What Makes A Memory?

Once Upon A Time…

Once upon a time there lived an instrumental music teacher who had recently joined and sung in a choral group for the first time in her musical life. It was an exciting time for her! She enjoyed learning a new instrument (voice) and the experience of making music with one’s own body. Also new was the memorization of all the concert music. That part was not so exciting and caused some small distress.

Memorize, Too?

Oh, sure, I’ve sung before – just not in an organized group setting. I sing along with songs on the radio or my iPod. I’ve even memorized songs not realizing I was doing so. I memorize songs easily enough. Like many of you, I know all the lyrics to Don McLean’s American Pie and Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody – without the karaoke screen prompts!

Singing with Aurora Chorus this term, I am required to memorize 16 songs that we will perform in the Dec. 20 concert. Yes, that is a lot of music, but some of the songs have simple repeated parts. Thank goodness!

On the other hand, this being a choral group, the songs all have words, something I’ve never had to contend with when playing band and orchestra music. What’s more, of these 16 songs, four of them are in a language other than English. I am also singing in Yorùbá, the language of Candomblé (Brazil); in Mbuti, from the rain forests of New Guinea; in Spanish; and in Georgian, (Republic of Georgia).

That’s What I’m Talking About!

You might expect that the songs in these foreign languages would be more challenging to memorize. Not true! One of my favorite songs and the one that has been the most fun to learn, is A jí kí ire ni Èsù, the song in Yorùbá. The melody is engaging. The 4-part voices weave among one another in an intricate rhythmic dance. The harmonies, too, are exciting with minor 7ths and 9ths over major triads, voiced in a such a way that the tonic of the chord sounds like a color tone! It’s a great song and our concert opener.

On the other hand, one of the hardest songs for me to memorize is in English, Song of Stars. It employs ever-changing time signatures, moving from 6/8 to 7/8 to 3/8 and back to 7/8. The tessitura, or vocal range of the song, for the second soprano part is a bit high for me. Yes, I can sing those notes when I am properly warmed up. It’s just not the most comfortable range for me – so far. The text is a prayer of the Algonquin people.

No Meaning

Perhaps the reason I had difficulty learning this song is that it had no meaning for me. In the beginning, I was just singing words, working on getting the rhythm correct and my entrances down. What if I read the words without the music and tried to understand what I was singing?

That helped a little bit. But the truth was, I just didn’t like the song very much. Do you remember what I reported in the previous edition of Musician’s Motivator? You retain new information better and remember it more strongly when you attach strong emotions to the subject matter, in essence, when you care about what you are studying. Well, I decided to find something to like about this song. And quickly, since the concert was just two weeks away!

I found it! I sat and listened to the song, as if for the first time, without any judgments about the lyric or the time signatures or tessitura.

I am an amateur astronomer, a devotee and enthusiastic pursuer of all things astronomical. I have relished the night sky since I was a young child. Then, I wanted to grow up to be an astronaut and explore outer space.

This song is about STARS! It even sounds like stars, with open voicings and an arpeggiated piano playing octaves and fifths. The opening piano arpeggios are tight clusters of root, fourth, fifth, and major seventh. Try that in any key on your piano. Doesn’t it sound like the stars twinkling overhead?

…And She Lived Happily Ever After.

The instrumental music teacher loved singing as much as playing her wind instruments. She sang in the concert, enjoying all the songs, and lived happily ever after.

Now the song has meaning for me and is easy to memorize. Lesson? Remember to bring Beginner’s Mind to my learning.

Are you learning something new? Struggling with a difficult subject in school? Finding something to like about the subject will make the learning more solid and you will retain more. And bringing your Beginner’s Mind to the table will help you be open to the learning along the way.

Share your learning discoveries on my blog or send me an email: meg@meggrace.com.

Some Quotes About Memory

What we learn with pleasure we never forget. – Alfred Mercier
The heart that truly loves never forgets. – Proverb
The true art of memory is the art of attention. – Samuel Johnson

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Read the next edition of Musician’s Motivator Dec. 24, 2009.

In the beginning, there was music

I was 6 or 7 years old when I had my first music lessons. My family didn’t own a piano, yet, I was taking piano lessons! I practiced my scales and finger patterns on a flat, folding cardboard keyboard. I remember unfolding it on the dining room table to practice.

I couldn’t received any aural feedback from my practice. Only during lessons in which I played on a real piano did I get to hear what sounds my fingers were making. The desire to make music was strong in me even as a youngster, since I continued piano lessons for a year; all the while practicing only on a cardboard piano!

A few years later, I had the opportunity to learn a band instrument. I am grateful to my parents for renting me a real saxophone.

My first year of lessons on the sax were in a group class of five or six 5th graders, taught by a local college student. I loved learning to play the saxophone; reading music, not so much.

We were taught fingerings with a numbered diagram of the sax keys. Numbers one through six were used to indicate which fingers and corresponding keys to depress. These diagrams were placed below the staff, describing the finger position for the note above.

It didn’t take long for me to learn to read the fingering diagrams. They were quite easy, in fact. About six months passed before my teacher realized I was only reading the diagrams and not the pitches on the staff.

