My teacher puts that into practice when he plays a familiar tune like "Sunny Side of the Street," or "Imagine," making it new in a way, and therefore allowing people to hear it anew, even if it's a well-known piece of music.
So I have been working on memorizing two pieces this week: a duet piece and a solo piece that contains chords. I have found it to be a very gratifying experience in several ways.
First of all, playing the guitar while watching myself play is a very different experience from playing while looking at the music. It's hard to explain what happens, but I'll try.
Looking at how the sounds are made makes the experience much more visual. I was reminded of my teacher's lessons about shapes. I couldn't conceive of what he meant until I started seeing the shapes--the angles the fingers make on the fret board--simultaneously in the case of chords, and sequentially in the case of melodies. It's a very tangible representation of the scalar quality of the movement--up or down the scale; forward or backward in space.
It reminds me that the guitar is a different instrument from the piano, where the notes are nicely laid out in a row, a single plane. On the guitar they are laid out in two planes: along an X axis and a Y axis, you might say. A particular note, therefore, is a point anywhere along that grid: it's on the first string (X) and the second fret (Y), for example. That note is identified as F# above the higher C. But to make it more complicated, the note made at that location is not unique: other combinations can produce the same sound. It's like the same number can be obtained by different routes: 1+3 = 4 and 2+2 = 4.
Once I started noticing the visual representation of the music on the guitar, I found I could make the necessary movements more easily and more quickly. And I paid more attention to the structure of the piece. In the case of the Bourre by Bach, I noticed immediately that the piece consists of a series of three-note phrases, many repeating--exactly as well as approximately. And I found I could memorize them more easily by seeing them in chunks, recognizing the patterns that helped me return to them, even when they were slightly altered. It's a process very akin to poetry reading or memorizing, because music, even instrumental music, is very similar to poetry in its rhythms and patterns.
When I told my teacher that I memorized a poem for a class, he said to think about how I memorized the poem. That made me see how I could memorize a piece of music. When I memorize poems, I try to memorize one verse at a time, or one line at a time if the piece is difficult. Then I keep repeating what I've already learned and just add a new line to it, going back and repeating from the beginning each time. There is a game called, "In My Grandmother's Attic," where each person thinks of an object that starts with a letter of the alphabet, and then tries to remember what the person before him or her said. So, "In my grandmother's attic there is an anvil," could be the first person's response. The next person might say, "In my grandmother's attic there's an anvil and a baseball," and so on, until the end of the alphabet is reached and all 26 items have been declared by the last person speaking.
I've been trying to see if this approach would work in learning music. For instance, with the bourre I'm learning, by visualizing each three-note phrase, I'm hoping I will remember what to play next: "In my bourre there is this trio and this trio and this trio and . . . ." It's a new process for me so at first it will be cumbersome, but maybe would speed up eventually as the process becomes more internalized.
But besides the visual aspect, there is the muscle memory to encourage as well. Eventually, my fingers will automatically do what my mind wants them to do because they've done it that way so many times before. And I won't have to think so much about it; it will just flow! I'm looking forward to that.
