Eli5 How did classical music composers memorize their songs back then after creating them?

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Let’s take for example the nocturnes of Chopin.

My preferred one is nocturne n. 20

He certainly didn’t have studio machine to record their sound AFAIK

How then did he memorize and write down everything to remember later?

Did he start playing the piano, write down the notes, continue playing or did he memorize the whole song by heart without any writing process?

Sorry 4 my bad English btw. Not a English native speaker.

EDIT : thanks everyone for the explanation.

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Anonymous 0 Comments

When I was in a band in Highschool, I never wrote down the music. It **was** all in my head. My band played at a few clubs in the mid 90s and not a single song was on paper, it was all memorized by the 4 of us.

Different people have different talents. I’m good with things that are formulaic and rote, so math, science, music, engineering, etc. I’m in my mid 40s and I can remember formulas from high school and college still not having used them in near 20 years. When you are playing your own music you have written yourself, it sits in a special place in your memory. We would run a 10-13 song set all from memory back then. I can still to this day hum out the melodies and sing 50% of the words of songs I made almost 30 years ago with my band and I have not touched a guitar in 20+ years nor played like that. I went on into universities, jobs, family, kids, etc after Highschool and still, I remember it so vividly I picked up my flying V from storage and busted out some licks from Highschool with having nothing written down.

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