Aural, Visual, Spatial Learning

When I am teaching someone who is brand new to reading music, I encourage use of the finger diagrams, periodically checking note identity without the diagrams. I also encourage motivated students to test themselves by erasing their drawn-in diagrams after a short period of playing with them.

We learn in different manners and at varying paces. Some of us are more visual, others are more aural. Still others learn quickest spatially. Both the cardboard piano and the finger diagrams of my early music lessons demonstrate that I am a mostly visual learner.

I used to think that being a predominantly visual learner meant that I wasn’t destined to be a great musician; that great musicians are principally aural learners. What I’ve come to understand is that all types of learners, aural, visual, and spatial, make great musicians.

Your Brain on Music

We tend to think of music solely in terms of what we hear. But research on the brain about how we process music shows that a lot more than our hearing is involved. In fact, the Auditory Cortex is only one small part of the brain that processes the various input from musical activity. Further, those parts of the brain that are stimulated when a person listens to music are also stimulated when the person merely hears the music in her head!

When we listen to music there is a neural symphony of activity going on in various parts of the brain. Check out the interactive brain area of Daniel Levitin’s website for his book, This Is Your Brain On Music. Dr. Levitin writes, “Musical activity involves nearly every region of the brain that we know about and nearly every neural subsystem.”

No matter what type of learner you are; reading, playing, and enjoying music are within your grasp. What’s more, studying music is great exercise for the brain! Practice of a new activity fires neurons and creates connections and pathways throughout the brain. Repeated practice reinforces the new neural pathways. Reading, playing and listening to music appears to stimulate more areas of the brain than any other activity, according to research thus far.

And something else, when you are studying something that is important to you or that carries with it a lot of emotion, the brain tags these new memories with more importance and you retain the information better. Caring about a subject (like the strong longing to be a musician) accounts for some part of how quickly you will acquire your new skills.

It’s a Win-Win!

Wanna improve your brain activity? Study music.
Wanna study music, but have doubts about your innate musical talent? Do it! Not only can you discard those doubts, a music practice is good for you!

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Read the next edition of Musician’s Motivator Dec. 10, 2009. Subscribe now and receive each edition delivered to your email acocunt.

My Train Of Thought

For today’s newsletter I have brought together a collection of quotes that express a train of thought I’ve had; and well, these folks just express it so well!

Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.

Mozart is certainly one to know about genius. Love is the soul of genius. Ah, put your heart into your endeavors; don’t hold back; be in love with your efforts. Make leaps into the creative unknown.

Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong.

Good advice from both Ella and Amadeus for every musician. In learning and practicing a musical instrument, voice included, there is no room for caution. As Confucius says, “The cautious seldom err.”

Mistakes are part of the learning experience. And many times, are just part of the experience! Mistakes do not know the difference between professionals and amateurs.

There’s a way of playing safe, there’s a way of using tricks and there’s the way I like to play which is dangerously; where you’re going to take a chance on making mistakes in order to create something you haven’t created before.

Henry Ford agrees, “Even a mistake may turn out to be the one thing necessary to a worthwhile achievement.”

What happens when you put your love and inspiration into your music?

A note can be as small as a pin or as big as the world; it depends on your imagination.

One of the things I like about jazz, kid, is I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Do you?

Life is about rhythm. We vibrate, our hearts are pumping blood, we are a rhythm machine, that’s what we are.

Any good jazz player has innumerable tricks he can fall back on whenever he gets stuck. But to be an improviser you have to leave these tricks behind, go out on a limb and take risks, perhaps occasionally fall flat on your face. In fact, what audiences love most is for you to go ahead and fall. Then they get to see how you manage to pick yourself up and put the world back together again.

Don’t play the saxophone. Let it play you.

Allow yourself to be inspired. Give yourself permission to fall on your face and feel your saxophone play you.

You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don’t try.

And where does magic come from? I think that magic’s in the learning.

Now we’ve come full circle, back to the concept of genius:
A genius is the one most like himself.

Don’t compromise yourself. You are all you’ve got.

Life is not about waiting for the storms to pass… it’s about learning to dance in the rain.

Having collected all these quotes, I am inspired to make music. I feel the soulfulness of Janis Joplin, the playful unrestrained creativity of Mozart, and the passion of Ella Fitzgerald all coursing through me, swirling and whirling in me, demanding release. I hope this collection will inspire you to play your cello or harmonica or whatever your instrument, like the true genius you are!

Got a quote to share? Got a motivational experience to contribute? Email me or add your comment below.

Music affects me keenly and intensely. I am always looking for ways to experience music on a deeper level; ways to bring the aural and visual together.

We often describe music, an aural art form, using visual descriptors. We talk about the texture created by a particular instrument group. Or perhaps the colors the key generates in our mind’s eye. Have you ever noticed how major keys tend to prompt bright colors, compared to more subdued colors of the minor keys. And then there is the shape of the music. We describe the phrasing and the form in physical terms.

The natural extension of describing music in visual terms is to draw it out! That’s what today’s ezine will show you how to do.

