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MH
We all struggle, each in his own way. Some are better with some skills and a disaster in others. As far as memorization, You might start with bulletproof musician. blog on the internet, written by a performance practice professor at Juiliard. Lots of great info and a lot of it backed by research. And the price is right

It does help to know we are not alone 😊

Tyrone
Yes, playing a piece a lot will get it into memory, but just a word of caution that will not be long term memory. Muse memory alone is unreliable le: if something goes wrong, you have no fallback If you are ever playing in a stressful situation, that ‘memory’ will vanish........ been there. Done that. That it is what started my quest to learn about better memorization techniques.

Think about overlapping the chunks so that if you memorize measures 29-32, the next chuck should start with
measure 31 or 32. If there is a fork in the road, played one way the first time. and differently the second, identify the difference and memorize s brain shortcut such as ‘ 1st time minor key, or first time descending chromatic scale’

I so agree with this !

Yes, overlap chunks. Each chunk should consist of a complete phrase or maybe two or three, plus just the first few notes or chord of the next -- Just enough overlap to get most of your fingers in the right places. It varies depending on what the actual music is.

An interesting thread.

As a child, memorization came easily, such that my junior/senior high piano teacher asked me how I did it. I didn't know how to answer her, because I'd never really thought of it. The music would just flow out of me after numerous times playing it.

Thinking about it now, much of it was muscle memory. Some of it was visual recall, too--I could, for example, "see" which page, and on what part of the page, I was on, which helped me move to the right chord in a passage highly similar to an earlier part of the music. So knowing music theory helped; i.e. "when the opening melody returns at the top of the third page, eight bars later go from V to vi instead of V to I." Etc.

When I started teaching, and wanting my students to memorize, I had to come up with better strategies than simply saying, "Just play it a lot, and you'll get it memorized." These are some of the things I teach to help students memorize:

1. There's no substitute for time. Memorization will be hard if practice is only happening a few times or less a week.

2. Look for patterns in the music--melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, sectional. Where does repetition or sequence appear? If repetition, is it exact, or is there a slight variant? If the latter, how does it vary?

3. Memorize in small units after you're familiar with the whole--maybe only one or two measures at a time. In harder sections, or contrapuntal music, memorize hands or voices separately.

4. Overlap phrase memorization; for example, with a 4-measure phrase, play a 6-measure section that includes the phrase plus the preceding and following measure flanking it.

5. Practice in the evening, then first thing in the morning sit at the piano and play as far from memory as you can with the piece you're memorizing. "Sleeping on it," then immediately applying what you learned in your sleep is excellent reinforcement of your previous, concentrated practice session. Your mind hasn't had a chance to get cluttered with many thoughts of the day.

6. Learning to sight-sing is good practice. Sing the tune as you look at the score. This will help you hear what is coming when you play, and as you become more familiar with playing piano, you'll grow in ability to find the keys that match your inner hearing.

On a side note, a bit off-topic, but it was kind of funny when it happened... I didn't learn solfege until I took Kodaly courses as a grad student, and when our instructor would transpose a sight-singing exercise from, say, F Major to D Major, I could sing the correct pitches, but would use the wrong solfege syllables because hearing a D on the piano when I was looking at an F on the staff threw me off something terrible!

All that to say that being able to look at notes on a piano score and hear in your mind what they should sound like is helpful in alerting a player to mistakes, and avoiding mistakes is, of course, very important when memorizing, so one doesn't need to unlearn wrong notes, or erase them from one's memory. (Playing very slowly at first, when learning a piece, helps with accuracy, too.)

Except for pros, those studying to be pros, or maybe the top few % of amateurs who aspire to give full recitals from memory, I think that memorizing is a mistake except maybe for the occasional piece. It only makes sense for those who think memorizing helps their performance or for those for whom it is required. I am quite sure that for the majority memorizing actually hinders their performance as fear of a memory lapse is one of the main causes of nerves.

I have not memorized any music for the last around half century. If I had tried to play everything from memory I would have studied/performed at most 10% of the music I did. If people want to play more than an occasional teacher's recital piece(a few short pieces each year) from memory the extra time needed to solidly memorize the music is done at the expense of learning new pieces, practicing technique, etc. and not worth it IMO. I'm not at all sure the extra time to memorize even an occasional piece is worth it.

