Last Friday, I wrote a piece for the Guardian about memorisation. I traced the history of playing from memory, commenting that it's a fairly recent fashion. I mentioned that many players find it stressful to play from memory, and suggested that if a person plays more naturally with the score, they should feel free to do so - as long as they have prepared the piece thoroughly, of course. I do think there's a difference between using the score because you haven't finished practising the piece properly (we can all tell when that's happening) and having the score there as an aide-memoire, to keep unhelpful nerves at bay. It seems to me that the skill of interpreting music and the skill of memorising it are two different things.
A lot of people wrote to me in response. Their emails made one thing very clear: that being forced to memorise music has had a damaging effect on many young players. Several people wrote that humiliating experiences with memory loss on the concert platform had put them off a career as a musician. Sometimes they had reached this conclusion themselves, and sometimes it had been put to them that the inability to memorise had closed the door of a music career in their faces. Teachers wrote that they resent the pressure on youngsters to memorise their exam pieces, because it restricts enormously the repertoire they can tackle each term. As often as not, it seems, a student will spend ages learning their pieces by heart and then have a wobbly experience in the exam itself, one that makes them feel bad about themselves. It sometimes puts them off their music lessons entirely. What a waste!
I don't think we should confuse good musicianship with the ability to memorise. Yes, there are some musicians who memorise easily and who relish the experience of performing without the score, free as a bird. To hear someone playing by heart with supreme confidence is a thrilling experience. But there are also plenty of intelligent, sensitive people whose musical gifts are actually inhibited by the strain of being made to play without the music. A pianist colleague once turned on someone who made a snide remark about her having used the score on stage, and said: "Tell me - did you come to hear me play Beethoven, or did you come to see me play from memory?"
I have had experience of performing both with and without the music on the stand. In both cases, I had prepared the music thoroughly. And if you asked me under which conditions I felt most free to have new ideas, or felt most inspired by the composer's thoughts, I think I'd say, "When playing with the music". Do others share this feeling?
