Yvonne Loriod and the Practice of Analytical Memory

ABSTRACTThe usefulness of music analysis in memorisation is well attested in music‐performance scholarship, even though the methods and processes of analytical memorisation are rarely documented and difficult to assess, especially in a historical perspective. The newly accessible working papers of Yvonne Loriod (1924–2010), a pianist renowned for her phenomenal musical memory, contain a corpus of small, handwritten aide‐mémoires (which she called pense‐bêtes) that offer an exemplary opportunity to study memorisation processes from a documentary perspective. Rather than detracting from Loriod's reputation as a memoriser, the pense‐bêtes contribute to our understanding of the personal music‐analytical strategies that facilitated her expert memory. We begin by reading Loriod's pense‐bêtes as evidence of a performer negotiating the social and analytical challenges of memorisation, asking what these private documents reveal about a modernist performance culture in which memorisation was conceived as a precondition of mastery. Next, we examine the pense‐bêtes as instances of performers’ analysis tailored to memory‐related issues, first with examples showing how Loriod navigated ‘dangerous passages’ by devising schematic solutions in score annotations and pense‐bêtes. We then proceed to three extended case studies featuring full formal reductions of works by Mozart and Messiaen. Considering these documents as serious instances of music‐analytical thought productively and empirically expands our understanding of the scope of performer's analysis: they complement and enrich existing analytical readings, underline the role of analysis as a practice integral to modernist musical performance and suggest new pathways for understanding the cognitive processes involved in apprehending complex forms.