Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Find it difficult to memorise music, due to good sighreading

Hi guys
I am 30 year old intermediate-advance player. I find it very difficult to memorise piano music especially some sections of music (like Chopin etudes) are very difficult and the notes seems to be abritary picked my Chopin.

Another thing is that I have excellent sight reading skills, and therefore I can satisfy myself very often by playing along with music and therefore get lazy with memorising since I was young.

I read somewhere (and I fully agree) that if one does not meormise the music, one will never perfect it. Rather, the person will get to 80percent of the piece then abandon it completely.

Since I want to get into serious playing (like going for diploma level exams) are there any advice you can give me regarding ways to improve my memorising skill?

I have the same thing going on. I play music for Sunday services, so I lean heavily on my sight-reading abilities. Just a couple weeks ago I played Liszt's Sonetto del Petrarca 123 for one of those services, with no preparation at all. When you have that capability, it can be hard to motivate yourself to memorize! But in certain situations you are required to do so, so it is important to know how to accomplish that.

If you're like me, the good sight-reading goes hand in hand with having a good understanding of the patterns and sequences that are going on. Take advantage of that and reason your way through the music. Just having certain points in the music where you recognize what you are looking at, then you can rely on muscle memory to fill in the rest.

I'm only addressing this briefly because of lack of time. Hopefully others can chime in as well.

Random thoughts:

I used to be a strict memorization advocate until I had to play Bach's Italian Concerto: the second mvt. is brutal to perform from memory (for a lot of people).

Also, I think something happens cognitively after about 25, such that memorization gets much harder than it was in one's youth.

My teacher was a great sight reader and accompanist who said it was amazing how easy something could be in rehearsals and how hard it would get in performances, playing from the score.

Myra Hess often used the score during the Second World War, and got criticized (by a few) for so doing, although it was clear to most people that she knew the work backwards and forwards, and the score was just a "safety net."

One tactic for better memorizing: put the score on a low table to one side, play til stuck, look briefly at it, then keep going.

I always had an easier time with memory than with reading, and pieces would generally memorize themselves as I learned them. But now, perhaps due to a combination of improved sight-reading, a gradually faster learning process, and the fact that I'm over age 25 I have to be a little more intentional about memorizing, particularly with music that's close to my sight-reading level.

Some things I find helpful
- singing the piece away from the piano
- memorizing one line at a time (melody only, bass line only etc)
- memorizing in sections starting from the end, so as to always move from less-secure into more-secure material during playthroughs

The part that's always the hardest for me is remembering which inversion chords are played in. That's just not something I hear as easily as other elements of the music. And inversions are very easy to recognize visually when reading, so they never memorize themselves (for me). The only way I can memorize chord passages is to memorize the top notes in order as if they are a soprano line, and the bottom notes as if they are a bass line. It requires a lot of drilling.

I do agree that the piece improves immediately when it's memorized, even if I was sight-reading it fluently. There are always musical elements that I don't really notice until I have to memorize them. Like a lot of what the inner voices do in Kinderszenen -- I can just about sight-read Kinderszenen but I suddenly felt I understood the voice leading a lot better when I started playing it from memory. Consequently it started sounding a lot better.

I like the point above about sequences and patterns - that was always something that I used when memorising pieces, finding patterns in the music that are repeated, and once you understand them they come naturally each time you get to them.

Some other things I used to do when I was playing seriously:

* 'playing' the music in my head while lying in bed at night
* practising from the start, and restarting each time my memory failed. This can get a bit painful, but reinforced where my gaps were (along with solidifying the bits that I knew)
* reading the sheet music along to a recording
* reading the sheet music and hearing it in my head
* playing the piece slowly from memory - much less chance that muscle memory will take over so you really need to know each note

I was always a terrible sight-reader, but good at memorising. Wouldn't it be nice to be naturally good at both!

If that was true, then all chamber music players and orchestral musicians (who never memorise their music) never perfect the music they play, which is patently false.

