Interview with… Charlotte Tomlinson (pianist)

Posted on June 17, 2013 by

charlottetomlinsonI have worked as a chamber musician and duo partner for my entire career to date and therefore I have not needed to play from memory in a concert. Music has been given to me anything from months before the concert to hours before, meaning that the demands I have had lay instead in being able to learn music fast and thoroughly.

Learning music fast and thoroughly is a particular skill, and for me to do this effectively has required a certain way of learning that I equate with memorising. In fact, I would say that the only difference is that I know I don’t have to play from memory in the concert, and that takes a certain amount of pressure off.

So what is it about this approach that is similar to memorising? I would say that it is the delving deep into a piece of music, getting to know that music as well as possible from every single angle. This is essential for a memorised performance otherwise the memory will fail. But it also needs to be essential for any performance, and even more so if there is limited time to learn it!

My approach to learning a piece of music is this: I start by sight reading it through and getting an overall sense. Then I will look and listen to how it all fits together, singing and playing the various different parts, whether they belong to the piano or the instrument/s I am playing with. I make sure I understand the musical structure of the piece and what it means musically and expressively before anything else. Sometimes I will take the score away from the piano, and spend time looking, observing and listening in my head.

Once I have the big picture, I go into the details. I take roughly four bars at a time, repeating them and making sure I know them extremely well, usually under tempo and with fingering, notes, articulation and dynamics all in place. Then I test those four bars from memory, reminding myself at the same time where this fits in the music as a whole. Once I know that I know them, I then shut my eyes to double check. The lack of visual stimulus concentrates the mind wonderfully, and I find I am really sensing where my fingers are, getting to know the physical moves from the inside out. I also find that having my eyes closed helps me focus on the sound and what I want to do expressively with music.

The next step is to work in this way with the next small section of four bars or so, followed by time to connect this section and the first four bars and see whether I really know it. I then do this for the whole piece, checking at every stage how embedded it is in my mind and fingers. Then I revisit the big picture, seeing how my increased knowledge of the details informs my overall understanding of the piece.

Obviously if I have to learn music fast, I don’t always have the luxury to go into such immense detail so I might jump stages and go almost immediately to the ‘eyes shut’ stage. To play music from memory on the concert platform, I would take this approach but just give lots more time and lots more repetition. I would also then check my knowledge of the music from a structural, physical and aural perspective, knowing that if one method were to fail, another would kick in and take over.

This aside, I would say that this method of learning music could either be called ‘memorising’ or is at least very similar to the process of memorising. But of course music has to be learnt with the same thoroughness that memorising demands – anything less will show up on the concert platform!

Book: Music from the Inside Out – a musicians guide to freeing performance

Website: charlottetomlinson.com

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Interview with… Jenni Parkinson (percussionist)

Posted on June 5, 2013 by

JenniParkinsonPlease tell me a little about yourself (profession, musical activities, etc).
I am a creative music leader, performer and teacher, specialising in marimba and percussion. My work centres on music as a means of communication, self-expression and escapism. I am co-founder and Director of Soundcastle, a London-based arts collective who create new music through diverse collaborations. I also perform classical and contemporary repertoire as part of percussion duo Meridian, and play regularly with Joy to Filth Ratio, a collective that writes and performs dance music on orchestral acoustic instruments, blending typically electronic genres with virtuoso classical performance.

Do you actively memorise music and perform without a score? If not, why not? If so, why? When in your musical development did you start to memorise?
There was a point a few years ago when I made a decision to only perform without a score, which was when I first started playing professionally in a percussion duo. We had both memorised a few things before, but not as a matter of course. We decided to start performing only from memory for a few different reasons. Firstly, when playing marimba, you simply cannot turn pages as your hands are full of beaters! I went through a phase of photocopying reams of music, but that’s a complete hassle. Secondly, there is a visual aspect to performing – people like to see your hands moving, and the music stand gets in the way. I think memorising helps with communication too, both between performers and with the audience.

I actually find reading from music quite uncomfortable now. As a musician, I don’t want to have music in front of me. Ever. It’s about communication and the level of engagement you have with the music. The score feels like a third wheel – it should be just you and the instrument. The music should come from inside. It feels more personal to me to play from memory.

