Learn First Then Memorize

AUG 17, 2012:  Here is another way to memorize a piece of piano music.  First of all, divide the piece you are learning into sections as described on the first post (July 14).  Once you have learned all the notes and rhythms this way, then you can start memorizing.  You'll find, probably, that you have memorized a great deal of it already just by going over it the way it's explained in that opening post.

Now the fun begins.  You get to try different shades of dynamics.  For instance, the composer writes mF, which means "medium loud".  What is medium loud, anyway?  You have to decide that.  You also have to decide which accents are to be really accented and which can be done gently.  Or should they all be done gently?  There are no easy answers, and if the composer was there standing in front of you, you might get a simple explanation or you might get an ambiguous one.  At any rate the composer is usually not standing there, particularly if this work you are learning is over 80 years old.

You can change your ideas about this as you memorize.  Memorize away from the instrument, and it should be easy to hear the music in your head as you read along, because you now have a powerful associational link between the printed page and the sounds it actually produces.  Now you can look for inner voices, for melody and harmony, for bass line and phrase structure--apart from your performance of it.  You can look at the music in the abstract.  And as you're looking, you can remember what comes after what.  Memorize by phrase, by bar, by line, by page, whatever.  Just make sure that the process makes sense to you and that you can put the individual gestures of the music together---in correct sequence.

Since you've already gone through the process of listening to this music over and over again in small segments, you've acquired the technique for putting the stuff together mentally.  So now, read along at your desk and do it--it shouldn't be too hard.  After this, your playing of the music should get away from any mechanical qualities it might have had when you first learned it, because now it's making sense to you as music and not just some black dots on a page filled with horizontal lines.  The music's really what it's about, not the details you see in print.