I have a video I made quite a while ago about How to Memorize Music which describes a technique I learned from my father Morton Estrin. www.MortonEstrin.com One of the first things I ever learned as a child sitting down at the piano was how to memorize.
My original technique includes a very simple process of taking one hand at a time with very small phrases. You practice each hand until memorized and then combine the two hands until it’s smooth and memorized. Once you have completed that, you move on to the next phrase connecting phrases as you learn them until you complete the piece. This is a system that has worked phenomenally not just for me, my father, and my sister, but all of our piano students and their students over many years!
This technique holds up for nearly any style or type of music but in some cases the music can become so complex that it can become incredibly difficult to memorize. The system may be inadequate when you have music that presents a middle voice that is distributed between the two hands such as in a Bach Fugue or a Scriabin Etude. It becomes very difficult to learn only one hand at a time in this situation. Luckily, there are some techniques you can use to work through these challenges.
In the case of the middle voice, try practicing only the middle voice (using both hands). The important thing is to get through each individual phrase and do your best to combine them. It may be incredibly difficult to combine the phrases and you might find yourself struggling to do this. The best thing is to keep working: learn a phrase, learn the next phrase, and then try your best to power through them. Even if you can’t combine them in a fluid way, don’t stop; just keep advancing through the phrases of music. This might sound counterintuitive to the process I described earlier, but if you wait until the phrases are smoothly connected, you limit how much you can learn in one sitting. Then when you practice the next day you can combine phrases to get a more fluid connection. You still may not be able to connect all the phrases, but you can break it down in the following manner (or something similar depending upon the context):
Day one: Learn 2 measure phrases and connect each 2 measure phrase to the adjacent phrase.
Day two: Learn 4 measure phrases.
Day three: Connect all the phrases!
You can continue working in this manner in each successive section of the piece.
Thanks again for joining me Robert Estrin Robert@LivingPianos.com (949) 244-3729
One thought on “Advanced Memorization Techniques for Piano”
Learn or memorize chunk by chunk! How true, Robert! Why is it that so many pianist dislike or refuse to learn a difficult piece of music piece by piece, bite by bite? The most talented pianist do it and did it in the past.
If my memory serves me right, I remember reading once that the great Richter learnt many of his difficult pieces bar by bar. Maybe a little exaggeration, here; but I am sure he would have learnt the difficult pieces phrase by phrase and then connected each to the next or to the whole.
Again thank you, Robert, for sharing your knowledge and skills with us.
Len