I'm always fascinated to hear about people's difficulties with memorization because I'm on the complete other side of the reading-memorization spectrum — it's rare that I am able to play a piece at speed without having memorized it inadvertently (e.g. I literally memorized Clair de lune over the last 2 days while I'm still not consistent in the middle section). The last time I remember it happening was for Bach-Petri Sheep May Safely Graze, where it ended up being easier to have the music in front of me for the slight variations in voicing/etc.

On the other hand, my sight reading is atrocious to the point that when I go to the local chamber music readings, I play violin instead of piano so I actually have a chance of keeping up 😅.

Back to the point of the thread — I think it's a fantastic exercise to try memorizing something if you normally don't! I've realized that relying on my memory also means that I've also given myself the crutch of being able to see my hands at all times whereas good readers often have a good sense of proprioception. There must be things I take for granted that readers have to work harder at, and would benefit from experiencing without looking at music. I should really practice sight reading more often, but at this point after half a lifetime of dwelling on my weaknesses I'd also rather lean into my strengths once in a while.

"You're a smart kid. But your playing is terribly dull."

    pianoloverus You're preaching to the choir. I've said I think several times on this thread that memorizing a few pieces is no problem. I've also never said that two cats shouldn't memorize one piece or several pieces. The point of my post you quoted is that by not memorizing pieces one can learn more repertoire.

    Maybe you don't realize it, but those comments make people, well, me, I can't speak for other people, hesitate to write replies. I do want to explain how I memorize, because I do it all the time. But I'm afraid to get into a discussion about how wrong I am for memorizing so much.

    I don't want to have a discussion about why I do that, and I don't want to feel I have to defend myself, or answer your question about how complex the pieces are that I'm playing, because when I answer that question, you will start about that too and say I should play easier pieces. And this thread is about how to memorize. Not about if it's good or bad.

    You have to realize that most of us don't have the ambition to become a professional pianist. Some of us started as an adult. We aren't interested in following the rules that children have to follow when they start when they are 5 years old. We started playing because we enjoy it as a hobby, we want to talk about our hobby, and we don't want discussions about how wrong our way of practicing is all the time. If we need help with our way of practicing we will ask specific questions about it, and then you can offer advice about it if you want, because your advice can be helpful, but I don't really want it when I don't ask for it.

    I know it would be better when I was better at reading sheet music, but I want to enjoy my hobby and be able to post in a forum without being criticized all the time. You probably do it to help us, but unfortunately it has the effect that I'm afraid to post on the forums, because I don't want to defend myself in public every time.

        Hi Josephine

        There are no rules, and remember this is just a forum, with mainly amateurs posting opinions, not facts.

        I said on a post in PW a month or 2 ago, that I read and digest what is said on here (and there) and I post occasionally if I feel I can help someone. I used to get quite wound up about other peoples opinions, but now I simply post my view and unless someone contradicts me with something that is clearly wrong (i.e. that's the note B, when it's obviously a G) I don't bother to argue with people. If they have a different view, fine, they may be right, they may be talking codswallop (love that expression), or they may be being deliberately provocative. I'll let them carry on... So my advice to you is to read the posts on here, take on-board stuff that you think helps you, and the rest... well a pinch of salt!

        The only person I really take advice from is my Piano Teacher. I'm never going to be a professional Pianist, but as an amateur I've done about 200 non-classical gigs, and I've never had anyone complain about my playing. The fact that my hand position, or my seating position, or my sight-reading, or indeed any other aspect of my ability to play music isn't technically correct doesn't concern me. As you said most of us are in it to have fun. And I've had a lot!

        As it happens I basically agree with Pianoloverus, and I'm sure he means well, but if you think some, or a lot of memorisation is the way forward for you, and it enhances your enjoyment of the music then do it. Take no notice of what anyone says on here and have fun!

        Cheers

        Simon
        All round average Jazz, Blues & Rock player.
        Currently working towards ABRSM grade 8.

            Simonb

            Thank you, I appreciate that you want to keep things calm and nice here, but I'm not upset. I just wrote my opinion down, that's all. I'm not looking for a discussion or fight, and I'm not looking for people to agree or disagree with it.

              Simonb There are no rules

              Actually this forum has just one rule which includes "don't routinely make other people's experiences worse".

              Instead of being given helpful advice we've been repeatedly told "there's no point in doing what you're doing", which is the opposite of helpful. Not every thread is a topic that's up for debate or an argument that someone "has to" win.

              In a spoiler as I don't want to discuss this in this thread but I think it's relevant: I have seen an innocent question by a new poster at PW turn into a huge argument that has nothing to do with the original topic so many times, and is there any surprise that the OP never returns? I'm glad that this hasn't been allowed to happen here.

