{"id":738,"date":"2008-12-18T14:58:26","date_gmt":"2008-12-18T14:58:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/2008\/12\/18\/how-many-pieces-do-you-know\/"},"modified":"2008-12-18T14:58:26","modified_gmt":"2008-12-18T14:58:26","slug":"how-many-pieces-do-you-know","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/2008\/12\/18\/how-many-pieces-do-you-know\/","title":{"rendered":"How many pieces do YOU know?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Daniel Wolf at Renewable Music takes the discussion of current repertoire in an interesting direction<\/a>, towards the question of \u201chow much music do you, or can you, know well\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n

Back in my training days as an ethnomusicologist, we were taught some of the basic questions to use with musician informants in the course of field work. One of the most basic was “How many pieces do you know?”* There seemed to be a near-universal upper limit of about fifty-or-so repertoire items whenever the question was narrowed to “How many pieces do you know well<\/em>?” Similar quantitative limits were encountered among musicians of many traditions, which, in our informal survey, included Native American singers, Javanese Gamelan musicians, and String Quartets, who were either asked to list, by name, the pieces that they “knew” and were ready to play<\/em><\/strong>. (emphasis added)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What an interesting question, and one I\u2019ve honestly never tried to grapple with. That bit about \u201cready to play\u2026\u201d that\u2019s where it gets complicated and tough. Modern players can get through hundreds of pieces in a year thanks to their razor sharp sight-reading skills, but I\u2019ve often found myself talking to a professional orchestra musician who can\u2019t remember ever having played the Mahler symphony they recorded just a few weeks earlier. Does reading something without mistakes equate to knowing it? Studio work is even more confounding, since\u00a0 you can record a piece without ever playing through it without stopping, and the players may not end up with any sense whatsoever of what the form of the piece is, or what order the various takes actually belong in.\u00a0 I once did a piece for a Radio 3 recording that was so insanely difficult the producer wanted to come up with start and stop points for editing before the sessions began- he thought that it was unlikely we\u2019d be able to do more than about 30 seconds at a time without stopping (in the end, we read through it with only one stop in the session, a testament to the virtuosity of modern players).<\/p>\n

But, reading a piece doesn\u2019t mean you know it.<\/p>\n

Neither does memorizing a piece. Ormandy had a famously amazing photographic memory- he could memorize anything in one flip-through, but he often said that \u201cjust because I\u2019m memorized it doesn\u2019t mean I know it.\u201d In his case, just memorizing the piece only meant he was sight-reading the picture of the score stored in his head. AC Douglas recently called reader\u2019s attention to the archive of Ormandy scores which document the process of getting from memorized to mastered.<\/p>\n

I may have the number wrong, but I seem to remember Karajan had 60 operas memorized which he said he could conduct from memory, with all the text memorized, if you woke him up in the middle of the night. Considering opera was only a minority interest in his repertoire, that\u2019s pretty scary. Barenboim\u2019s recent exploits aren\u2019t too surprising- he\u2019s always had that kind of facility for a huge volume of repertoire. However, that doesn\u2019t necessarily mean that I\u2019m all that convinced by some of the conducting work he does.<\/p>\n

I used to be amazed by the best instrumental teachers at conservatories, who could teach and demonstrate, in great detail, just about any piece for their instrument. \u00a0I\u2019m sure some of them had way more than 50 works memorized at any time- but probably 35 of those they taught ever week of their lives.<\/p>\n

Fiddlers and jazzers tend to know hundreds or thousands of tunes, but can take advantage of the fact that so much of their repertoire fits into standardized forms (blues, rhythm changes, 32 song form, etc\u2026). Still, it\u2019s amazing to see how fast they can memorize a new tune (usually one hearing is enough).<\/p>\n

I leave pieces on my repertoire list based on whether I fee like I could perform them under pressure on about a week\u2019s notice. Most of the standard rep pieces, like the Beethoven, Brahms, Dvorak and Tchaikovsky mainstays, I could just open the score and be ready to conduct, but how well is well?<\/p>\n

Carlos Kleiber probably had less than 20 pieces in his repertoire at the time of his death. In spite of the fact he could play all the Mahler symphonies at the piano from memory, he only ever conducted Das Lied von der Erde, as he felt it was the only one he thought he could do well. Learning a vast repertoire can be a great education, but quantity is no guarantee of quality. If the king felt that Beethoven 6 was too hard for him, maybe us mortals ought to ask ourselves how well we\u2019re doing it? <\/p>\n