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I think reading from the score is the way to go, but there seem to be a lot of people who don't sight-read all that well, so they feel that they have to memorize. If that's the case, I would recommend trying out the score-reading method on pieces that are easier to sight-read. Then work up to harder pieces.

When you play while reading something that you've seen and played before, you're using a mixture of memory and reading. Then try something of the same level of difficulty that you've never seen before, and you'll find out how much memory there is in the mix for you. It'll vary from person to person, and from time to time for the same person. The more you do it, the more memory you develop.

I try to watch the paper as much as possible, but when something is really well memorized that gets boring.

Some people simply memorize without trying to. I'm one such person. It's not that I can't play from the score because I do all the time; I play many "throw-away" pieces below my current level that I practice for a week and move on and I don't memorize them. But my teacher-assigned pieces are much more difficult and I stay on them for many weeks. Initially I play from the score but after a while I realize that the score is no longer necesary because I have already memorized the music. For me it's just something that happens with no additional effort. Different people have different learning strategies.

That Guardian piece is interesting. Not everyone is good at memorizing, nor should everybody who wants to perform be required to memorize. I blame Franz Liszt for that----not sure if it's his fault, but it seems like a good guess.

I definitely fall into the group of learning a tough piece, and end up memorizing it more than I am reading the score. I am trying to do mix of reading, as reference point, and memorizing. I am not a proficient sight reader, and I heard that sight reading exercises should always be pieces below what you are learning to play. And I am trying to throw such a random piece as part of my practice. My teacher tells me I have tendency to memorize, but it is coping mechanism for me to progress! Haha. But I am working on the sight reading too...not enough time and energy on some days. I love piano so much that I spend little time on exercise!

According to this guy, good sight-readers and good memorizers need to learn to be both:

http://blog.twedt.com/archives/904

I agree mimi9...the magic balance ...

The interesting thing is, from what I recall from my student days, everyone was adept at sight-reading. And everyone could also sight-sing. I don't know whether that's a consequence of the fact that the ubiquitous ABRSM exams (which almost every music student - of any instrument, or voice - does in the UK) places a lot of weight on sight-reading and aural skills, and none at all on memorizing, in the belief that the vast majority of 'graduates' will not become solo concert pianists (the one category which is expected to play their music from memory) but will instead be using sight-reading skills as professional or amateur musicians.

Certainly, as an amateur pianist, I used to spend (and still spend) a lot of time reading through a lot of music that came my way, whether in collaboration with other musicians (especially a violinist friend), or just for fun by myself, without any thought of memorizing any of it.

That's in contrast to the assessments/exams and the 'student recital' system in the USA and Canada, where students are expected to perform from memory, which was rather puzzling to me when I first heard about it in PW. After all, how many students ever become solo concert artists, if they do become professional musicians? Orchestral and chamber/collaborative musicians almost never play from memory.

I know quite a few professional musicians - most of whom also teach part-time - who told me that they can't remember the last time they had to memorize anything, since they became professional. But they all rely greatly on their ability to sight-read unfamiliar music very easily and fluently.

I too am one such person. I do not sight read very well but continue the arduous grinding daily process of practicing sight reading nonetheless ..... is like pounding rocks and hoping to produce something more than dust. I do not memorize on purpose but after staring at a given score for the week or two or more it takes to develop some mastery of the piece, it just happens.... self-conditioning as it were. I have been at this a litle over 2 years starting as a 55 year old beginner. What other options are there if I want to learn pieces enough to play them reasonably well? I practice. As the course material has progressed, I have increased practice time, if it is 2 or 3 hours a night, so be it to the extent necessary to eventually play the given piece well enough to get instructor's approval to move on to the next new piece.

" ... people set too much store in memorizing ...." I take this to mean there are players who do attempt to memorize on purpose .... or as a strategy as Qazsedcft said. There is usually a mirror opposite for just about every behavior characteristic, so there are probably people out there who set too much store in sight reading. Also, there are many famous performers who attained great celebrity despite being self taught pianists by ears, not eyes; Elton John, for instance.