Have you ever had a major memory lapse during a performance and, if so, what happened?
I don’t think I’ve ever had any major memory lapses during solo performances, but I used to get very nervous so didn’t play from memory for fear of forgetting. Now it doesn’t worry me. My percussion duo partner and I had a simultaneous memory lapse once when one of us took a wrong turn playing Bach, and couldn’t get back to where we supposed to be. Fortunately we were playing background music so we faded out and tried again, but still couldn’t get past that point. In the end we had to try something different!

Are there any particular types of music – pieces, composers or genres – that you find particularly easy or difficult to memorise, and why?
I think it is more about style that particular composers. Minimalism is really hard to memorise (and we play a lot of it on marimba!) and I find rhythm sticks less well than melody. Take Steve Reich’s Nagoya Marimba for marimba duo, for example. Every bar is the same but slightly different, and is repeated a different number of times. It’s a nightmare! You are chasing each other throughout, so we learnt it together. Somehow I’ve memorised how may times to play each repeat – I think this must have been using visual memory, as I colour-coded all the bars depending on how many times they had to be repeated before I tried to memorise it. That piece was really hard to memorise, but I think it’s stuck forever now!

I find music with functional harmony relatively easy to learn, although there isn’t much for percussion. Take Schubert, for example; the chords are well known and the progression is predictable. It’s the same with pop music. Bach is an interesting case though – I have to be careful not to memorise it wrong, and have to pay particular attention to repeats with different endings so as not to take a wrong turning and miss out a few pages! The phrases don’t end neatly in Bach because of the counterpoint, so it’s harder to break into chunks for memorising. Sometimes the melodies switch between different people too, which makes it hard to memorise alone.

How do you memorise music? Are there particular techniques you use? Do you use visual memory, and if so, what do you visualise?
I have quite a good memory for music and don’t find memorising things too difficult, particularly at an advanced level – by the time you’ve mastered something technically, you’ve played it so many times it is memorised. When I was a student, I practiced my final recital so much that I knew the pieces by memory, but I still played with the music just so I knew it was there. Just in case. Now I use a variety of methods for memorising. I have quite a strong visual memory – I know where I am on the score when I’m playing. I also analyse the harmony and structure. When there are tricky bits that aren’t going well, I break it down and repeat small chunks over and over again. Learning drumming pieces can be hard due to the lack of harmony. In theses cases, I take 4 bar chunks and play them over and over again, first with the score, then without, until that chunk is memorised. Muscle memory and memory for shapes are really important too, so drums always have to be in the same place.

At what point during learning a piece do you work on memorisation?
There was a phase, when my duo first started, when we had to try and memorise lots of things we already knew, which we had learnt to play previously with the music. This was a case of playing without the music and seeing what had stuck, then working on memorising the bits that hadn’t. However, once we decided to perform only without the score, I started learning new pieces in a different way – memorising and learning at the same time. I would look at 8 bars, work out how to play it, then play without the music and repeat until I knew it. I think this method is faster and you get used to not staring at a piece of music all the time.

How do you deal with memory lapses? What tricks do you use to prevent it happening during a performance?
I don’t do much solo playing anymore, and I usually played with the score when I did! When playing in an ensemble, you can rely on other players to some extent to get you back on track if you get lost. I know memory lapses will happen if you think and worry about them.

Are there particular techniques you use for maintaining your memory of specific music over a long period of time (i.e. years)?
Not consciously. Normally I find it is possible to resurrect a piece with some practice. The gist of the piece is usually there, and how it should sound, but specific notes, harmonies and hand movements fade.

What do you think is the role of musical memory in creating new music, either through improvisation or composition?
I tend to compose music with a strong skeleton, but with an element of freedom. I have the general shape of the piece in my mind, and idea of the harmony and rhythmic texture I want, and then improvise around this.

Have you ever tried to teach others to memorise music? If so, how do people differ in their ability to memorise music, and what tips do you offer them to improve?
I teach beginner piano, mainly to children, and I do teach memorisation as I think it is really important early on. However, it’s an interesting balance, because often I have to teach them not to memorise as some children memorise too soon and cannot read music! At the very beginning I don’t teach notation until a few months in, but work on shapes, note patterns and playing by ear. In the creative projects I do with Soundcastle, we usually don’t write anything down. We record everything instead, to capture improvised ideas, many of which are never notated. Then we have to learn from recordings instead of from a score. This works well when composing as a group, and the ideas stick easily in the memory because you’ve created them.

