Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Good memory, bad reader

One more in the memorizers' camp here.

I am learning to sight read, but at a snail's pace and am certainly not good enough to rely on the sheet to play.

Furthermore, since I have the bad habit of learning pieces that are at the absolute limit of my playing habilities and a bit more, I need all my concentraiton to try and make it sound musical.

Yet. I think that I will always memorize pieces I want to keep in my repertoire, relying on sight reading to play those I have forgotten and to learn new ones.

Last week, after the children's concert, while parents and guests where having a bite to eat, my teacher told me to go and play some background music saying "Don't tell me You don't have your sheets, You know them by heart". So, I went up on the stage and got to play on the Grand Piano and soon ended up with half a dozen kids around me, showing what they could do and it was all a great deal of fun, thanks to memory for the fond memory.

Another memoriser here!

Personally I'm not too bothered about learning to sight read just yet; I play only for my own enjoyment at the moment so if I want to learn a new piece, I'll just memorise it in small stages. I've 'dabbled' with a few simple pieces for a few years and have focused on learning piano for about 7 months now and I find I can play anything I ever have done from memory......although it may occasionally take a minute or two with some pieces that I rarely play.

I am able to read music at a fairly satisfactory level so that I'm able to commit it to memory, but I am a very long way from being able to sight read unfamiliar pieces. I will sometimes 'sight read' for pieces that I've almost memorised but where I still need a little extra guidance though.

As has already been mentioned, I don't think that there is a connection between being able to memorise music and being able to sight read - at least not in a physical sense such as your genes or type of brain etc. I suppose people who are good at one of these will often neglect learning the other as there is little need, but I don't think theres any reason why anyone can't be good at both......or neither for that matter! :p

Well, I'm also a memorizer. I'd like to read better, and hope to someday. And I'm suspect it would speed my learning a new piece, but I'm not sure how much... so much of my time is spent figuring out fingering, or learning how to fit my hands around the different parts of a piece.

But sightreading would, I think, let me "try on" more music quicker, and accompany people, and for those reasons I intend to improve those skills. I have no confidence that the 10 minutes a day approach will work for me: but I suppose I should try before I reject it! It seems like it comes slowly to me, however.

Keith

I suffer from CRS. In other words, I can't remember sh*t. Even as a child I had great difficulty in memorizing pieces. My sightreading is mediocre at best. I guess I'm not good at anything.

And yet, You enchant us with beautiful music evey time; imagine... :p

A bunch of great responses. Thank you for all your insights. Especially:

That literally made me laugh out loud. A little encouragement since you are usually the first to give compliments when people present their personal performances. I have checked out your performances, and you seem to overcome your mediocrity somehow by putting forth great music.


Notwithstanding, It seems that most commenting here are better at committing songs to memory in much the same fasion as me.

I spoke with my teacher today about it, and he seems to think that I am not as bad a sightreader as I think I am. I suppose we are all our own worst critics. Nevertheless, he is going to bring me a book that he has used to teach his more advanced students better sightreading skills since I brought it up.

He is actually more interested in my technical development, since the music I work on demands more of that technique. Basically, if I could sightread the repertoire to speed, my technique is not where it needs to be to enable that anyway.

Currawong, you compiled a great list, and I think your advice is well considered. I know you are a teacher from reading through some of the other threads, and you always seem to have an encouraging word for us students. Perhaps I should spend a little more time on sightreading, and become proficient at that part of it.

I have said from the beginning that I want to become strong in every aspect of playing from improv, accompaniment, technically demanding classical et. al. I suppose I put sightreading on the backburner since I use up alot of my practice time trying to master tougher repertoire. If your recommendation, currawong, is to just spend maybe ten minutes of my practice time reading, then that I can spare. My teacher seems to agree that a little time a day with the book he is bringing me will help me out.

