Last week one of my students was having some trouble with memorizing a piece and asked if I had written anything about the subject. As it turns out, quite a lot. For a while I've been wrestling with my own memorization challenges and learning more about how to process and commit to memory works I'm playing in order to recall them meaningfully in performance. At the same time I'm trying to understand how my students can memorize music better, taking into account their own neurodiversity and ages, because memorizing music changes radically as you get older. 7 Articles I've Written About Memorizing Music is a compilation of previous articles, most of them on The Collaborative Piano Blog, some dating back over 15 years.
Managing meaningful careers is a frequent topic of conversation with friends and colleagues, and remains one of the things I find interesting to think, read, and write about. Fitting the Arts Into Your Life and What Success Looks Like are two perspectives from the last few weeks.
The struggle to process the rapid course of events over the last few months continues to be a challenge for so many of us. Finding a Centre of Gravity looks at some ideas of Oliver Burkeman on how what is directly in front of us is more important than what we're reading on the news.
Here's some interesting stuff from around the web:
- Can Art Help Us Grasp Reality? - Ilaria Puri Purini in conversation with Robert Lawrence Kuhn on how art can transcend the person who created it, exploring the work of Wassily Kandinsky, Helena Blavatsky, Walter Gropius, and more.
- Distributed Localism - How can we create a "local understanding" within the sprawling, corporate, AI-infested internet of 2025? The Homebound Symphony suggests some ideas to keep online communication and discovery local, and friendly.
- When in Doubt, Write in Red - Dime Novel Raven looks at the best red inks with some beautiful examples.
- Is Our Universe Trapped Inside a Black Hole? - Recent observations from the James Webb Telescope reveal that the tendency of two thirds of galaxies to spin clockwise suggests that our current view of big bang theory might be incomplete, with interesting implications.
- The Dancers Dance Out of Time - From Devour: Art & Lit Canada Issue 20, a poem by Carla Hartsfield about the experience of viewing Dégas' dancers in an art gallery.