Forthcoming events:

Websites: soundcastle.co.uk, www.meridianduo.co.uk, www.joytofilthratio.com

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Mental practice and a holiday from playing

Posted on June 2, 2013 by

Many musicians worry about how to keep repertoire fresh and accurate when practising simply isn’t possible. I haven ‘t touched the piano for a week, and although my recent holiday in the mountains was undoubtedly restorative for the mind and soul, it was not so good for the fingers. Even the great pianist Vladimir Horowitz  famously once said: “If I do not practice for a day, I know it. If I do not practice for two days, my wife knows it. If I do not practice for three days, my audience knows it.” In my experience, the best option is to replace regular physical practice sessions with mental ones. Rehearsing a piece inside your head requires deep concentration but is extremely rewarding and can cement memorisation.

Despite the obvious absence of a piano on a hiking holiday, I managed to squeeze in some mental practice of my favourite new piece, Scarlatti’s wonderful G major sonata K.427. This short, life-affirming piece sparkles with syncopated rhythms and driving semi-quavers. The real challenge is to stop my fingers running away from me (egged on by the daring ‘presto quanto sia possibile’ marking at the top)! Here’s Walter Gieseking playing the Scarlatti sonata faster than seems humanly possible…

I found this piece extremely easy and quick to memorise, perhaps because the musical building blocks are very familiar to someone trained in classical Western music. Like all of Scarlatti’s astonishing 555 keyboard sonatas, the piece is a single short movement divided into two approximately equal (repeated) halves. Written around the mid-1750′s, the structure of piece is an early form of the more developed sonata style of the classical era. Motifs are presented, developed, repeated and modulated using what has now become standard functional tonality.

Because the piece is well memorised, I can sit and ‘play’ it through in my head without the aid of a score or recording. I find I’m able to change the tempo at will, alter the dynamics or articulations and rerun sections, and even practise hands separately. Interestingly, I discovered that my memory for the top (right-hand) part is almost entirely aural – I hear it in my head; in contrast, my memory for the bottom (left-hand) part is almost entirely visual – I see either the keyboard or the score in my head, and have to really focus to ‘hear’ the notes clearly. In this case, I think I have even managed to make artistic decisions about how to shape different phrases in my head – something that can get forgotten in the mad dash of attempting to execute all the right notes in the right order at a real keyboard.

Hopefully, once my well-rested fingers are warmed up, I’ll be able to replicate the music I hear in my head at the keyboard.

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Interview with… GéNIA (pianist)

Posted on May 23, 2013 by

GeniaPlease tell me a little about yourself (profession, musical activities, etc).
I am a pianist, composer, educator and founder of the Piano-Yoga® method.

Do you actively memorise music and perform without a score? If not, why not? If so, why? When in your musical development did you start to memorise?
I learn very fast and always try to play without the score because it gives me a lot of freedom. Without the score, my senses are connected to my hearing and tactile sensations. I find the score a drag as it kills the music! The score can be very limiting, and is not always a good representation of what the composer intended. I would rather play without the score and make a few mistakes, than play perfectly with the score. Having said all that, these days I do use the score sometimes for contemporary music, if I need to play at a short notice or if I know that I won’t play the piece again soon.

I’ve been playing since I was 4 years old, and I’ve always played from memory. In Russia, where I grew up, no one plays with the score. When I was a child, I had a phenomenal memory and would remember everything straight away – I wouldn’t even have understood the question of whether to play from memory or not! I think if you play a piece from memory, you have to really know it, in your mind and in your fingers. If you rely on the score, your memory for the piece may be quite superficial.

Have you ever had a major memory lapse during a performance and, if so, what happened?
I remember my first memory lapse, but it wasn’t really major. I was a student at the time in my early 20′s, and my teacher and I had had a disagreement the night before a major performance of the Medtner Sonata. During the performance, I somehow looked into the audience and saw my teacher, which made me think of the previous night and brought on a memory lapse! I don’t think anyone really noticed, but I was shocked – before this I hadn’t really realised that memory lapses were even an issue!

Are there any particular types of music – pieces, composers or genres – that you find particularly easy or difficult to memorise, and why?
I find Chopin particularly hard to memorise. It’s often very similar musical material, but with incredibly small differences between repeats in a piece. I have to actively force the memorisation process for Chopin, by separating it into sections and learning each section separately. Some people have difficulty learning contemporary music, but I have quite a mathematical brain which easily remembers patterns and structures, so I don’t usually have any problems with it.