                TheBoringPianist On the other hand, my sight reading is atrocious to the point that when I go to the local chamber music readings, I play violin instead of piano so I actually have a chance of keeping up 😅.

                Oh, you're not alone in this-- I can sight read okay but definitely not well enough to read chamber music with others! At the ACMP play-ins here, the pianists are always assigned a group and choose their pieces in advance so that they can prepare.

                Also, I'm always amazed at people who play very different instruments well!

                TheBoringPianist I should really practice sight reading more often, but at this point after half a lifetime of dwelling on my weaknesses I'd also rather lean into my strengths once in a while.

                Clearly your sight reading skills haven't impeded you very much 🙂

                    Edited.

                    I finally finished the video that @Josephine and @twocats recommended. Very interested and beneficial! I loved it where he was talking about what some kind of chord was, and how he was calling it a different chord, even though it was actually some other chord, and he just said "But I do not care." If a professional can take that lax approach, I think so can the rest of us! 😃

                    Joking aside, I implemented some of his suggestions last night during practice (as I was eating my one-quarter of a vegetable) and I think it was quite helpful. I tried to memorize an 8-measure passage focusing on chord and note names and even though at the end of 15-ish minutes, I wouldn't call it truly memorized, I noticed a lot about the music that I hadn't noticed when just reading the score. All in all, very useful!

                      ShiroKuro I started my score study this morning and I think my struggle is definitely going to be doing "bite sized chunks". I want to bite off more than I can chew!

                      Maybe my goal should be to limit myself to one phrase per day when I'm at the piano. That will force me to be more patient and I have so much other stuff to work on anyway and I don't have any short-term deadline.

                          Very few people can remember “all” the pieces they played. Depending on how a piece is arranged, there are some pieces you can sit down and work out the sequence by ear if you have good ears. I came across a lead sheet version of “Silent Night” with several chords including C, G & F. There is a lead sheet version of the Simon & Garfunkel “Sound of Silence” with just 4 chords. I showed a friend who plays guitar: Dm, C, F & Bb. The melody with 5 variations is easy to follow by ear.

                          IMO you can train a student to be a good memorizer or reader early. While traditional piano lessons focus on developing reading skills, Suzuki requires students to learn the Book1 pieces by imitation off the teacher and soundtracks on a CD before learning to read. A student can be conditioned to listen to sound sequences and remember them. It’s like somebody talking about an article in a newspaper. We remember the content based on what was said than having to re-read the page to get something out of it.

                          The last piece I worked on was a Bach Bourree with 24 bars on 1 page. Has some awkward fingerings. Otherwise repeating the sequences by muscle memory isn’t too bad. Muscle memory is unreliable and requires regular repetition. If you haven’t played a piece for a while, you need to relearn some of the notes. The rest would come back quickly.

                          twocats I think my struggle is definitely going to be doing "bite sized chunks"

                          I did some work away from the piano to define my sections for Chopin Ballade 2; hopefully others can learn from my mistakes!

                          I made the initial mistake of creating a forScore "page layer" when what I wanted was a "score layer" and had to redo some work. And then another mistake of defining chunks that were way too short in the easy part. I ultimately decided on shorter chunks for difficult sections and natural phrase breaks for the easier sections. Hopefully that amounts to a reasonable amount to memorize in a day. There are 30 total sections but there's some repetition, so when I encounter a repeated part that I mostly know I'll just work on an additional section on that day!

                          Update: I think having the ability to do layers is very powerful but the forScore implementation kinda sucks. Now that I'm done marking up my sections, I have to manually select the page layer on each page to get back to my original layer! I will have to double check at the top of the page to make sure that I'm marking up the layer that I intend to.

                              twocats I don't think you reached the stage where the piece became a part of you!

                              You are absolutely right, of course. I don't think that I have ever reached the stage where a piece became a part of me, not even the few pieces that I spontaneously memorised. Would it even be possible for me to reach that stage?
                              Interesting...

                              *
                              ... feeling like the pianist on the Titanic ...

                                  Animisha

                                  Me neither. I think because we don't play that long yet? Recently I experienced for the first time it went into that direction. But not completely 😄

                                    twocats Update: I think having the ability to do layers is very powerful but the forScore implementation kinda sucks. Now that I'm done marking up my sections, I have to manually select the page layer on each page to get back to my original layer! I will have to double check at the top of the page to make sure that I'm marking up the layer that I intend to

                                    That’s unfortunate. With Newzik, the layer setting applies to the entire piece (not individual pages). I’m not sure why they would design it to make you re-select a layer for each page.

                                      twocats Maybe my goal should be to limit myself to one phrase per day when I'm at the piano.

