For those of you (like me) who choose to maintain some type of repertoire, do you experience memory lapses especially during times when you're learning new stuff? Despite trying to play my rep. at least once a week, I've been experiencing more and more of these, so now a lot of my pieces are just 70 to 90 percent memorized. It makes me wonder if the brain can only hold so much, or is it just me...

One day, maybe this Winter, I'll go back and relearn them again because this is one of my piano goals.

Its natural to experince this. The human brain is faileble. And this apllies so much more for those who hold piano as a hobby and additionally have intelectually demanding jobs. As the repertoire grows, you just have to reherse them more...

I find that although I play my (miniscule) repertoire regularly, I also tend to gradually make little modifications here and there. Every now and then I have to pull out the music and get myself back on track.

I think that learning and memorizing takes a lot more focus than most of us are used to having to apply to things.

Yep!
Some days i can rattle off my repertoire. (albeit about four and about four minutes each), with very few hiccups.
Then say, the following day, my brain just freezes on certain passages and can`t remember it at all, and have to re-check my sheets.........................
Very frustrating but i put this down to my age (56).
But it seems to happen less and less as i really install them in my brain.
But as you say, quite common when you are trying to learn a new one on top of the oldies

It happens every once in a while especially if it's some older piece that you don't practice that often anymore. But it's usually easy to relearn the forgotten passages with the sheet music. It also really helps if you've written down the fingering for those passages.

Yup, slippery slope too. Because that first time it's 95%, the next it's 90% and next thing you know you can't remember a thing.

In Playing the Piano for Pleasure, Charles Cooke tells us to immediately add those forgotten measures as "fragments" and get them so they'll "never" be forgotten again.

In my case with the Chopin waltz in B minor, I still have problems with areas that were tricky to begin with. I guess that's not a surprise!!

I thought I had memory lapses...but now I can't remember!

Yeah, I also often forget... um... what were we talking about?

I don't rely on my memory any more. However well I think I know a piece of music, I'm quite capable of forgetting completely what note comes next, and for no obvious reason.

I've given up worrying about it -- I assume it's just one of the many ways age mocks me, like a kind of arthritis of the brain.

Many years ago I noticed something similar, and since then I have made it a point to always be able to follow the score while playing a repertoire piece. So if I memorized a piece (which I like to do for music that I play in recitals or that I record), at some point I go back to the score and read through it HS, then HT, and reacquaint myself with the score so I can use that as a memory hint. Then, because I also like to have at least a few pieces I can play without the score, I practice those pieces alternately with and without the score. That means that there are only 2 or 3 pieces that I confidently play with no score, but the flip side is that I have more than 10 pieces in my repertoire that I can play with the score.

Given that I am a grad student (not in a music-related field!), I teach, and in the middle of all that, I always try to be working on new music, I don't see how it would be possible for me to maintain 10 repertoire pieces if I only played them by memory. Because I can always follow the score, that means that when I am super busy and can't work on my repertoire pieces, I haven't "forgotten" them and they remain playable and in my fingers.

Andy, thanks for the reminder. I will order that book today. It seems like a true Pianist's book.

Ah yes, problem spots in pieces always rear their ugly heads for the pieces that are just in maintenance mode. I've got quite a few of them.

ShiroKiro: I have *just* started to do this - playing my old pieces with the score and actually reading the score whilst playing. This is how I plan to re-learn my older material. Thanks for the advice, everyone...happy 4th!!

I still get memory lapses but I am much better at being able to recover from stumbles than I used to be. I find that the time when I am most likely to forget whole sections of a piece is just after I have learned that piece to a point where it is playable in front of others. I feel like I have to learn a piece, go through the natural process of forgetting it and then relearn it a few months later for it to stick in my memory.