As a music student trying to memorize your piece for an exam or recital, you often have to tackle the issue of memorization and technical execution of playing a piece of music simultaneously. Memorization can sometimes be a struggle, but it is one that you can overcome. Not all people have a remarkable ability to memorize or the hand agility to play complex music passages easily. While there are many ways to approach this problem, I’ll share the method of memorization that has proven to work for me repeatedly, allowing me to memorize the music and play it up to speed simultaneously.
I call this method the measure-by-measure method. It’s not an official name or technical method, but it seems like a provable and successful method for many of my students.
For this method to work well, you have to consider two things: make sure your fingering is correct and that you play the music the same way each time, and secondly, that you’ve taken the time to ensure the rhythm is accurate for the section of music that you’re practicing.
Your abilities and the complexity of the piece of music will determine how long it will take to memorize and play it up to speed.
Play the first bar in the right hand, ensuring the notes, fingering, and rhythm are correct until it becomes easy to play. Playing the measure of music correctly may be achieved in a few repetitions, or it may take some time. Either way, ensure you can easily play that first measure of music in the right hand before moving on to step two.
Step two is the same as step one: play the first measure of music in the left hand, ensuring the fingering, notes, and rhythm are played correctly. Once you can easily play the first measure of music in the left hand, you can move on to step three.
Step three is the same as steps one and two, but this time, you play hands together for the first bar, again making sure that the fingering, notes, and rhythm are correct, and playing the first bar hands together until it’s easy to play.
At this point, you’ve memorized your first bar of music and played it many times, helping you commit it to memory and allowing your hands to move correctly on the keyboard for that measure of music, building your kinetic memory.
Now follow the same process for the second measure of music, working first with your right hand, then your left hand, and finally, hands together, ensuring the fingering, notes and rhythm are correct. Once you can play the second measure of music correctly, you can continue to the final step.
The final step is to play the first and second measures of music and repeat those bars with the correct fingering, notes, and rhythm until you play the two measures of music correctly.
The process moves on by working on the third measure of music by itself. Once it’s easily played correctly, you play bars one through three. The idea is to work through the entire piece of music in this manner: working on bar four, then playing bars one through four until they can be played effortlessly, then working on bar five, then playing bars one through five.
While this may seem like a long process, it’s not because you’re committing the music to both your mental and physical memory at the same time. If you were to try to memorize the piece of music simply by playing it from start to finish over and over again, it would take you much longer.
Next time you memorize a piece of music, why not try this method and see if it works for you? Until next time, happy practicing.
