Memorizing Music
You play a piece often enough that you no longer need the music, and you think it is in there. Weeks later you make a mistake in bar eleven and the whole piece disappears. Not one bar: everything. You can only start again from the top, and you do not know why.
- 4 kinds of memory
- a chain or a map
- start anywhere
At which level
- Intermediate to advanced
- Any instrument
In short
Play something often enough and memory appears by itself, in a very specific shape: each passage triggers the next one. The bar you just played is the cue for the bar coming. That is the same mechanism as knowing the words of a song you never deliberately learned, and it has the same weakness. Break the chain anywhere and there is no way back in except from the start.
Memorising properly means building a map instead: knowing where you are in the form, which harmony you are on, and what the passage is doing, so that any point is an entry point.
How you practise it
Four kinds of memory work together. Motor memory is fast, reliable and brittle under pressure. Aural memory is knowing how it goes. Visual memory is seeing the page or the hands. Conceptual memory is knowing the structure and the harmony, and it is the safety net: it is the only one that lets you restart in the middle of a phrase. The classification is old, from piano pedagogy around 1900, and modern research has refined rather than replaced it.
Where you run into this
- A performance that collapses completely after one small slip
- A player who can start at any bar on request
- A piece that survives a year away because the structure was learned, not just the moves
Our own examples
A short phrase you can start from several points here. Being able to enter anywhere is the test, and it is a much harder test than playing it through.