                                      You’ll have to report back about how this goes for you. I know that with pieces that are sort of “in the pocket” of difficulty level for me (not too hard, but challenging enough to be interesting), I would want to press ahead. Or with pieces that are easy for me, I would read through and work on a huge chunk, or the whole piece…. Especially because I’m lazy and reading is easy,I’m finding it hard to force myself to memorize the piece I decided to memorize. 😅

                                      BTW one thing I’m thinking about is the distinction between “learning how to play a piece” and “memorizing a piece.” In watching the video by Greg Niemczuk, it’s earl that he doesn’t need to learn how to play that piece, he just has to memorize it, and then he’ll be working on interpretation, musicality, expression. And with the piece I’m planning to play first in my recital next month, the “easy” piece, I don’t really need to learn how to “play” this piece. (Btw this piece is Wishing, by Ffrench, the first piece in my Journal thread).

                                      But for other music I play, that’s not necessarily the case. For example, some music I struggle with choosing the fingering, or like Miracles (the Alexis Ffrench piece that Rubens transposed for me) I struggled with distributing the notes between the two hands …

                                      or Una Mattina (by Einaudi), I couldn’t play it until after a lesson with my teacher when he showed me a different way to count it. (Of course after that, it felt so easy, I felt like an idiot).
                                      Here’s Una Mattina:

                                      Anyway, I think, for me anyway, all this means is that I should choose the piece to memorize carefully, so that if my aim is to practice memorization as an exercise in and of itself, then I should pick a piece that I only have to “learn to play it,” rather than a piece that I have to “learn how to play.”

                                      Does this make sense??

                                      BTW just writing this post makes me think I really need to be firm with myself and try to memorize the whole piece for Wishing, not just a few sections… Being a “reader” makes me so lazy… 😅

                                          @twocats re the layers in forScore, that sounds frustrating, if you haven’t already perhaps you might try to google some how-to to make sure there’s not a trick you’re missing?

                                            @Animisha and @Josephine I think I reach the stage where a piece becomes a part of me only after playing it a lot (and I don’t mean practicing it a lot), combined with recording or performing it for others, and also after learning it, polishing it, forgetting it and then bringing it back again.

                                            I don’t think it has to do with how long someone has played in general, but more about how someone has interacted with that specific piece.

                                            Although, in the contest of this thread, then maybe the question is, would memorizing a piece speed up that process, or would one still have to go through some of those other steps? I don’t know…

                                              ShiroKuro @Animisha and @Josephine I think I reach the stage where a piece becomes a part of me only after playing it a lot (and I don’t mean practicing it a lot), combined with recording or performing it for others, and also after learning it, polishing it, forgetting it and then bringing it back again.

                                              The only two pieces that stuck around since I was a teenager were pieces that I worked on for at least a year back then (and when you're young a year feels like forever) and memorized! I have to say that they're indeed a part of me because everything else has gone away but I can't seem to forget these if I tried.

                                              @Animisha and @Josephine I do think it's possible for you to reach that stage, but you would have to keep working on a piece over a very long time, as SK said not just "practicing" but "playing". And I also agree that the act of putting something away and bringing it back solidifies it (Greg N. also talked about "forgetting" a section and "relearning" it).

                                              ShiroKuro Anyway, I think, for me anyway, all this means is that I should choose the piece to memorize carefully, so that if my aim is to practice memorization as an exercise in and of itself, then I should pick a piece that I only have to “learn to play it,” rather than a piece that I have to “learn how to play.”

                                              I'm doing both-- I can play the fast parts of Ballade 2 but slowly. It'll take a lot of work to get it up to speed, but I have stuff like fingerings and phrasing figured out already (Greg N. can do that on the fly but better for us if it's figured out in advance, I think). I'm hoping that the memorization will also help the learning process but we'll see!

                                              ShiroKuro re the layers in forScore, that sounds frustrating, if you haven’t already perhaps you might try to google some how-to to make sure there’s not a trick you’re missing?

                                              I'll Google, the software can't be that stupid, can it? 🤣

                                                      twocats I'll Google, the software can't be that stupid, can it? 🤣

                                                      I was thinking that the solution might be to only use score layers even for my markings (forScore defaults to a page layer) but apparently if you use multiple score layers there is a long-time bug where they might compress into one big score layer and you can't get it back. Or it doesn't save and is lost!!

                                                      And there's a person who reported that all their page layers got merged into one as well. I think it's minimal risk for these particular markings as they're easy to erase if needed but it looks like using layers for anything complex may be a little risky. I'm going to be backing up my .4sc individual annotation files more often!

                                                          twocats I'm hoping that the memorization will also help the learning process but we'll see!

                                                          I am sure it will. I just feel I'm too lazy right now to try to memorize a piece that I also have to more active learn the how of as well. 😅