Memorizing

**John Craton** · Nov-28-2005, 9:03am

I really can't add anything new to what has already been stated, but I will reiterate the concept that phrase-by-phrase memorization is what works best for me. Memorizing things has always been difficult for me, but when forced to do it I take the music a phrase at a time, play it several times with the music, then try playing it from memory. Once I have that down I move on to the next phrase, repeating the same process. Then I work at it till I have both phrases down from memory. It is a long and arduous process, but it seems to work for me. (It's also the technique I use when memorizing lines for a play.)

Some of my students have much better memories than I. One little girl who studied with me a couple of years always came to her lesson with the new material memorized after the first week. She said she didn't try to memorize it, she just did. This sometimes presented its own set of problems, however, as she would occasionally memorize the music with a few wrong notes. It was hard to make the corrections after that, but she would eventually work things out. She had the nearest thing to a photographic memory I've seen to date.

Just keep at it. Once you have the piece memorized you'll probably find you can play it far better than when relying on the notes on the page.

**Katie** · Nov-30-2005, 1:53pm

I will add just one thing, and it's something that helps in everything from memorizing to sight reading. Don't just listen to other people play. Listen to yourself play. It soulds like a really silly thing to say, but you'd be amazed at how many college music majors don' even do that.
Once you've started getting comfortable with the music, stop focusing so much on the mechanical stuff...where to put your fingers and rhythm, and start listening critically to yourself. Listen to pitch, tone, phrasing. Listen for subtle things. Don't record and listen. Listen as you play. Sometimes you can get into an awesome meditative zone doing this. The point is as you do this you concentrate less and less on the notes in front of you. You've probably got some of it memorized already but the music is a crutch. Listening provides a graded distraction from that crutch. The neat thing is, every time you practice, you're memorizing a little more. You're also noticing more things about you're playing, like what happens to you tone when you hit a difficult passage. Even better, when you listen as you're reading the notes, you start associating written notes with sound. You're relative pitch improves and so does your sight reading because you can hear the pitches before you play them.
Listening to yourself is one of the best things you can do for your playing.
-Katie