My instructor, a wonderful young woman in her mid-twenties and somewhat recent music major graduate , plays nothing ( piano, also viola) if she does not have a score from which to read/play. I asked her if she would consider collaborating with me for student showcase. She said I would need to come up with the score for her to play her part. On another occasion I asked her - do you not have a handful of favorite songs in your head for which you can just sit down and play when the mood strikes you? She looked me in the eyes somewhat uneasily and slowly shook her head "no". By the same token she has been somewhere between perplexed and pleasantly surprised as my accidental memorizing has increasingly risen to the surface.

I suspect there are multiple factors in involved, don't know what all of them may be but pretty sure personality types and age are among them. It may be an interesting study from a behavioral analysis or engineering view but as far as being able to accumulate pieces in my memory bank repertoire, I really do not care what all the factors are, just happy that at least one seems to be working in my favor 🎶🙂

In the article that I just posted (yes, it is too long) the author offers this view of memorizers vs. sight readers. Don't know if he's right or not:

"I believe that when one becomes really good at sight-reading, they often perceive an illusion that they are getting worse at memorizing. The table above already discusses one of the main reasons for this, namely that the pianist spends less time tasting, chewing and digesting each note they play (as opposed to the slow reader who has to put so much thought into every note). There is another reason: Those who can sight-read well get their pieces up to “performance tempo” so quickly that the normal time it takes them to memorize a piece of music hasn’t been reached by the time the piece is performance quality. As a result, time must be spent consciously memorizing the piece. . . . .

"Slow sight-readers are usually the ones saying, “I never have to try to memorize my music – it just happens.” In reality, they aren’t better at memorizing than their musical neighbor – more likely, they are just worse at reading music than their neighbor! Their own inexperience (or fault) becomes a virtue in their performance-oriented musical journey."

This basically applies to the vast majority of professional musicians. It also applies to me, a lowly amateur, who only fairly recently (since four years ago) decided to memorize everything I intended to perform at my monthly recital. (There's a lot, lot more music I can perform if I'd chosen to play from the score instead, but the time required to memorize all that would mean I'd be spending all my waking hours at the piano when not at work, as I have a full-time job that's nothing to do with music.)

I don't think they actually believe that they're poor memorizers - just that the effort required to memorize pieces mean that they can only play a limited repertoire from memory compared to what they could if they were playing from the score. Svialoslav Richter, for example, greatly expanded his performing repertoire when he started to perform in public using sheet music and page-turner. In his later years, he had probably the biggest concert repertoire of any well-known pianist - and all because he'd switched to playing from the music (apparently after a disastrous memory lapse in a concert). By then, he had such a huge reputation that the audience didn't think any less of him for using the score in concert. The great Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli famously had a very small concert repertoire, but his students all attested that he knew, and played, a lot of other music that he never performed in public.

Interestingly, there's also a sort of reverse psychology today, where well-known pianist-composers like Stephen Hough always perform their own music with the score in front of them - to show that they aren't improvising it, and are playing music that had been carefully through-composed, like the other pieces that are in their recital program . It's generally accepted that contemporary music is always performed from the score:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqzZfMzba5I

To keep this thread somewhat accurate, Elton John was not self-taught. Google his official website, or Wikipedia.

From Elton John's official website:



From Wikipedia:



BTW, Please share who are the "many famous performers" who are self taught of whom you speak.

If I could play 4 pages of Handel like a "gramophone record" after only one hearing, I wouldn't be "a diligent classical student" either.

This thread is really going far afield and I'm not helping!

The take-away for me is the use of spaced repetition for piano practice. I've never heard of using spaced repetition for anything other than for flash card study (for music theory or languages) but working on various pieces in some sort of a random way probably does help the mind to learn and retain.

