A Conversation with Vera Fonte
Pianist, professor, and researcher Vera Fonte on her piano education and path that led her to her PhD.
In my previous post, I shared how I came to know pianist Vera Fonte and how that meeting led to our first collaboration. This time, I wanted to delve deeper into her story. Vera’s path has taken her from an early love of the piano, through the difficult experience of a memory slip on stage, to a PhD at the Royal College of Music where she researched how musicians memorize contemporary music. Today she’s a visiting professor at the University of Minho and serves as Vice-President of EPTA Portugal. In our conversation, she spoke about the science and art of memorization, her experiences as a teacher, and the advice she offers to younger pianists searching for their own voice.
Q: Ever since we first met back in 2014 at the welcoming party of our student accommodation in London, I’ve credited you with being my first Portuguese teacher. How does it feel knowing that because of your patience and natural teaching ability, I am now living in Portugal and still speaking this language 11 years later?
Vera:
I have to say that I’m very surprised to hear this. I had no idea you considered me responsible for your learning and enjoyment of the Portuguese language. And yes, we did spend many hours trying to speak Portuguese. I enjoyed all the time we spent doing this. It made me realize how difficult Portuguese is as a language. Only when I tried to explain things to you, I understood how complex Portuguese is! But I was quite surprised when I met you last year in Lisbon. You spoke fluently. I think you deserve all the credit. It shows your commitment and willingness to learn, a feature I have admired since we met in London.
Q: Can you tell me about your piano education? How did you come to the point where you knew you wanted to do a PhD in piano?
Vera:
My PhD was focused on music memorization, particularly the memorization of non-tonal piano repertoire. As a piano student, since I was a child, I never dealt with memory issues. But one day during the finals of a piano competition, while playing a Prelude and Fugue by Johann Sebastian Bach, the C minor from the first volume, I had a severe memory slip on stage. When I restarted, I had the same memory slip again in the same place. I panicked and moved on to the next piece. As you can imagine, this was a very traumatic experience for me.
From then on, I struggled with stage fright. It was so bad, I seriously considered giving up and following a different career path. But music was my passion since I was five years old, so I decided at least to do a bachelor’s in piano performance. This is when I met my piano teacher Luís Pipa. At the time I doubted if I would ever be able to become a performer, but he sat down with me and we had a serious conversation about this. He told me, “Look Vera, I believe you have what it takes to be a performer, all you have to do is rework and remake your piano technique, look at your music memorization problems and try and research them.” That’s what I ended up doing.
When I did my master’s in music teaching, I decided to do my thesis research project on music memorization. This is when I discovered the research of Roger Chaffin, a very important researcher in this area, and his colleagues Tânia Lisboa and Aaron Williamon. These studies showed that professional musicians were using memorization strategies, that worked very well for different instruments and repertoire, but were also used by experts in other areas, like chess, medicine, memory championships. When I started applying them, I was quite surprised by how well my memorization abilities improved. Within a year, I was able to get back on stage. This was a life changing experience for me.
Q: Can you briefly explain some of the strategies you found when doing this research?
Vera:
Many of these strategies are based on the use of our knowledge of tonal musical vocabulary. For example, professional musicians use a technique called chunking, which consists of grouping single notes into patterns that we know very well, such as scales, chords, arpeggios. If you develop this ability to chunk the music into groups quickly and effectively, then when you are in encoding and processing the information, you can process much more at once. Musicians also create a mental map of the music they perform with certain landmarks, or safety points where you can start from. Before, when I was a student, this never occurred to me.
When I decided to focus on contemporary music, I found it quite difficult to apply these strategies. It was hard to find recognizable chords, scales, and arpeggios. It was also quite difficult to create mental maps. I was using formal structures of classical music I knew well, like sonata form, or rondo, and suddenly none of these forms were there. This type of music is also very physically demanding. For example, you have to stand and play inside the piano, turn on electronics, etc. You don’t always have a chance to look at the score.
I started doing some research, and found professional musicians that specialized in contemporary music and performed from memory. So, then I realized that this was possible to do. That’s why I decided to do my PhD on this topic.
Q: Can you explain a little about your PhD research?
Vera:
At the time there was a huge gap in research in this area of music memorization. So, I spent six years interviewing professional pianists, observing not only myself but other pianists practicing and memorizing this music. I discovered memorization techniques that could be applied very effectively. For example, it was very interesting to see that experienced musicians also used chunking here, but it’s a different type of chunking. It’s not chunking into chords that you know, it can be into something like hand shapes. You’re grouping the music in your head, and you see the pattern visually. I also saw that they used mental maps, not based on the formal structures, but on a subjective structure. They create their own structure. Their own story. Their own logic. I also discovered very interesting things such as the role of body movements, the choreography as a way of organizing the way you think about the music. There are lots of interesting strategies. I could speak all day about this!
Q: You ended up using the piece I wrote for you “If You Were Here” as part of your thesis. Can you explain how that factored in?
Vera:
Your piece “If You Were Here” was used in one of the research studies for my PhD. In this study I explored my own process of learning and memorizing. When I was reading about memory, the studies were very interesting, but were based on laboratory studies where musicians were doing short recall tests. For me this wasn’t the same as memorizing a long piece over a long period of time.
My aim was to investigate non-conventional repertoire, and ideally, without having access to any model of the work to guide me. I didn’t want to listen to the piece or have any knowledge about it beforehand. As you know, at the time RCM was running the module “Contemporary Music In Action” where performers and composers work together to create new pieces, and Harris Kiitos, who was also supervising my project, recommended that I join. When I attended the first class I noticed you were also there, and I immediately thought you would be perfect for this project.
I have to say, your piece was quite challenging to memorize! It was one of the most difficult pieces I ever had to memorize. I even considered playing with the score at one point.
Q: Yeah, that is one of the things you told me, to make it challenging to memorize. Normally, I don’t like to repeat things, so I guess I took that part of it to heart with certain figures I would vary just a little bit but not in a way that it would interrupt the flow of the phrase.
Vera:
Completely! You did a great job of making it challenging. I really had to create a new system to memorize your music. One of the strategies was memorizing the choreography. Another strategy was chunk the information into patterns and think about those chunks while playing fast sequences. I would say them out loud as I practiced. When I performed the piece, I would just recall the patterns. I still use that strategy today with other pieces as well.
When I finished performing the piece, I reached out to Roger Chaffin, that I spoke of before. He was very interested in the study. To this day, I’ve had the privilege of working with him.
Q: To change gears, you’ve been teaching at the University of Minho for some time now. How has teaching at the undergraduate and graduate level changed your perspective on the piano?
Vera:
Working with undergrad piano students is a very enriching and fulfilling experience, because you have the opportunity to think together with them about musical interpretation and deal with different interpretive perspectives. This process of discovering with your students how to solve difficult passages, how to control your instrument, how to know yourself, really changes your perspective as a pianist.
Q: What advice do you have for younger pianists, especially those that are seeking to pursue piano at a post graduate level?
Vera:
In my opinion, it’s essential for young pianists to discover their identity and their artistic voice. They must focus on what sets them apart in order to find their place in this field. It’s also very important to develop career management skills like knowing how to create festivals, your own concert opportunities, promoting strategies, ways of preparing performance for various contexts.