How do you memorise music? Are there particular techniques you use? Do you use visual memory, and if so, what do you visualise?
When I was 8 years old, a friend asked me how I memorised pieces. At the time I thought this was a silly question – I don’t do anything, the music is just there! She replied that this was very dangerous, because ‘if you’re ever feeling unwell there’s nothing to rely upon’. Fifteen years later I realised what she meant! As we get older, our lives get much busier (and the music usually gets harder too!) and our brains can easily get overloaded. So now I find I need a strategy for memorising.

I usually work to tight deadlines, so have to learn new repertoire very efficiently. I use one simple strategy for memorising music: take a phrase, play it through hands separately from the score until each hand plays it perfectly three times in a row – with phrasing, emotional impact, fingering, notes, everything. For contrapuntal music, decide beforehand which voice(s) will be dominant, and play each of them through separately in a similar way. Then put the hands together until you’ve played it again perfectly three times in a row. By the end of this, you’ve played the phrase at least nine times and by then it’s stuck in your head! Then you can try playing it without the score. If there are any errors, go back to the score to correct any points you didn’t get right. But you have to get it perfect from the start, as if it was your final product – with emotion.

When playing from memory, I recall two aspects of the music most strongly – sound and tactile memory. About 10 years ago, I started incorporating music theory and analysis into my preparation too. I try to trace backwards to the composition process, to understand chord progressions and the structure of a piece. As a child, I sometimes used visual memory (of the score), but I don’t use it anymore – the score is just a distraction! In fact, I don’t really use visual memory at all. When I do mental rehearsal, I feel the music in my fingers and hear it in my mind, but I don’t visualise anything.

At what point during learning a piece do you work on memorisation?
I’ve been influenced by two teachers in particular. The first demanded that I only bring memorised pieces to lessons, and refused to work on a piece unless I could play it completely from memory. The second would work on a piece with me until it was almost perfect, and then tell me to memorise it (though by then it was already memorised)! I regard learning a new piece as a three stage process: synthesis (playing the piece through to get an overall idea of it); analysis (detailed work); and synthesis again (putting it all together). I start memorising just over half way through this process, in the middle of the analysis phase. I think it’s a bad idea to memorise straight away, before you understand the music. When you are just starting to know a piece, you need to work with the score so you don’t learn the wrong notes!

How do you deal with memory lapses? What tricks do you use to prevent it happening during a performance?
Everyone has memory lapses. My advice is to improvise and keep the piece flowing with the same rhythm, the same key and the same emotion. Never take your hands off  the keys! Obviously you need to know the piece very well to reduce the chance of memory lapses. You can’t just jump from playing with the score into performing from memory, it needs practice. Practicing performing from memory in front of people, and in different places, is also very important.

Are there particular techniques you use for maintaining your memory of specific music over a long period of time (i.e. years)?
If you learn a piece properly in the first place, and perform it in public at least 3-5 times, it seldom disappears and will come back in a few days with some work.

What do you think is the role of musical memory in creating new music, either through improvisation or composition?
Although I improvise and compose, I don’t really connect these activities with memory. Obviously collective memory is used unconsciously, but I’m not aware of using memory when creating new music.

Have you ever tried to teach others to memorise music? If so, how do people differ in their ability to memorise music, and what tips do you offer them to improve?
There is a very clear differentiation between students. Some people don’t need to be taught to memorise, they just do it naturally. For example, most Europeans play from memory as that’s what they’re used to. I don’t try to teach them to memorise, as they already have their own method that works. But other people – particularly English adult amateurs who have never played from memory and want to learn – I teach them the strategy that I use (described above).

I now combine piano with yoga practice and meditation too. When you work on a piece of music you need to be present in what you’re doing. If you’re emotionally involved then usually your mind will be involved too. Meditation really helps with concentration, and can bring focused energy into practising.

Forthcoming events:

Websites: www.genia-music.com, www.piano-yoga.com

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Pianists on Playing (book review)

Posted on May 17, 2013 by

PIanists_on_playingCompiled by Linda Noyle, “Pianists on Playing” is a collection of interviews from the 1980′s with twelve international concert pianists. The pianists, who are all giants of the classical piano world, include household names like Vladimir Ashkenazy and Jorge Bolet. Each pianist was asked the same series of questions about the “craft of the pianist”, including how they memorise music. Although the book organises the interviews into separate chapters, I’ll take a different approach and give an overview of what was said specifically in relation to memorising.

