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

853 views

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.

In: 157

23 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

I think most people can imagine sounds, including music. I can imagine them very vividly, although for music I struggle to imagine more than 1 or maybe 2 notes at once.

We have systems for writing down music with pen and paper.

Therefore, you can imagine a series of sounds (like a melody, or a chord progression, etc etc), and then write it down if you want to use it in a song. If you do this work for long enough, then you can write a song of any length you feel like.

You can review what you’re written, either just in your imaginination, or getting an instrument and playing it to see how it sounds. (I lack the skills to easily imagine music from just reading written notation, but I imagine with practice a composer could do so quite well, but would probably also use an instrument to help.)

Review and revise as necesarry, and hopefully that will improve the quality of the song until you are happy with it and consider it finished.

You are viewing 1 out of 23 answers, click here to view all answers.