HAY GUYS

For a while there I would break up my pieces into small sections (around eight measures) and sight read these sections seven times through each day. With time this simple method, relying mostly on my kinesthetic memory, provided fairly satisfactory results. Eventually though I found myself with less and less time to devote to keyboard studies so I was forced to start looking for perhaps more efficient alternatives.

Upon reading a book (I forget the name) I became infatuated with the concept of “mental practice”. This also seemed to be a big buzz word amongst piano forums as well, so I thought why not give it a try. I tried this for several months focusing on mentally visualizing each hand in my mind and then putting them together on my piano and using my kinesthetic memory from there. I also tried for a while to combine both hands in my mind, but many complications arose and I ultimately gave up on this. The main drawback of this method though was that I started to actually sort of dread piano practice, as this method of memorizing was extremely taxing and simply not any fun at all. Surely there has to be some method out there that doesn’t take all the fun out of playing the piano.

Fed up with this whole “mental practice” business I opted for a more technical approach to memorizing. Basically I would play the hands with different rhythms, transpose them, and do all sorts of technical/kinesthetic focused training until I could sight read the short passages at relatively quick speeds. Once that was accomplished over the course of a few days memorizing the passage was almost effortless. Though I still use this approach sometimes, over time I gravitated towards my next solution.

All of these practicing methods seemed to highlight one key area for me in memorizing, and that was the auditory or sound aspect. I came to learn that once I could hear the phrase in my mind my fingers would almost automatically find the keys, even before I actually touched the keyboard. With this newfound understanding I started really working on my solfege and ear training, and I started trying to hear the pieces before I played them. In the beginning this was a slow and arduous process but my ear started to come around after a while, and I started needing less and less to pluck away at the keys to hear the melodic and harmonic lines.

I try to hear the left and right hand separately in my mind and then combine them in my mind. I will usually start slow focusing intently on the intervals and what each hand sounds like. I may double check on the piano at various points as well to make sure everything is accurate. By this point I may have also referred to professionals playing the piece and worked out my own interpretation or copied theirs. This all usually takes one or two 20 minute practice sessions.

*As with all my days of practicing a particular passage or section, I will ONLY practice that section ONCE per day. I really feel you need a night of rest between a twenty minute practice session to really gain its full benefits, else you are really getting no added benefits out of the additional practice.

**I will usually work on 9-12 different passages/sections (3-4 hours) per day though.

If I look at the section and can hear it in my mind I now go to the keyboard, otherwise I will repeat the previous day’s practice session. I will now use rhythms and other various practice aids to drill the various hands into my kinesthetic memory. Once I have both hands matching the interpretation I have in my mind I will then put them together and proceed practicing until my hands together playing is matching my ideal interpretation. Depending on the structure of the piece or its difficulty I may even skip the hands separate process all together. Hands separate practice is really just a method to iron out difficulties that may lie in certain fingering or technical passages, and not necessarily a concrete practice step I always follow.

Once the passage is at a relatively secure level, and I can play through it with ease I will start trying to wing myself off the sheet music. I usually am able to tell within a few minutes (or even seconds) if a passage is ready to memorize or not. Any sign of difficulties and I will usually just go back to technical studies on the passage and try again tomorrow. If I play a few measures several times through though with the sheet music and upon taking my eyes off the printed page I am able to play those measures with minimal effort then I know this section is ready to be committed to memory. At this point the memorizing is almost effortless. I will usually only require but a manner of minutes to commit a typical eight measure section to memory. Once the section is memorized I will play it through seven or so times, and then proceed to the next passage needing work.

I will continue with session 3 as long as it takes until the piece comes to me immediately with little or no effort. Only at this point will I consider this section memorized and confine the practicing of it to just playing it through a few times per day.

One point to clarify is that I always overlap one measure for each of the sections so that the joining of them at a later date is easy.

As two adjacent sections reach the “memorized” stage I will proceed to join them together, and in that manner the piece begins to take shape and nears completion. Once all sections are joined to the whole I will consider this piece to be memorized, and like earlier with the individual sections I will confine its practice to once a day or maybe even a few times per week depending on the amount of repertoire I am preparing at the moment.

If the piece is of particular importance to me I may even opt to forget it all together and re-learn it from the beginning in a few months. This is how you really gain a depth and understanding of a piece and ultimately produce a better interpretation of it – by continually forgetting it and relearning it. Each time you forget a piece fragments of it remain in your conscious and subconscious, and when you pick it up again new insights from other repertoire you learned and listened to combine with those fragments to form something often superior to what you started out with. It is my opinion that the more you learn and forget a piece the more the piece will become part of you, and the more genuine your interpretation will become.