Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner pieces easy to memorize but not necessarily easy to play

Hello everybody,

I've been checking out two pieces lately:

1 - Chopin's prelude n. 3
2 - Tiersen's Valse d'Amélie

These two pieces apparently don't have much in common but I've been quite impressed by how easy they were to memorize. In both, many sections are just copies of previous parts, simply moved to a different octave or to another key. Often the hand follows the same identical pattern, just starting on a different piano key.

Now of course la Valse d'Amelie is much easier than the prelude, and even if I'll be still working A LOT on the Chopin before I'm able to play it decently, I got both pieces stuck in my memory and that is something that already matters a lot to me, as it gives me immediately the freedom to put away the stress of memorizing and to concentrate solely on improving the technique on these repetitive movements and the final result is great sounding music.

To give an idea, the fourth prelude by Chopin is much easier to play than the third, but when it comes to memorizing it, it takes more time, or at least it did so to me.

Another piece that comes to my mind is the first Gnossienne by Satie, super easy to memorize, while I wouldn't put the first Gymnopedie in the same list, as it has more variation.

So, I'm aiming at pieces that sound great and which have a very simple structure and repetitive movements, no matter if they're technically easy or difficult to play.

Would you be able to suggest any other piece like this?

Thanks a lot,


KP

Albéniz's Asturias is easy to memorize - at least, the outer sections, which you can almost play by ear.

Paderewski's Menuet in G (or Minuet). Super easy to memorize but challenging in the fast runs, smooth turns, and lengthy trills, etc. A good showpiece or encore.

Delightful and charming piece and easy to memorize but requiring "nimble fingers" is Grieg's "Schmetterling" (Butterfly), from Lyric Pieces, Op. 43, No 1.

Regards,

I'm currently working on Sibelius's b minor impromptu, Op 5 no. 5. It definitely fits your required specification.

Beethoven's Tempest Sonata 1st Movement, and a lot of Beethoven I find easy to memorize but oh so difficult to play.

Revolutionary etude was very easy to memorize for me. The left hand pattern stays almost the same for most of the piece.

I'm finding Scriabin's Nocturne for the Left Hand Alone, Op. 9, No. 2 quite easy to memorize.

Regards

all of Chopin pieces are easy to memorize and easy to play but SO HARD TO INTERPRET

beethoven op 2 no 1, op 2 no 2, op 2 no 3, op 27 no 2, waldstein, appassionata, no. 32 c minor, pathetique easy to memorize

liszt late pieces like nuages gris, funeral prelude and march so easy to memorize

moscheles etudes and moszkowski etudes easy to memorize

rach preludes and debussy deux arabesques

bach well tempered clavier and inventions sinfonias chromatic fantasy fugue partitas

Shostakovich prelude fugues really easy to memorize

scarlatti sonatas

For me it would have to be Liszt. His writing is a bit "simpler" than Chopin, so it's easy to memorize.

[my emphasis]

You really don't know what you're talking about, do you?

For some reason, the second movement of the Beethoven Op 78 gave me a real challenge. Not sure why, memorization in general was not a big issue for me at uni.

So a reversal here: learned the notes quickly but went insane memorizing them.

I think I know what Im talking about regarding 18 years of piano playing
Chopin pieces are easy to memorize and play except some etudes but my saying is subjective its depend on your technique if you look at whole piano repertoire chopin pieces are not difficult

For sure Chopin etude 10/1. Each measure is basically one chord so memorization is not hard. Plus you kind of have to look at your hands to whole time, so memorization becomes a necessity.

So much music to check! Thank you very much all of you. I definitely don't agree that all of chopin's music is easy to play, but someone with 18 Years of experience will probably have less difficulties than someone in with 1 or 5 years. Also I'm not sure if I agree with bach's inventions being easy to memorize: it's trye that often patterns are repeated/changed of key/moved from one hand to the other, but I think they have enough variety to make memorization much more of a challenge compared to gnossienne, prelude 3 or valse d'amelie. The rest of the suggestions, I'm gonna check the scores soon! Thanks again!

As I grow more musically sophisticated, even the simplest pieces become harder to play.

Not easy for me to memorize those up-to-4 repeat (but ever so slightly different) sections with multiple measures, e.g., Nocturne Op.9 No.3 and I can understand why no one plays this as an encore!

Choosing to respond to this because it makes even less sense to me than some of the other bizarre comments in the thread.

Here are my thoughts, for what they're worth:

- I find that slow atonal music is virtually impossible to memorize, particularly if it is also a-melodic.

- Looking at the thread title, I'm wondering if this is all backwards. Pieces that are difficult to play are more generally easy to memorize because of muscle memory. When I watched the Cliburn 2013 competition - all of it - I was struck by how many professionals made mistakes in the "easy bits" because they hadn't practiced them enough.

- Ergo, pieces that are difficult to play are generally more easy to memorize.

As for Batuhan saying that all of Chopin pieces are easy to play, that's just so much execrable nonsense. Op. 10 No.2? Op. 49? The Bb minor Prelude? Op.49 would be up there in the list of difficult to play and memorize. So yeah, I'm tired of this thread already.

If you have a great foundation of technique nothing is hard to play or memorize the only hard thing is to interpret liszt played beethoven hammerklavier at the age of 24 for the first time in the world do you think liszt is mature enough to play hammerklavier at the age of 24 ?

Only if you overthink it.