Piano Video Lesson: How to Make Memorization Easier

Hi, I'm Robert Estrin and you're watching LivingPianos.com. Today I'm going to show you how to make memorization easier.

Having said that, memorizing piano music is one of the most difficult things you'll ever do mentally.

It really takes all your concentration and I'm going to show you how to approach this so that you can make it easier and more effective. I'm going to show you the, I'm going to use as an example, the second movement of Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata. I happen to have the music open here and I thought it would be a good one to show you. So I'm going to play the first phrase and then I'm going to show you how to approach memorizing it to make it easier.

So, let's say you sit down and you figure that's a good amount to learn, so you play it over and over and over again until you kind of get it.

But did you know that that is far too much material to take at a time? If you were to add up the sheer number of notes in what I just played, it doesn't seem like a lot of music, but there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of details when you consider that every note has its finger, has its phrasing, has its expression. So there's four details to each note and putting the hands together. Now I've talked about how to memorize by taking small amounts at a time, hands separately and putting them together.

Well, there is more to it than that. I'm going to show you some tips right now. First of all, if you analyze a score right at the beginning, you realize that the right hand is in chords, so learn it in chords.

Now, if I were learning this, believe it or not, I wouldn't take half that amount.

I would take a quarter of that amount.

Sometimes you can learn one hand, let's say four measures, but then when you put the hands together, chop it in half and just do two measures when you're putting the hands together because the hardest part about memorization is putting the hands together. So let's say you learn the first line of music.

And you learn the left hand.

I think that's too much.

I would suggest just learning the first two measures, but give yourself the extra note of the beginning of the third measure as a connection point.

That's plenty of material, believe it or not. How long will it take you to learn that? Not so long.

Now, you might have gone through the first two lines of this, eight measures, and played it over and over again for 30 minutes, for 45 minutes, for an hour, but you know what? You'll never quite get it because you don't give yourself the opportunity to really study the infinitesimally small details that you can master in just a few minutes.

Those first two measures in chords.

Once you get that memorized, then you get the left hand memorized, then you put it together in chords.

The next step would be to play the right hand alone the way it's written.

And then finally put the hands together.

And then if you like, you can reward yourself and play it with the pedal, which is literally the last thing you do in your practice. Now, if you have trouble delineating the melody from the 16th notes in the right hand, you could practice with articulations, playing with a light finger staccato on the 16th notes to train your hand which notes are accompaniment and which notes are melody.

Better yet, put the hands together and you have a duet between the soprano and the bass with the inner voice with the gentle finger staccato.

If you learn just two measures, or if you learn four measures hands separately and then put together just two measures at a time, you give yourself a fighting chance to really perfect your music as you go. Plus, since you're not overwhelming yourself, you can sustain a longer productive practice. So remember to cut things in half, learn less at a time, and don't use the pedal until the very end of the process so that you can hear what's there and develop the best fingering in your playing. So those are some memorization tips for you. I hope it helps you. If you've got others, leave them in the comments here at livingpianos.com, your online resource. Thanks so much for joining me.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/how-to-make-memorization-easier/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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