3. How Important Is It for Your Developments as a Musician That You Can Memorise Effectively and Perform Confidently from Memory?

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Learning a piece from memory has so many different positive factors and develops a musician to the best of their ability. Although it can be difficult to do and master, it is worth the hard work. The end result seems to be much more rewarding than if the score was being used in a performance. Firstly, memorizing allows the performer to connect with their audience. A score can really prohibit a relationship between the two. An audience doesn’t just attend a performance to hear music, they come to watch and absorb the performance as a whole. This is especially the case for singers. If a singer is blocked by a music stand or looking down at music, the meaning of the song just disappears and the passion from the singer is less visible. Equally instrumentalists are expected to play their music in a virtuosic manner, and lead the orchestra professionally, however with music in front of them, their professionalism decreases, as their concentration goes into the reading of the score. This again, detracts the audience away. As a singer I know that it is difficult to learn new pieces especially if sight reading and perfect pitch isn’t a strong skill. Current research by Nate Kornell, an assistant professor of psychology at Williams College and Robert A. Bjork of the University of California have said ‘To manage one’s own conditions of learning effectively requires gaining an understanding of the activities and processes that do and do not support learning.’ In other words, for one to learn something and memorize something, one has to know how they work and learn the most effectively. So before one can memorize something they must know how they go about memorizing something. Scientific research from Dr. William James ‘Father of Psychology’ has identified how the skill of memory can be improved in five simple techniques. In regards to learning a piece of music, these are:

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