It's good to know that I am not the only bad sightreader out there, though so I do appreciate everyone's own confessions. :p

I will be thankful for being blessed with such a good memory, though. I think a balance between the two will better enable me to reach my goals, however. Now, back to work (on the fake ivories, of course )

Grace and peace

Joel

The comments here frighten me so much that I feel that I should really take up sight-reading again.

My mother is 86years old and almost every day she won't remember what she has had for lunch. I would dread to think that if I continue playing piano the way I do that come 86 I won't be able to play anything at all - I only wish I was joking!!

Actually, maybe I was a bit alarmist. It probably isn't as bad as that - I suspect muscle memory (which is what most people here seem to be talking about) will survive when a lot of other sorts don't.

But still, it's good to have a back-up .

currawong, I wasn't that alarmed but there is a certain amount of truth in what you say. Can you distinguish between 'memory' and 'muscle memory'.

Some of the ways of memorising include:
- aural, where you remember how it sounds and almost play it by ear
- visual, where you remember what the written music looks like.
- analytical, where you have analysed what's going on in the music, the form, the key changes, the melodic shape.
- some sort of visual memory where you remember where your fingers go on the keys, a sort of pattern memory
and,
- muscle memory, where you start the piece and your fingers seem to go off by themselves. This is very common, and most people find it easy to do. However, it's unreliable, in that many people memorising like this can't pick the piece up from anywhere but the beginning. They also often can't slow down and carefully work on individual sections.

As a matter of no interest at all, I can solve a Rubik cube using muscle memory (but not any other way).

I learn piano pieces by memorising them. That's what I always did and what I will always do.

I use the sheet music to know what I am supposed to memorise. Whilst I think that it is important not to be scared by the notes and to quickly understand them, I am not an advocate of throwing hundreds or thousand of hours into trying to become a better sight reader unless you really feel a need for it.

I see the advantages and disadvantages as follows: I cannot play a piece of music just put in front of me at a party (but I am not interested in playing at parties and would not play it well anyway); I might be a bit slower in learning a piece, although I am not convinced of that as the time I spend trying to let the piece sound right is perhaps 1000 times the times I would have saved myself by being a better sight reader; I cannot think of other disadvantages.

But I can have the music in me. I know that I can sit at a piano and play. I can concentrate on how I want the music to feel. I can continuously look at the keyboard whilst playing, which I think makes things much easier.

I am not afraid of memory; by normal health, practice will make it no problem at 60, 70 or 80 years of age. On the contrary, it's exactly the memorising which will keep your brain beautifully active even in very old age, Rubinstein did not need sheet music to play when he was very old.....

Most importantly, if you feel at ease with memorising I do not see why you should force yourself to something which, useful as it might be for other people, appears not to be your cup of tea.

I honestly think you can be strong at both if you work at doing them both.

My 72 year old teacher came over to my house about a month ago to play on my piano. She sat down and played and played and played. Concerts, chopin, mozart, beethoven, bach. One after the other. She didn't miss a beat

On the other hand I can hand her a piece of music from level 7 or 8 and she'll sit down and play it straight through, at tempo. She'll make a few mistakes but keeps going.

I also know that she worked very hard at what she does. She isn't a child prodigy she is just someone who loved the piano and worked very hard at it every minute of the day.

She says when she had kids she would put them in a cradle right by the piano, and the toddler would be in the livingroom with her as well with their toys.

She is a perfectionist and she won't let anything pass without it being perfect in rythym and tempo and dynamics. Little note mistakes are expected but everything else has to be perfect.

Sightreader here...but I a working on memorization more. It can be frustrating to be in the presence of a piano and not be able to play anything! So I am working on memorizing a few pieces to have ready to play.

Generally I can dig around in someone's bench or music shelf and either find something I have worked on, or is fairly easy to sightread.

Not having music is less of a disavantage now days with the advent of the computer and internet. You can download virtually all of the classical literature, or keep pdfs and scanned music on a keychain drive....if your host doesn't mind printing for you.