Artur Schnabel: Memorising & Composing

Q: Some teachers seem to feel that if a person memorizes easily and naturally without thinking about it a great deal, he should be made to think about it a great deal. And some teachers believe that only those truly memorize who write out all the music they learn.

A: That is really very advisable. But not for the purpose of memorizing, rather to establish more and more intimacy with music. I would definitely recommend that everybody who studies music should spend at least half an hour a day copying some music. Eventually, he would do it very quickly.

Q: Do it from memory?

A: Compositions he learned, he could write out from memory. But I thought really more of copying from music. Once a gifted music student has, for instance, copied on of the string quartets of Beethoven or, let me say, the first movement of a symphony, he will have benefited much morethan he ever divined. I think this is actually the quickest way to get into music. Of course, it should not only be a graphic activity. He should hear the music while he is writing it, should enjoy its beauty and greatness, and stop sometimes to delight fully in the happiness of having discovered something he had not noticed when he read or played it. He will notice much more when he writes it.

Today, I wish to recommend the copying of music strongly. And I also think that every musician should try to compose, even if he is so disgusted with the results that he destroys every composition immediately after he has written it. That does not matter. It is the activity and not the result which is so important

I never perform my own compositions, because when I have finished a composition my urge is to start the next composition. I cannot spend time practising my own compositions - and they are not too easy to play. I hardly know them: a composer does not know his own compositions. He only knows his next composition - which is forming and working in him.

I am sure Beethoven did not know his sonatas as well as we know them. After he had composed a sonata, it was finished - for him.