Secrets to successfully memorising repertoire for performance

Pianists at an advanced level are expected to memorise much of their repertoire. This is a source of some anxiety for many students who perform and are afraid of having memory lapses. Much of my own preparation for recitals is directed towards ensuring that my repertoire is very, very securely memorised.

The problem though is this: you may perform repertoire from memory in the comfort of your own home several times without lapse only to have it fall to bits in performance. So how do you know when it is well and truly memorised and that you are not simply under the illusion that it’s memorised? Keep reading to find the answer.

The information in this article is gleaned from my experience of several years of Conservatory-level study, specific advice received from the piano teaching staff there (who are all concert pianists in their own right), and a number of books I’ve read addressing the issue as well as how the brain learns and memorises things.

How not to memorise repertoire

Before I detail how to properly memorise repertoire, let me first detail the worst way in which you memorise repertoire.

The worst way to memorise repertoire is to repeat something over and over until it gets into your head and fingers. As the repetitions continue, your fingers start automatically going to the next notes and you develop a flow. Keep going and you start to need the sheet music less and less, until the point where you don’t need it anymore.

If you memorise in this way, you’ll be able to perform something from memory in the comfort of your own home with no trouble. Whether you get through it on stage will be completely hit or miss. Flip a coin. Maybe you’ll get through it. Maybe you won’t. There’s no way to tell.

Why is this the case? The answer is that in using this method, the performer primarily utilises muscle memory to get through the performance. The brain is not entirely conscious of what notes, exactly, the fingers are playing. Some of them yes, but not all. The brain is often on auto-pilot with this method: performing without paying too much attention or awareness of exactly what is happening.

In situations of no stress – for example, performing in the comfort of your own home – muscle memory and auto-pilot is enough to get you through. As soon as get on stage though, the performer’s body is in a state of stress: a fight or flight mode. Senses get heightened, the pulse races. And the auto-pilot gets switched off. Suddenly, you are thinking, ‘What notes does this piece start on? What note am I meant to play when I leap up there with my right hand? What section is coming up next, and what key is it in? If I have a memory lapse, what am I going to do?’

You get a bit flustered. You’re sweating a bit, and you’re nerves are making your fingers and feet tremble a little and you don’t have the nuanced control you did at home. And suddenly, you might mix up the fingering a little. Or you might miss a note. And the muscle-memory which have served you so well fails you completely. You come to a crashing halt, and the silence and awkwardness is deafening. You try to pick it back up, but you have no idea what comes next or even where to start.

That might not happen. But any sane performer would want to ensure that the above scenario doesn’t happen.

The practise method I’ve just detailed above is known as massed practise and does not ensure any lasting results. Leave it for a month and that repertoire will be largely forgotten. Any performance that relies on muscle memory and a brain on auto-pilot is a recipe for disaster.

Let me be clear: you will develop muscle memory. But you will not rely on it. You will do many repetitions in your practise until it is memorised, but you will not engage in massed practise.

How to properly memorise repertoire

The methods detailed here make learning repertoire far more effortful. It is not easy to get to the point where repertoire has been properly and securely memorised. So, as you put into practise the following methods, it will feel slow and you will struggle. You may feel like you’re a really slow learner and that you are not smart, and that you don’t have what it takes.

But you do have what it takes. Keep this in mind: the more effort you to put in and the harder it is for your brain, the more certain you can be that the memory work that is taking place in your brain will be far more secure than it otherwise would be.

Encoding: creating a detailed blueprint in your mind

The key to a secure memorisation is to create a detailed blueprint in your mind, then practising properly to make sure you can recall it accurately whenever you need it. I learnt this technique in the first few days of my undergraduate music degree. Consider also the following quote from John Medina’s Brain Rules:

The more elaborately we encode information at the moment of learning, the stronger the memory.¹

So, here’s how we do it. Let’s use the first phrase of Beethoven’s first Sonata in F minor, Opus 2 No 1 as an example:

Opening of Sonata in F minor Op. 2 No. 1 by Beethoven.

Superficial encoding would be to think:

F minor chord going up.

But let’s encode it in more detail:

Basics first: we have four flats, and we are in the key of F minor. The time signature is alla breve so we have two minim beats in a bar. The first movement is in Sonata Form so in these opening lines we have the First Subject. We’ll expect this to be followed by a Modulating Bridge and Second Subject, then Cadence Material completing the Exposition.

The First Subject starts with an upbeat, with the right-hand thumb playing middle C. You play an F minor arpeggio in second inversion going up, finishing on the mediant (the third note of the F minor scale). That mediant is followed by a kind of ‘hook turn’ shaped motif, stepping down three times forming a triplet, then stepping up to finally end on F, the tonic. While that’s going on in the right hand, he left hand comes in and plays three F minor chords in root position, then it goes to the dominant seventh chord in first inversion, all staccato.