No doubt, they can all play bits of what they learnt from memory, but not the complete works. I assume you're in the UK. You might have heard of the Aurora Orchestra, who played in the BBC Proms last year. In their concert, they played Mozart's Jupiter Symphony from memory (but not the Rihm or R.Strauss). The conductor and players talked about how difficult it was, and how long it took to memorise the music even for a piece they know very well, and how protracted and how extensive their rehearsals had to be, to get everything right, compared to if they'd played from the score.

That is also my own experience, ever since I started memorising some of the pieces I learn (for recital purposes) a few years ago. Prior to that, the only pieces I ever deliberately memorised were for my performance diploma exam several decades ago (though there were a few short pieces that I could always play from memory simply because they were short and straightforward, and I'd played them so often). It takes me three to five times as long to learn a piece to play from memory as to play it from the score, to the same standard. And I still get the odd memory lapses, for which I often rely on my improvising skills to get out of. If I had zero improv skills, I probably would never even countenance playing my recitals from memory.


I'd say that you should start the memorising process right from the start - memorise as you learn, in other words. What I've found is that it takes almost as long to memorise a piece that I can already play comfortably from the score (including pieces I've played for decades), as to memorise a piece I'm learning from scratch.

So, once you decide you're going to memorise a piece, memorise each and every bar as you learn it. Get all the fingerings sorted out at the beginning - you might have to 'roughly' try out certain passages at performing speed to make sure that your fingering actually works at that speed. Sometimes, seemingly plausible fingerings that seem perfect at slow tempo don't work when you speed it up. Look for recurring patterns - and take note of when the pattern starts the same, but then suddenly or subtly changes in the recap. This is where it's easy to get caught out when you're under pressure and performing. I've seen well-known concert pianists get caught out in this way, when they forget to 'turn the corner' (especially key change) and end up having to play the development section all over again......

And - always, always - have several 'starting points' where you can pick up the music from, if you have a memory lapse. Without them, a lapse spells complete disaster in performance, unless you have exceptional improvisational skills (like Liszt, when he hit a wrong note at the end of a piece - he simply extended the ending without pausing, as if that inconclusive note was what he intended to play all along..... ). Practise stop-starting, jumping across sections; and make sure the ending is as securely memorised as the beginning.

I've always heard this, but at 51 I find memorising much easier than I ever did in my 20s. For me it gets easier with age, which I put down to being a more experienced memoriser. I don't know how long this will last, so I am trying to make a list of pieces that I want to memorise before my 60s. I'm currently working on the last five Beethoven sonatas, and my favourite of all piano works, the Diabelli variations. The Art of Fugue is my dream, but I don't know how possible it is, but I'd certainly find it easier now than thirty years ago.

I'm a fairly decent sight reader, and never really HAD to memorize until college, but often found that I memorized everything anyway. What always did it for me was page turns. When practicing, I would always wait to turn the page until the memory gave out. When first learning that would be soon, but eventually it would be most of the next page. Then I would try the other way, turning the page earlier and earlier. Soon enough I would be playing it from memory, and forgetting to turn the pages at all.

I don't know if this is obvious but make sure you've analysed the various harmonic, melodic and structural features of the piece you're memorising carefully, and the parts you're having difficulty with even more so. Try to use mnemonics (e.g. making a word or phrase from some key notes or feature of the passage) with bits that seem arbitrary. They won't help you in a performance but will help get over the initial 'hump' of memorising. And split really difficult to memorise passage into smaller chunks - cover up bars with post-its for example - then gradually increase the amount by which you continue. Finally, practicing slowly with eyes closed forces an increase in your awareness of finger, hand and arm position and your 'mental picture' of the piano which will also help.

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that this reduces the amount of memory work required by 90%. Also see how much you can play by ear. Even if you can't manage a lot of it, this will improve over time -provided you make the effort.

Maybe it's not that your sighreading is so good, but that your prooreading is so bad.