On memorizing piano pieces: I took several years of piano lessons. I once learned to play a piece from memory, only to forget the opening chord at the recital. I was completely stuck, so after a minute of trying I had to just apologize and sit down again. It was likely the most embarrassing experience of my childhood.
I learned the hard way that just playing the piece every day was enough for my “muscle memory” to know what to do. At some point, during practice, my hands would just play the piece correctly without any conscious thought or effort. But that was actually my downfall—my muscle memory could easily evaporate when I was in a different setting. And under pressure, my conscious brain discovered that it wasn’t prepared to step in and help.
After that, my piano teacher helped me try some other techniques. The strategy that worked best for me was to both practice daily to engage my muscle memory, and also to consciously memorize the exact notes in several key measures (usually the opening of each section).
Another thing that might have helped would have been to practice the same piece on many different pianos, ideally with strangers in the room. When you play the same piece on the same piano, you’re not only immersing yourself in a specific piece, but in a specific instrument/environment/social context. When you keep the piece the same but change the context, the memory risks falling apart.
One challenge in understanding your own memory slips is determining their cause.
For piano performance, is it insufficient practice? Leaning too hard on muscle memory? Not playing on enough different pianos/environments? Playing in front of an audience? Or maybe you just had a bad day that day for some completely unrelated reason, like some other stressor prior to the recital?
There are lots of things you can do to avoid memory slips, and the more the better. But I think it’s also good for people to be skeptical/open-minded about inferring cause and effect. Better just to do the virtuous actions and assume they’ll all work together to give a benefit.
To me, being competent at sight-reading comes from immersive practice. But sight-reading itself helps you build broad knowledge, because it gives you the ability to sample lots and lots of pieces of music—not just the sounds, but the physicality.
And uniting mind and body in sight reading is an excellent complement to just listening to other people’s recordings as you explore the world of classical music. For example, let’s say you were capable of stumbling through a Beethoven sonata at low speeds via sight-reading. You might be able to play (badly) 1-2 pages of the sonata in the time it would take you to listen to it.
One way to really get familiar with a wide swath of the classical music literature in, say, an hour a day, might be to listen to 2 sonatas (each ~15 minutes), and sight-read two other sonatas for ~15 minutes. Try to space out your listenings and your sight-readings of the same piece. For example, listen to them in order from first to last, but sight read them in reverse order so that most of the listenings/playthroughs are spaced out. This capitalizes on the spacing effect.
In this way, you would be able to expose yourself to all 32 Beethoven sonatas in a couple weeks. I bet you’d have a much better memory of how they go if you did the sight reading + listening combo, rather than doubling the amount of listening and doing no sight reading.
On memorizing piano pieces: I took several years of piano lessons. I once learned to play a piece from memory, only to forget the opening chord at the recital. I was completely stuck, so after a minute of trying I had to just apologize and sit down again. It was likely the most embarrassing experience of my childhood.
I learned the hard way that just playing the piece every day was enough for my “muscle memory” to know what to do. At some point, during practice, my hands would just play the piece correctly without any conscious thought or effort. But that was actually my downfall—my muscle memory could easily evaporate when I was in a different setting. And under pressure, my conscious brain discovered that it wasn’t prepared to step in and help.
After that, my piano teacher helped me try some other techniques. The strategy that worked best for me was to both practice daily to engage my muscle memory, and also to consciously memorize the exact notes in several key measures (usually the opening of each section).
Another thing that might have helped would have been to practice the same piece on many different pianos, ideally with strangers in the room. When you play the same piece on the same piano, you’re not only immersing yourself in a specific piece, but in a specific instrument/environment/social context. When you keep the piece the same but change the context, the memory risks falling apart.
Yeah, I forgot to mention, I actually tried that too! I at least visited one of my teacher’s other students and tried performing on her piano.
It’s harder for me to tell how much it helped, but I think it was useful, at least for my own confidence.
One challenge in understanding your own memory slips is determining their cause.
For piano performance, is it insufficient practice? Leaning too hard on muscle memory? Not playing on enough different pianos/environments? Playing in front of an audience? Or maybe you just had a bad day that day for some completely unrelated reason, like some other stressor prior to the recital?
There are lots of things you can do to avoid memory slips, and the more the better. But I think it’s also good for people to be skeptical/open-minded about inferring cause and effect. Better just to do the virtuous actions and assume they’ll all work together to give a benefit.
Is there a way to build broad knowledge for sight reading pieces, or is it merely a matter of sufficiently immersing oneself by just practicing?
To me, being competent at sight-reading comes from immersive practice. But sight-reading itself helps you build broad knowledge, because it gives you the ability to sample lots and lots of pieces of music—not just the sounds, but the physicality.
And uniting mind and body in sight reading is an excellent complement to just listening to other people’s recordings as you explore the world of classical music. For example, let’s say you were capable of stumbling through a Beethoven sonata at low speeds via sight-reading. You might be able to play (badly) 1-2 pages of the sonata in the time it would take you to listen to it.
One way to really get familiar with a wide swath of the classical music literature in, say, an hour a day, might be to listen to 2 sonatas (each ~15 minutes), and sight-read two other sonatas for ~15 minutes. Try to space out your listenings and your sight-readings of the same piece. For example, listen to them in order from first to last, but sight read them in reverse order so that most of the listenings/playthroughs are spaced out. This capitalizes on the spacing effect.
In this way, you would be able to expose yourself to all 32 Beethoven sonatas in a couple weeks. I bet you’d have a much better memory of how they go if you did the sight reading + listening combo, rather than doubling the amount of listening and doing no sight reading.