Rocket88, I agree. The link I posted was written by an opinionated person who doesn't always know what he is talking about. But I did find his comments about sight-readers and memorizers at least interesting to think about. It's quite possible that he doesn't know what he is talking about in those cases either.

I think there is some truth to this, or perhaps I should say this rings true for me. Also, speaking for myself, it is not (sight) reading the notes themselves that is the slow step for me, it is poor (but improving) feel for the geography of the keyboard, i.e., finding my way around without looking. Improvement has come as I have forced myself to keep my eyes on the score rather than on the keyboard. In defense of memorizing, there are difficult passages in scores that almost require one to memorize. My teacher has encouraged me to memorize some pieces, but I do note that when she plays in concert, she plays from the score.

With respect to the OP, I occasionally go back and read through old and forgotten repertoire with the idea I will get it back in shape, but usually that falls to the side because the new pieces my teacher assigns to me take up my practice time and energy. I'm slow and time is fast.

Since this thread is drifting near and far (and most interestingly so!), may I ask why you choose to memorize pieces for your monthly concerts rather than play from the score? What is the added value?

Wow, this thread has gone in some really interesting directions! Thanks to those posting articles, I'll definitely be reading those later.

Valencia, I think your question (several posts back now) was already answered quite well, but just to say that I agree with that, Debussy or Bach inventions can certainly be sight-read -- not by me if we're talking prima vista! But that level of music is certainly do-able for playing from the score. But again it's all in how you approach it. And there definitely nothing wrong with memorizing it either! Don't get me wrong. I just find that for myself, the score-centric approach works best.

I'll try to write more after I read all the newer posts and the two articles that have been linked. This thread is so cool because it shows all the various approaches from memorizing to reading.

With all due respect, agreed, neither do I want you to derail the this thread ...... but, in the 70's EJ was being promoted here in the states .... somewhere around the era of Madman Across The Water era and Crocodile Rock. There was ample publicity in print - including cartoon leaflets - some of which I read, as well as direct television interview / quotes which I watched and heard anecdotes from Reggie himself wherein he described home life during his formative years growing up in England while passing idle time teaching himself to play by ear " couldn't read a bloody note to save my life". Of course by today's standards, if google or wiki does not render such information, it never happened ..... urban myth, nod nod, wink wink. Be this as it may, there is no single, universal version of recorded history or truth, yet. Likewise there is no single, universally agreed upon fingering for scores of music such as the aforementioned On Parade.

The quote I cited that Elton John had piano lessons while young, and thus was not self taught, is from Elton John's official website, "Eltonjohn.com" in his Bio section.

To be frank, it 'just happened' .

The recitals started quite by accident, when I began attending meetings at that venue for educational purposes (for my job) and saw that ancient C.Bechstein grand sitting forlornly - but prominently - on the stage. I asked if I could play it, and having brought no sheet music with me, could only play bits of half-remembered classical pieces that I 'joined up' with my own improvisations. Following that, people asked me to make it a regular monthly thing, and I didn't want to lower their expectations by starting to bring music scores with me (and my improvs might be OK for a one-off impromptu fling, but not for a regular classical recital series) .

So, for the next month, I memorized and practiced properly a few pieces that I could already almost play complete from memory (because I'd been playing them for many years, on & off) - Mozart's K545, Chopin's 'Minute' Waltz and 'Revolutionary' Etude, and Schumann/Liszt's Widmung. And it went on from there, as I dug up pieces that I used to play well, which didn't require too much effort to re-polish to performance standard. It was the memorizing part that took a lot of time - and four years on, I still don't find it any easier - especially as I'm also learning and performing pieces I'd never played before. Most of what I play in recital now are pieces that I've learnt in the past year or so, sprinkled with old favorites.

However, when I played at last year's Christmas concert (at very short notice, when the official accompanist fell ill) to accompany the singing, I did play from the music - actually, I had to sight-read most of it, as they were a mixture of traditional carols and Christmas songs that I'd never set eyes on before. A few I'd never even heard before.......