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
There are some documentaries on YouTube about John Williams’s process scoring movies. Despite all the technological advances he still does it sitting at a piano by hand with manuscript paper.
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.
An author who writes a book doesn’t memorize it either beforehand. Writing music can be similar. Chopin may have an idea of the overall melody, write a piece of it, play again, change a bit, then starts the work of designing the variations and the harmonics. Again, trials and errors. So, it’s not like he played it entirely in his head and then rushed to write it.
Come up with a story in your head, you’ve got a pretty good idea of what you want it to be about, the where, the who, the twist, the climax, the end, the epilogue. Sit down and write it. Read it, edit it. Read again. Build the parts that will get you where to need to go. Add flourish, add details, add dialogue, add foreshadow.
Consider composition of music as a language, the analogy is the same. He had an idea, rough drafted, embellished. Some people have more colorful imaginations to write down right away. Some people need lots of time Anne effort to redraft.
Nocturne 20 is the most beautiful piece in the world – you have great taste!
Do you play an instrument yourself? If you get to a decent level, you will probably find that you can compose a simple piece, or just some snippets, and play them from memory. From there it’s just a case of writing down the score.
Professional composers just do that on a bigger scale with talent and practice. If you want an amazing example of memory, check out the story of how, as a child, Mozart memorised the 9 part polyphony of Allegri’s Miserere Mei after hearing it twice. This piece was not published because the Vatican wanted to keep it for themselves, but Mozart transcribed it, and his version spread through Europe, breaking the Vatican’s monopoly.
https://www.classicfm.com/composers/mozart/guides/mozart-allegri-miserere/
Creating music is not such as a “magical” process where you invent 30 minutes in a stroke of genius and then you need to write it down. Music had nad has structures, if you think in a band today that make a song, they only make 2-3 things: verse, chorus and bridges. A 5 minute song is composed of 2-3 verses and 2-3x chorus, meaning that they only “compose” like 1 minute of music and then repeat. Similarly, something like a symphony (5th of Beethoven, for example), have similar structures that were often used in their time. That’s why in the 5th you hear the typical Pa-pa-pa-paaaaaa at the beginning, and then you hear it again like 5 minutes but not with the same notes and not *exactly* like the beginning after that an then again almost to the end almost *exactly* like at the beginning. Writing music is an intellectual process, where you start to play with melodies, harmony, Instrumentation and etc, so, it’s not like you “memorize” 10 minutes, because writing simply don’t work like that
Made up blobs on the lines, tried playing it, replaced some blobs. Tried playing the idea further until found something nice, put the appropriate blobs on the lines. And so on.
Except Bach, who started with a phrase of blobs and said “Now let’s write it backwards. And now upside down.”
Let me add in addition to using standardized sheet music annotations, many composers had a distinctive structure and used repetitive and complementing elements.
Same way an author writes a poem? They wrote it down.
Some composers had the ability to “play” one or more parts in their head as they mentally composed and then they’d write that down. But generally, a motif or melody is composed and then accompaniment is written to support that.
accompaniment that an orchestra would normally play. While Chopin was composing the right-hand melody, he was likely thinking about and playing with different options for the left hand.
There are also general rules of classical music that would help a composer remember what they wrote and where they need to go. Phrasing and chord structures were somewhat rigid, even in to the Romantic Period of which Chopin were a part of.
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