Tips for Memorising Piano Music
Watching a professional pianist play through a whole concerto without even keeping the sheet music on the piano can be really impressive. If you’ve only been playing the piano for a little while, you might even be finding the idea of ever achieving this impressive. Playing from memory? Sounds impossible!
But as you play pieces more often, and start to memorise some passages, you’ll begin to see how this is completely doable. In fact, there are certain things you can try to make it easier for you to remember sheet music. Here are some tips to follow!
Memorise one thing at a time
In the same way that you wouldn’t be able to memorise a whole book if you read it quickly in one go, you wouldn’t be able to remember every single note if you just tried to memorise the whole piece at once.
Everyone has different techniques to memorise things, but one that can apply to pretty much everything is to focus on memorising things in chunks. Especially if you’re only starting out!
Focus your practice on successfully playing small sections of your piece without looking at the music sheet, and keep doing so until you feel ready to move onto memorising the rest.
Repetition is key
There is no better way to train your hands and memorise the piece than to repeatedly playing it. This is how you can achieve that ‘muscle memory’ that will tell your hands exactly what needs to happen between each passage.
This is also a great way to learn to spot mistakes and figure out what needs further work. In fact, it’s important to not let the repetition get in the way of improvement! It’s no good to keep repeating the same mistakes so while you repeat to memorise, watch out for any room for improvement.
Use music theory
Memorising pieces becomes harder when you don’t know your chords from your intervals, and so on. Building a strong music theory knowledge can help you better understand the inner workings of the piece you’re playing, and consequently make it easier for you to memorise.
Think of when you’re learning a language - isn’t it easier to remember a sentence in a foreign language when you know the meaning of it? The same applies to memorising music. Learn what the piece is really trying to tell you by applying your music theory knowledge (or brush up on it before carrying on with memorising your piece!).
Try associations
Once again, memorising music isn’t so different from memorising words in a foreign language. After all, music is its own language in a way! So in the same way you would try tricks to remember what the french word for train is, you can try that with remembering music too.
Get your pencils and highlighters out and don’t be afraid to note things down on your music sheet that will help you remember each passage. This could be a simple description of the tempo or dividing each section with a number, to help you remember what comes next.
Try different things to find what works for you
Ultimately, you should try out what works best for you when it comes to memorising things. Think back to your school days and try to apply the same tricks you used to study but to music. Before you know it, you’ll have found a fool proof method to start playing your music without reading it on the music sheet!
While there is no major requirement to get to a point in your piano studies that you must play without looking at your music sheet, it can be fun to try and memorise what you play. It can also be a great way to really get to know a piece. So even if you feel like you’ll never be able to play a piece from memory, don’t be discouraged from at least trying it!