I think most of the suggestions for memorization on this thread are very good but the goal of memorizing is not a good idea for most. Memorizing an occasional teacher's recital piece or a few exam pieces is fine but memorizing most of the pieces one studies uses up too much valuable time.

I agree. I learnt a lot of rep as a student - both with my teachers and by myself (for my own pleasure) - which was only possible because I never needed to memorize any music, not even for my annual exams.

When I started playing solo recitals from memory a few years ago, I discovered that on average, it takes me about five times as long to learn a piece from scratch to perform from memory as to learn it to perform from the score. Which means that I'm very selective about what I choose to memorize.

I can never understand why the RCM requires memorization of exam pieces for what are essentially basic-level assessments - are they preparing young pianists for solo professional careers? How many actually go on to conservatories and have solo careers? All the music teachers I know - on any instrument - tell me they've never memorized any piece in their lives. Many of them also play professionally in orchestras or chamber ensembles (if they teach an orchestral instrument), or accompany instrumentalists or singers (if they teach piano).

As for teachers who insist that their students play all their pieces from memory in student recitals......words fail me.

I easily memorize music that is beyond my sight reading skills. I think I am good at memorize through kinesthetic sense. I may work on each measure at a time and I play the measure without the score to see if I memorize it.

For me, if it is sight readable, it is very difficult to memorize. I guess I highly depends on visual sense and do not think much about memorizing it. For example, chamber music is very difficult to memorize as I tend to just read music.

For some people, there is not even an intent to memorize. It just happens. No time is allocated to it. Just as Andamento says, one just plays a piece of music a few times and it goes into the memory. It's the recall which is the issue. Some of it appears stored away in neurons with a lag time to access. Some of this might be muscle memory, but I think that is maybe not all true. I think in addition to cognitive, there is also muscle memory. So to not memorize because actually a special feat. It requires effort. It also requires probably some drugs like HDACi, D-cycloserine, propranolol, fingolimod, triazolam, midazolam, diazepam, or some cocktail of these. The only effective thing I've found to disrupt memory consolidation was getting hit by a car while on a motorcycle. It disrupted 2 seconds worth of memory consolidation. Personally, I don't know how to do it short of getting hit by a car. If there was an easier way, there are a couple Terabytes worth of stuff in my life I would like to forget please starting with certain events when I was 2 years old.

When I started getting into piano playing, I can't say I started from the beginning because I played violin in high school and can read the treble clef reasonably well. Even being weak sight-reading 2 clefs at a time, I tend to memorize a lot. For me this means running through the melody line enough times so I just need to read the bass as I'm playing along.

Unless someone picked up a piece of music for the first time and try to play through it, after running through a piece many times, nobody can say they haven't got at least some part of the music in their head even if they can't reproduce the whole piece without the sheet music. And then there are the Internet uploads. Many students played the Minuet in G & Gm from the Notebook for Anna M. Bach. And over the years many versions are already online with varying degrees of note accuracy. When I started working on a Waltz by a Russian composer, I only had to read through 20% of the material since I can hear online performances and try to play accordingly. Even without reading a single note, after hearing a few versions, I got some idea how fast / slow the tempo can go. I know if the piece is in a major or minor key so I am not learning it from scratch. A lot of pieces for students you can find versions uploaded by teachers. The tempo, fingerings, dynamics and articulations are all explained in the video demo.

When it comes to memorizing pieces, most people know how to sing Happy Birthday or Jingle Bells because everybody would repeat these pieces year after year (no effort involved). If you run a piece through a few times a day, everyday for a month, doesn't matter how much you still rely on reading off the sheet, you would have at least some portion of the music memorized. If you've made at least 1 recording in the process and listened to the playback, you are going to get a large chunk of the piece into your head and you don't even have to put in a lot of effort like you are memorizing sections of a play by Shakespeare. The other part of memory is your muscle memory. Once you run a song enough times, you fingers are more or less on autopilot. Like when I get to a certain part of the music, I should be using finger 3 on a white key and after that I should be using finger 2 for a black key sort of thing. I've programmed the playing sequences into my fingers and don't even think about which notes I should be playing at any given moment.