Alex Hannold was the first climber to climb El Capitan without a rope. I can’t imagine the mental strength and calm that it would take to be 2,500 feet off the ground without a rope. In his TED talk, he describes making the most difficult move of the climb – he said that what prevented him from succumbing to fear was simply the fact that he had done it 50 times previously with a rope. He had to memorize “thousands of distinct hand and foot movements” and when he arrived at the difficult spot, his body and mind just remembered and moved.
In the last year, for the first time in about a decade, I decided to pick a few difficult songs on the piano to memorize. I kept playing in church and at home a bit, but it was always just reading music. This time, I wanted something to play when I didn’t have sheet music in front of me. Over the course of a year, I picked 3 difficult songs and memorized them:
-“Liebestraum No. 3” by Franz Lizst
-“Prelude in G Minor” by Sergei Rachmaninoff
-“Fantasie Impromptu” by Frederick Chopin
It’s obviously not a feat like climbing “El Cap”, but it is an incredible feeling to get to a point where you can play 8,000+ notes where your body and mind simply remember where to go next. There are “thousands of distinct [finger] movements”. You hear the flow of the music and your hands somehow know where to go next. You get to the point where the only thing that will mess you up is when you actually start thinking about what you’re playing. The best way to play it all the way through seems to be to get into a sort of meditative state and just let your body remember. It’s an incredible feeling – almost an out of body experience as you watch your own hands move and play something beautiful.
I admit I’m not much fun at parties – can’t play anything by ear; don’t take requests; don’t know any popular songs :0. My kids have started asking me to play at night though when they go to sleep. When I sit down to play in the middle of the day, they’ll say “No, don’t play! Wait until we go to sleep!”
I learned a few things over the last year as well as I memorized these notes – nothing particularly novel or profound, but I was happy all the same for the reminders.
Habit is powerful. Struggle is what brings results. Start small, but know when to take leaps.
We are more capable than we think
As I memorized these pieces, I realized that our capacity for memorization was much bigger than I imagined. I would tell myself that I could only memorize two measures per day, and then I would just keep going, telling myself “well, I’ll try to memorize these, but I’ll forget them tomorrow.” Then, I would consistently come back the next day and surprise myself that my brain and fingers had actually retained that information.
So what did I learn? I should have less fear. I can experiment with pushing myself a bit farther than I think I can go and surprise myself. I’ve found the same to be true with learning a language or surfing a bigger wave than I thought I could.
Habit is powerful. It also has “staying power”.
Practicing for 15 minutes a day is much more efficient than 1 hour on the weekend. I had been playing these songs casually for a year. When I started playing 15 minutes per day, I made actual progress.
There were other lessons learned. I noticed, for example, that when I developed even a short-term habit, it had more “staying power” than I thought. For example, if I practiced for 15 minutes for 7 days in a row, and then went on a business trip and didn’t practice for a week, I was still able to come back a week later and have a lot of it memorized.
The reverse is true as well for overcoming bad habits. When I learned the wrong fingering, it was really difficult to undo that work. It’s a good lesson to be really careful in noticing bad habits and preventing them from getting encoded in our brains.
Lean into the struggle
Another straightforward lesson, but an important one. There’s a tendency to want to keep playing the parts you know well and that sound good. That brings almost no progress and in fact slows you down because parts of the song sound much better than the other parts by the time you get to the end. I learned to always start with the most difficult piece, if only for the first 5 minutes of playing each day.
I couldn’t just play the easy parts. I couldn’t keep doing low quality over and over and think you’ll get better. I can keep playing that difficult section at the end terribly or I can struggle and do it twenty times in a row and struggle and then get better.
A very interesting lesson was that the “difficult” parts of songs change over time. Some parts are difficult and then become easy, but other sections fade in and out of difficulty. Once a section is mastered (e.g. once you learn a life skill), it doesn’t mean it’s there forever.
Small progress, then take the leap
At some point on the path to memorizing, you have to take a leap. You want to just keep reading the song over and over until you just magically have it memorized, but you hit a wall at some point where you have to make the switch. There is an uncomfortable gap between reading and memorizing that must be jumped, not bridged across.
Journey of a 1,000 miles begins with first step
It’s amazing how impossible a piece seems at first. I remember seeing the tiny notes in Liebestraum and thinking that it would be absolutely impossible to even play that, let alone memorize it. Feels like your fingers could never feel familiar with the notes. Then it starts to click. Then when it’s memorized, you look back and wonder how it felt so difficult and intimidating. Sometimes it’s difficult to know where to start (like which fingering to use), but you just have to try something and see how it feels. You can’t know from just looking at the notes how it should be. You might have to learn it and then unlearn it.
Beauty
I read a book recently called “How to Stop Time”. The main character lives for thousands of years, choosing to live difficult lives and become an expert in certain skills. He has to be careful, though, of picking a life where he plays the piano:
“I have long convinced myself that the piano is like a drug, seductive and strong..it can awaken dead emotions, it can drown you in your lost selves.”
He also said that it’s a “nervous breakdown waiting to happen” :), but I think that’s a bit much…
I am grateful for the lessons, but more than anything, I am just glad to be able to appreciate something beautiful. The melodies and harmonies and dissonance of these pieces are so touching. There was nothing too practical about learning all this. I won’t get paid for it. But I think when I spend all day working or crunching numbers, it’s refreshing to think about how to put feeling into a particular phrase, or in the Rachmaninoff piece, just to hammer it as loud as I want and play it as fast as I can.
I had forgotten how meditative, how powerful, and how meaningful pure art can be.
Here are the 3 videos of the songs! All are work in progress, but they are memorized!
Liebestraum No. 3 by Lizst
Prelude in G Minor by Rachmaninoff
Fantasie Impromptu by Chopin