It’s funny Saul.

really good response Carl. I memorize some by solfege, but mostly I analyze the whole piece first, using chord/lead sheet symbols and memorize it harmonically that way.

PHILISTINE!!!

I knew that 3 years of sight singing and dictation in college would somehow come in handy! 😉

“I should also add that, when I walk out on stage to play a recital(always from memory) 100% of my concern is that I will have a memory slip that I can’t get out of. I don’t worry about difficult passages or missed notes. Of course I’m going to miss some notes. That’s live performance and it’s not worth worrying about. But I do worry about memory problems. But the reality is that, with the system I use for memorizing, I almost never have memory problems at all, and the few times I do, I can get out of them easily.”

This is very funny, I have exactly the same experience! A couple of years ago, I had the following system to memorize: when I knew the piece well, I started to play the piece (or first parts of the piece) with left hand only and right hand only by heart. I played the left hand and thought of what the right hand should play and vice versa. I also played one hand and thought of what the playing hand is playing. I also practiced without any hands, just the pedals, playing both hands in my head. Since I’m doing this, I’ve never had big trouble in pieces in recitals, and if I lost it somewhere, I always could recover quite easily. By doing this, it’s also a lot easier to play a piece again after having not played it for a long time.

Also in the train or bicycling I’m playing pieces in my head.

Then the solfege: I believe there’s a “French” system and another system. The French system is naming the notes singing, not considering the distances. As we in The Netherlands have quite the same system as in Germany (g sharp is called gis, b flat is called bes), it’s quite easy here to sing on note names.

Furthermore, I have heard of a combination of this: as “fa diese” takes a lot of time, one can sing “feu” (I don’t know how to bring this into American syllables, this should be pronounced in the French way), I can’t remember the vowel for “bemol”, maybe a b-flat is called “sais”? (again, French pronunciation). And one can indeed sing on base of the tonal system: the tonic is called “one” or “do”, the dominant “five” or “sol”, but one has to analyse the harmony a bit first, because of modulations.

By the way, I’m always impressed by how fast the French can say those note names so quickly! Perhaps they are used to speaking with many syllables per second? 😉