Pictures At An Exhibition

Do you know the story of Mussorgsky’s composition, Pictures At An Exhibition? He wrote this suite in honor of his artist friend, Viktor Hartmann, who died suddenly at the age of 39. The stunned Russian art community organized an exhibit of over 400 pieces of Hartman’s work. After viewing the collection, Mussorgsky composed Pictures in six short weeks.

There are other examples of musical compositions inspired by art. Franz Liszt wrote Hunnenschlacht (The Battle of The Huns) based on art of the same name by von Kaulbach. Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky were no strangers to this practice. The more contemporary composer, Stephen Sondheim, wrote the musical, Sunday in The Park With George inspired by Seurat’s 19th century painting Sunday Afternoon on The Island of Grand Jatte.

Music-Inspired Art

And what about the reverse? That is, art that is inspired by music. There is plenty of that too. Searching for examples of music-inspired art (MIA), I found the RedBubble website. They have a whole section of the site devoted to MIA. That’s where I saw this painting by Susan Kimball, Dream Mambo that she drew while listening to a recording of Nica’s Dream by Horace Silver.

Making Music Art

This morning, I listened to Branford Marsalis’ Creation cd. This 2001 release is a beguiling collection of music by French composers. Marsalis performs on soprano and alto saxophones with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. I got out my sketch pad, colored pencils and ink pens; and began to draw while listening to Darius Milhaud’s La Création du Monde as performed by Marsalis and Orpheus.

As I listened to the opening sounds by Marsalis’ alto saxophone, I let my pen glide across the page. As the music crescendoes and jumps in greater intervals, my pen reacts. The trumpets and percussion enter and the jazzy theme is developed. Some of my pen markings are abstract, other marks resemble objects in the world.

I listened and drew through two hearings of the seventeen and a half minute piece. On the first listen, I used pens of various point sizes. Second time through, only colored pencils were in my hands.

Surprise Learning

What a fantastic way to listen to a piece of music! What started out as an exercise linking art and music became an enjoyable way to learn. While focusing solely on the act of drawing, the music seeped deep into my soul. The various themes of the music came to life before my eyes.

The flowing “birth” music at the start shows up as curving parallel lines. The music intensifies and a colorful volcano-like structure appears in my drawing. Then feathery phrases from the alto and lower strings manifest feathers on my drawing. A musical uproar produces what could be seen as a cityscape, complete with a sax player under a streetlamp!

Go Deep

Is there a song or piece of music that is on your mind? Do you wake up with phrases from a song on your lips or a melody in your ear? That song is a good candidate for this drawing exercise.

• Draw out your song using different media; crayons, acrylic paints, or a lump of clay.
• Divide your paper into equal-sized grids and draw each 30 seconds (or other appropriate time period) in each grid square.
• Create a drawing in the morning and compare it to a drawing made in the evening of the same song.

What other ways can you think of to experience music more deeply? I’d love to hear from you and see any art you create. Contact me via email or share your comments on my blog.

Did you know the Portland skyline is music, just waiting to be played? Yes, it is! And it is beautiful music.

It all started on Sunday afternoon when I received a link to a story about a short song written by birds. You’re intrigued, aren’t you? I was, too.

Are you familiar with the cellular phone commercial in which all sorts of scenery, buildings, and people are positioned from shortest to tallest to represent the symbol of good phone reception? It’s a clever way of ’seeing’ phone reception everywhere. In a similar vein, today’s exercise will have you ‘hearing’ music everywhere you go.

I’ll start with the bird story. Visualize your everyday power lines running overhead. There are 5 of them running parallel to one another. And birds like to perch on them. You’ve seen this countless times. Now, imagine the 5 parallel power lines are the lines of a musical staff and the birds are notes on the staff. Voilá! It’s music.

Birds on the Wires

Here is what Jarbas Agnelli did with his image of birds sitting on power lines.

What a great idea! As I was taking my daily walk on Mt. Tabor the next day, I looked for birds sitting on power lines. Didn’t see ‘em. But I did see a great view of downtown Portland, with its tall skyscrapers, short department stores, and medium-sized buildings.

In a flash of insight, I imagined laying a musical staff over the city skyline and hearing the pitches represented by the tops of the buildings.

Composing Begins

At home, I googled “Portland skyline” and found this image. Thanks Colgate Alumni of Portland for use of the photo! Printing it out, I penciled a staff over the buildings, then I circled the tops of each building to notate the musical pitches. Check out the images of the skyline before and after it becomes music.

I played around with key and quality (major, minor) and settled on F minor. First listen to the melodic line as played by my midi flute.

Here is the finalized music in 4-part harmony as played by my midi marimba.

Try This At Home!

This was fun! I invite each of you to try this exercise at home. There is no right or wrong answer. Only your perfectly-personal fun result! If you don’t have a pitched musical instrument like a keyboard, guitar, or clarinet, use your voice and make your own best guess at the pitch.

You don’t need perfect pitch to hear the music all around you. Find the music everywhere you look. Here is one place I saw and heard music on my walk today. See all 15 shots on my Flickr photostream, tagged as ’seeing-music’.

I’d love to hear any music you come up with. You can also send me an image in which you see the music. I bet we come up with different songs!