Perhaps the most unifying concept mentioned by all twelve pianists is the importance of mental practice. Rudolf Firkušný talks of practising away from the keyboard, sometimes even before the learning the score. John Browning recalls a particularly demanding former teacher who advocated being able to call out every note away from the keyboard – “to call out every note… every dynamic, every phrasing, and every finger, so that I can go away from the keyboard and in my mind I can do through the entire work as if I were writing it down from memory.” Leon Fleisher advises “with a new piece, one should sit down, probably in a chair away from the piano, and learn it, look at it, take it apart, try to understand all its elements as much as possible. Sing to yourself. Sing the various components.” The importance of analysing the harmonic structure is also highlighted by the majority of interviewees and Misha Dichter talks about “break[ing] a piece up into its smallest components… that fit into a larger structure”.

However, memorising is clearly also very individual. Some pianists learn at the piano, and some away from it; some use mostly visual memory, and some use entirely aural memory. Dichter says that “I don’t trust myself playing anything in public unless there are certain discernable layers of understanding that I’ve done through with the piece”. Mechanical motor memory is obviously important but most describe it as unreliable. Interestingly, Fleisher suggests looking away from the keyboard to help with memorising – not only to hear more clearly, but also to separate oneself from the “sensory activity” of the fingers moving.

Perhaps surprisingly, although all twelve pianists perform from memory, several confess that they have no idea how they memorise music – and that they don’t want to know! There are also a few references to memory slips, and John Browning reassuringly says that “every performer, no matter how secure, always thinks about memory slips!” Janina Fialkowska describes the “terror of forgetting”, which sounds rather familiar to me! But all of them emphasise that musicality should never become a slave to accuracy.

Although several of the pianists describe themselves as fast learners, Bolet’s tale of memorising Liszt’s notorious Mephisto Waltz in just an hour and fifteen minutes is perhaps the most astonishing. The speed of the process clearly surprised even him, and when asked how long it would take him to learn the piece he originally estimated a luxurious six hours! It’s clear from Bolet’s description that intense concentration is the key: “I sat down and really concentrated on every single note. I went slowly and methodically repeating a lot of passages.”

Outside of the specific arena of memorising, the book is brimming with sage advice on piano playing and music making. One quote in particular from Dichter speaks volumes about the intensity and devotion with which these piano legends approach everything about their craft: “In practising, never daydream. Never use the piano as a vehicle for simply moving the fingers and passing time. If you have only one moment when you’re not aware of what you’re doing, mysically or technically (and usually both), you’re wasting your time.”

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Music and Memory (book review)

Posted on May 12, 2013 by

Music&MemoryInitially envisaged as a text to accompany an undergraduate musical composition classes, Bob Snyder‘s “Music and Memory” gives a fascinating overview of the basics of both cognitive psychology and musical structure. Perhaps most interesting of all is his unifying perspective – that “cognitive structure creates constraints on possibilities for musical structure”. Under this model, understanding memory is not simply of passing interest to the musician, but of fundamental importance to understanding music itself.

The book does not concern itself with different types of sensory memory (visual, auditory, motor, etc.) but instead focusses on the interdependence between music and memory. Snyder states that for “music that has communication as its goal, the structure of the music must take into consideration the structure of memory.” At the heart of the book is the premise that there the three difference types of memory (sensory, short term, and long term) can be mapped onto three different levels of musical organisation (notes, melody/rhythm, and form), which occur over roughly equivalent timescales.

The first level of memory – so called echoic or sensory memory – operates on the a timescale of under a second and relates to raw sensory data. For auditory information, vibrations are converted by the inner ear to nerve impulses that represent the amplitude (volume) and frequency (pitch) of the original soundwaves. Basic categorisation of this information occurs before the brain gets involved, and sounds that occur less than a sixteenth of a second apart are perceived as a single event. At this fleeting level, all we can perceive musically are the basic building blocks of notes – pitch, loudness and timbre.

