By memorizing a piece of music, it is easy to “cheat” from time to time. Maybe your music is in front of you and you steal one or two looks in the difficult sections. At the same time, it can be challenging to get your music completely out of sight. Coming and going in between in the book “on” and the book “off” is a way to pass out from the score. This is a great post, thank you very much for sharing.
But if the time you can spend on musical endeavors is limited, linking your memorization practice with the detailed methods below will help you remember faster and more extensively. The practice of remembering music differs from the more standard practice methods for learning off-page music. Somehow, remembering music may seem easier, because our mind is a kind of magnetic attachment to repeated material. In fact, you’ve probably accidentally noticed that you memorize parts of your pieces just by playing over and over. But there is a difference between this involuntary memorization and the type that results in glorious concert performances without sheet music from ecstatic-looking piano superstars. Deliberate memorization is methodical, detailed and driven to internalize as much music as possible.
All those notes and details, perfectly remembered and then simulated fantastically in the moment. There is something in a memorable music performance that makes you feel a bit more authentic, intimate and honest. This is undoubtedly a subjective perception, as many of the best artists used scores while playing, but the appeal of a memorized performance certainly exists.
From the beginning you should dig through the difficult parts of your music and make sure that the fingering matches your playing style. Here are some tips for pianists to have small hands, which focuses on choosing good fingering and making adjustments. Even if you have a normal sized hand, the intention should be to make it as easy as possible to switch from one note to another. Therefore, it is never a good idea to try to practice, let alone memorize a piece of music if your mind is not focused. It’s a good idea to plan your practice sessions when your mind is comfortable.
An idea that helped me, not really mine, but my teacher, is to change the temporal value of the notes, ranging between long and short. If a measurement consists of 4-quarter notes, make two long and two short (i.e. two of them dotted and two of them eighth). I am 79 years old and return to my first love, the piano, after an absence of more than 50 years. I can hardly remember the lyrics, so I have to write and pronounce them as a monologue out loud. Instead of being a rhythmic memorization, I now learn a story. It makes it easier for me if I get lost during a workout or performance.
You still have to spend quality time remembering the words. I make sure that I play the entire piece of music every day to get into the flow of the piece as a whole. But the crisp memorial job happens in much smaller pieces. If there is a passage that gives me a little trouble, I can only practice one or two steps at a time. Indicate a series of starting points in the whole piece where the piece can start at any time, in case a memory strip occurs.
The memorization process can be daunting if you don’t know how to get started, so we hope the tips for remembering in this article have given you some confidence. I teach my music theory students that it is important to know the theory behind the scales and the most important signatures, but making friends with every musical key is burna boy what is needed for real musical fluidity. When I look at a piece of music written on three sharp objects, I don’t have to stop and think about which keys three sharp objects have in their main signatures. Since I am already friends with the thirty head and small keys, I know that when I see three sharp objects, he is my friend.