Everyone is impressed when you walk up to your instrument empty handed, sit, and proceed to play a zillion tunes – without sheet music.
Your audience just thinks, “Wow, where did they put all that music?!” and You think, “Yay – if I’m not reading, I don’t have to worry about getting lost on the page!” and Everyone thinks, “That’s impressive”. And we all swoon at the wonderfulness of carrying all that stuff in your head.
And let’s be honest, even if you try not to be, it’s hard to avoid smugness when you just waltz to the harp and start to play. We all have been led to believe that memorizing your music is the most important skill to have, but many struggle to remember music. Some have trouble memorizing even a single note.
While that’s debatable that memorization is the most important skill to develop, it is important that we all work on having a strong memory of our music. Problem is, memory can be tricky. It can be solid for a coon’s age and then all of a sudden it can skip town on a whim, leaving you stranded.
There are many reasons for being deserted by your memory – stress, poor preparation, injury, illness, age. You might have experienced one or all of these (and others). Let’s look at what some of those reasons are and how you might overcome them:
Poor Planning – no matter if you learn tunes lickety-split or need years to really get a tune in your head, you need to know how you go so you can plan appropriately and leave yourself enough time. If you do need a great deal of time and repetition, make sure you leave it for yourself! Don’t think that this tune will be the one that you soak up like a desiccated sponge – be reasonable and give yourself enough time to learn and be comfortable with it before you must be able to play it in public!
Stress – nothing will knock you for six like stress. You already know that stress is a physical (and psychological) response to fear and anxiety. If you’ve ever been stressed, you know that it feels inevitable and unending. Your heart may pound. Your hands may shake. The strings may swim in your vision. None of that helps you remember what comes next. One of the easiest ways to help tamp down your no matter how related to the planning, stress will get you every time, so you have to work around it.
Injury – this might be the most challenging of all because sustaining an injury can be frustrating for many reasons. These injuries are ischemias of varying sizes. If you have a small stroke, you might not even know you’ve sustained an injury, you just notice you have a problem you didn’t have before. If you have a bigger incident, you may well know that you have had an injury and now have to deal with “fixing” it. The good news is that being a musician is one of the best therapies you can endure – music requires activity all over your brain. Working on playing will help you heal (both physically and spiritually) including helping you develop new pathways. It can be slow and frustrating and difficult. You might not reach your previous proficiency, but you can keep working, monitoring your progress, and seeing your progress.
Illness – like injury, illness can also impact your ability to remember your music. Whether it’s an infection, a lack of sleep, or a chronic illness, you may find that your memory is impaired (even if briefly). Your best defense is to know to expect a dip in your recall and plan ahead.
Age – it happens to everyone – even when you think it won’t happen to you! Forgetfulness is a natural part of aging, but other aging related things can also affect your memory such as your medical status, as well as medication affects and major life events (current and past). Your thinking will slow down as you get older, which can change how well you can do complex tasks (like playing the harp). All those things you already know will help you keep your cognition – like eating appropriately, getting exercise, and taking time to be creative (at least I didn’t suggest a list of additional tasks, just one’s you already know!).
There are other impactors, but these are the biggies (and the ones you’ve asked about). So, what can you do about it? Well, we already said you can plan to give yourself enough time to learn and take good care of yourself to stay healthy and whole. But there’s one more thing to include – overlearning.
Overlearning is a tool that can help you be prepared and to fill the gaps when your memory is faulty. Overlearning is what you get when you continue to study and master a tune past when you have “learned” it. We (all) want to get to the playing and often overlook this step, but “knowing” the tune (tenuously) will not help you get past the memory desertion brought on by stressful situations (you know, like lessons! harp circles! performances!). I know, by the time you “get” the tune, you just want to play it. But we all have experienced that horrible feeling when, with just a little stress (such as when you have poor carpeting or someone is getting a glass in the kitchen or you’re making your debut at Carnegie Hall) it will all fall apart.
To overlearn a tune, first you have to acknowledge that you might know it, but you don’t r-e-a-l-l-y know it. When you add more repetition, you are making a good start on overlearning. And then it’s time to really lean into the tune – actively look for its nuances, it’s nooks and crannies, and plumb them for a better understanding of the music…and then work on repetitions of each of those unfolding nuggets. Once it’s overlearned, you’ll have multiple ways to find your way if you get lost, pull a thread when you can’t remember how it starts, or bringing in the next chord when it has left the building. The more ways you can remember all the elements of your music – the more overlearned it is – the more likely you can recover when you can’t remember what comes next.
No method of patching the leak will be foolproof, but overlearning stands as a useful tool for getting through those times. Have you actually overlearned all your tunes? Do you have other ways to build a strong memory of your music? Let me know in the comments! I’d love to have new ways to fix things!