradition generally speaking. Most bagpipers spend their time piping with a bagpipe band. Those bands do a lot of marching – parades, competitions, massed bands, with the occasional concert thrown in. We do not have equipment meant to bring our music with us. Part of the piping tradition is memorizing your music.
There is a vast debate regarding whether memorization or reading is better – I firmly fall into the camp of “memorization” – and may at some point choose to expand on why. However, for our purposes, we are going to assume that memorization is the superior method, and lay down methods for improving memory.
Short and Long Term Memory – Why they Matter
The first thing we need to do is understand exactly how it is our memory works (in broad strokes, of course). Neuroscientists generally accept two different types of memory – short term, and long term. Short term memory is for remembering small bits of information quickly in order to function. That’s reading a phone number off a text message, and if you’re a barbarian whose phone can’t automatically read that number and let you tap it to call, pulling up the phone app and dialing it. Remembering short strings of numbers, and within a minute entering it.
When you get off the phone with the store, odds are you can’t remember that number anymore.
That’s short term memory. In piping this is akin to playing the first bar of a tune, repeating it without the music, going and playing a tune you know, and then attempting to play the bar you had just read through. Because it was committed to short term memory, you can’t play it again.
Long term memory is more permanent, and will allow you to play through 20 minutes of music, deciding to play a tune you haven’t played in a month, and still be able to do it. A lot of pipers can do this particularly with a tune like Amazing Grace, because we’ve all had it drilled in so hard that our corpses will be able to play it. Long term memory doesn’t have a limit – we don’t forget it. We just have difficulty recalling occasionally.
The mission of every musician trying to memorize music is to transfer music from short term memory into long term memory. This requires a few different techniques.
First, we want to break a tune into easier to consume chunks. Memorization relies first on committing something to short-term memory, but short-term memory is limited. If you can break a tune into chunks – build associations between parts of the tune to turn individual notes into phrases in your mind, and then build those phrases into whole tunes – then you will have a much easier time committing music to short-term memory. Once that’s done, it becomes a matter of drilling the piece into long-term memory.
Let’s talk first about those associations…
Associative memory in piping is the practice of look at a tune, identifying repeated sections, and memorizing that tune by those sections. Some folks in the piping community will refer to this as “the snowball effect.” The first disclaimer I’d like to give is that those sections can be various sizes – I generally use two measure phrases to illustrate this, but a phrase of music can be very different things. In piobaireachd it can be a single measure, in some light music it can be three measures. However, the key is to find repeating phrases, then plug those phrases into the tune pattern in order to build the whole piece.
This works great in piobaireachd. A single piobaireachd can be anywhere from 5 minutes long to 25 minutes – that can be a real bear to memorize. However, there is a well established method of classifying piobaireachd which breaks it down into insanely small pieces. There are tunes out there – Hector MacLean’s Warning in particular – where I have been able to memorize the entire tune in 15 minutes. Hector MacLean’s Warning is 188 measures long, as written.
Yes. 15 minutes.
Let’s look at something a bit simpler though – a classic 2/4 march named “Teribus”:
You will notice that I have highlighted this sheet music in four different colors. If you look at the music presented here, each colored section is identical to the colors of other sections of the same tune. If you memorize line 1, you already have 16 of the total 32 measures of the tune down. You then only have to learn the last two measures of line 2, and the first two measures of line 3.
Your phrase structure through the whole tune is:
Part 1: Blue, Orange, Blue, Pink, Blue, Orange, Blue, Pink
Part 2: Green, Orange, Green, Pink, Green, Orange, Blue, Pink
Let’s look at another one, shall we?
In Scotland the Brave, once you’ve memorized the 2nd line, you’ve memorized half the tune. At that point, you just need to lock down line 3, and get the ending 3 beats of line 1 plugged in.
Scotland the Brave is 16 measures long – 9 measures is all you need to memorize.
Almost every bagpipe tune can be broken down in some way to simplify and speed up the memorization process.
Moving to Long-Term Memory
Now that we’ve broken tunes up into more manageable chunks, we now need to transfer those chunks from short-term memory to long-term memory. This is where individual preference starts to play a role, and I believe is where a lot of difficulty in memorization lies.
Partly, this is where point number two on the How to Study Music sheet I include in my student policies comes in. You can’t memorize a tune if you have distractions, period. While practicing your phone should be off, your computer should be asleep, and anyone else at home ought to be aware that you are practicing for a set amount of time, and so should not bother you while you are working on your material. You can’t commit material to memory if your mind is wandering.
However, it goes further than simply focusing.
Repetition is the method I find to be the most reliable to move material from short term to long term memory. Here you review the music, then play through it as far as you can without the sheet even accessible in front of you (no having the sheet near you as a crutch to fall back on in order to get through the tune). Once you hit a point you can no longer work through, flip your sheet over, look at that section, then flip over the paper and start again from the beginning of that section. Memorize the section, then move onto the next section.
Once the sections you have pre-selected are all memorized, you then plug them together and memorize the phrase structure of the tune.
This process does take time – you have to step away and do something else once you are relatively comfortable with the memory on the section you have worked out. Beating a dead horse isn’t going to make it run. Likewise, flogging your brain with intense repetition at a certain point becomes useless. Set down the chanter, put the music away, and go do something else. Sleep on it, and come back to it tomorrow.
But it has to be tomorrow.
This is where daily, consistent practice comes in. If you work through a tune as I’m describing above one day, then wait four days to pick up the chanter and play the tune again, you will have lost all of the progress you made. Work on the tune, sleep, work on the tune, sleep. After a few days you’ll have it memorized. Introduce it into your practice warm up repertoire, then your performance repertoire.
Do you have a method of memorizing which works particularly well for you? Sound out in the comments!
For additional thoughts on this exact topic, take a look at this article.