The second level of memory – short term memory (a component of working memory) – operates on a timescale of a few seconds (3-5 sec on average) and allows a number of events to be grouped and held in the consciousness at the same time. Musically this correlates to melodic or rhythmic phrases, and thus the capacity of working memory places a natural limit on the length of musical phrases. Acoustical groupings are determined either by temporal proximity, aural similarity or continuity of movement, i.e. notes that are played in fast succession, sound similar or move in the same pitch direction tend to get grouped together. While in working memory, short chunks of information can be pondered simultaneously and compared with information previously stored in long term memory. The timescale can be increased by rehearsal, i.e. repeating the same material to make it more familiar and facilitate permanent memorisation. Because of the importance of the interaction with long term memory to allow comprehension, what we already know plays a major role in determining what we see and hear. In musical term this means that our ability to appreciate new music is primarily dependent on experience, rather than any inherent property of musical genre; familiar music is easier to understand, and therefore to enjoy.

The third level of memory - long term memory – operates on a timescale of fractions of minutes through to many years, and generally involves chemical or structural changes in the brain. Musically, this correlates to large-scale form, i.e. sections of music, which is not perceived immediately but only in retrospect.  ”In listening to a whole piece of music, we are only able to consciously understand the relationship between different parts of the piece by having events come back into awareness from long term memory.” Most of the contents of long term memory is unconscious, so reconstruction of large-scale patterns takes much more effort than basic pattern recognition and may require repeated listenings.

Snyder_Levels

The book also highlights the importance of musical categories and boundaries, which are really just constructs of the way our memory allows us to perceive sounds. Snyder describes interpretation as the “management of nuance” – variation within the boundaries of musical categories. A single piece played by multiple different performers is still perceived as being the same piece - with the same notes, phrases and sections – but with different dynamic emphasis, rhythmic accuracy and pitch deviation.

All of this has profound implications for composition as well as performance – such as natural limitations on phrase length and the importance of repetition and structure. Snyder goes as far as to categorise all music into two groups based on their memorability:

  1. Music that attempts to exploit memory, which contains chunks of similar material separated by clear boundaries and organised into an overarching hierarchical structure that can be efficiently learned. Functional tonality provides ample opportunities for establishing high-level musical architectures, and much of Western classical and popular music falls into this category.
  2. Music that attempts to sabotage memory, which flouts all or some of the structural principles outlined above, making both anticipation and recollection much more difficult. This includes both information-rich music (e.g. atonal music) and information-poor music (e.g. highly repetitive or slow music), such as contemporary Western experimental music and some religious chants.
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Interview with… Claudio Barile (flutist)

Posted on May 9, 2013 by

ClaudioBarilePlease tell me a little about yourself (profession, musical activities, etc).
I am principal flute and soloist of the Buenos Aires Philharmonic and have held positions in many other orchestras during my career. I am also an active chamber musician and have given many solo concerts around the world, as well as doing masterclasses.

On playing the flute from memory…
I don’t know many wind instrumentalists like me who like to memorise pieces. But I do! I think the flute might be harder to play from memory than other wind instruments, because the others instrumentalists can see theirs hands, which provides a very good reference for the memory. With the flute, if you open your eyes, you see the public!

On memorising…
I am going to write some significant things for me about memory. I always need to know where I am going to put my fingers and my ears – there must be a connection between these, like a wire or a cable. Melodic intervals and the score are also very important and harmonic memory helps me to play with more expression.

When I am without the flute, I need to be able to remember where the notes occur. In order to be sure about everything I am going to play, I start to say the name of each note in the correct place without the flute. What is very important for me is the rhythm, or in other words, where and in which place I am going to put the notes. For example, am I going to play four quarters? three quarters? how long is each note? how long is each pause? etc. When I am practicing, no expression is necessary in order keep the mind’s attention on this issue: memorising the music, and all of the map around the flute part if I am going to play with piano or orchestra. What I do by memory without the flute is to remember what my fingers have to do in opposite hands, i.e. what the right hand has to do using the left, and vice versa. In fact, I’m practicing all the time, while I’m walking or at the gym! I memorise with the score in front of me without the flute – on the sofa or in bed!

Numbers also help me a lot – that is, rhythms. If you change the time signature of the bar, even if you are playing in four quarters, or one note or half notes alone, you must take care about rhythm because of the length of each note! That is geometry, like chess players use. They can remember many of the plays in the past through numbers. And numbers never lie.

Website: www.claudiobarile.com

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