Get the idea? There’s a lot of analysis going in the encoding and the more in-depth and elaborate that analysis is, the easer it will be to recall that later on stage. In my encoding, if I didn’t specify that my right thumb started on middle C, it’s possible I’d get on stage and think to myself, does it start up there or down here? Even little details like that can be vitally important.

This process will slow you right down, but you will be far better off in the long term.

Encoding the blueprint in your mind is only the first step. The problem is that even as we encode that information, we tend to forget it quite quickly. Consider the following quote again from Brain Rules by John Medina:

People usually forget 90 percent of what they learn in a class within 30 days. He further showed that the majority of this forgetting occurs within the first few hours after class. This has been robustly confirmed in modern times.²

So the second step is to practise in a way that stops this forgetting from occurring and cements that blueprint in your mind. We want to avoid massed practise or mindless repetition.

Principles of practise

The principles outlined here are taken from Make it Stick: the Science of Successful Learning.

In order to remember and be able to recall the blueprint from memory, you have to practise retrieving the information many times but not in a way that makes it a mindless repetition:

To be most effective, retrieval must be repeated again and again, in spaced out sessions so that the recall, rather than becoming a mindless recitation, requires some cognitive effort. Repeated recall appears to help memory consolidate into a cohesive representation in the brain and to strengthen and multiply the neural routes by which the knowledge can later be retrieved.³

We want the information retrieval to be effortful:

Effortful retrieval makes for stronger learning and retention. We’re easily seduced into believing that learning is better when it’s easier , but the research shows the opposite: when the mind has to work, learning sticks better. The greater the effort to retrieve learning, provided that you succeed, the more that learning is strengthened by retrieval. After an initial test, delaying subsequent retrieval practice is more potent for reinforcing retention than immediate practice, because delayed retrieval requires more effort. Repeated retrieval not only makes memories more durable but produces knowledge that can be retrieved more readily, in more varied settings, and applied to a wider variety of problems.⁴

So firstly, to make information retrieval effortful, practise sessions should be spaced out. Remember that we forget the majority of what we learn within a few hours. You should let some of that forgetting occur; it will make the retrieval more effortful which is what we want.

Secondly, practise sessions should be interleaved.

Interleaving the practice of two or more subjects or skills is also a more potent alternative to massed practice.⁵

In the case of memorising our Beethoven Sonata, we can interleave our practise by simply swapping back and forth between other repertoire. Since this Sonata is in F minor, we can practise all the scales and arpeggios related to F minor, i.e. F minor, F melodic minor, F minor in contrary motion, F minor arpeggios in all inversions, dominant seventh arpeggios in all inversions etc.

Thirdly, practise should be varied. The goal is to find different ways to practise the same thing. For instance, can you play the right hand notes using your left hand? That’s hard to do, but it forces you to retrieve your blueprint instead of relying on muscle memory.

Methods of practise

Using the principles outlined above, here are some different ways you can practise. The methods listed here are not exhaustive. You can come up with your own ways of retrieval practise that are varied, interleaved and spaced.

Practise the piece from beginning to end. Your practise session should at begin and end with a run through of the piece or movement in its entirety. You have to get used to the concentration required to play through the whole thing. You should play through mistakes and aim for flow.
Practise slowly. Very, very slowly. I have heard this advice from so many teachers and concert pianists. Why is it so useful? The reason is that you cannot rely on muscle memory when playing so slowly. You have to fall back onto your blueprint. It also gives you time to mentally recall and rehearse the encoded instructions in all its detail. You have full control over every muscle movement, and it will help you enormously on stage in performance.
Practise at varied speeds. Practise it at normal tempo, practise it faster, and quite a bit faster. Play it slower, and quite a bit slower. You’ll find out if your fingering and arm movements are moving in the most economic way.
Practise with a metronome. Playing with a steady tempo can be quite hard to do. We also have the tendency to play faster when stressed or anxious. Practising with a metronome helps to develop an objective sense of whether you are playing with a constant tempo.
Have someone distract you while performing. Pretend you are in a performance situation. Have a parent, housemate, or friend distract you while you play. They can cough, talk, shuffle papers, make their mobile phone go off. Walk right up to you and stare intently at you or your fingers while you play. Anything to put you off. You have to maintain your concentration and composure.
Practise while looking at or away from the keyboard while performing. In performance, are you going to look at your fingers while you play? Or while looking straight ahead? Or while looking up? Or perhaps with your eyes closed? Most of the time you will look at the keyboard, but you want to be able to confidently look up or close your eyes briefly without making mistakes. So practise it in these various ways: look at the keyboard while practising, look away while practising, and close your eyes while practising. In the middle of performing, this will make you more comfortable in taking your eyes away from keyboard. If you think about these things now instead of during a performance, you won’t get anxious about it on stage.
Run through while concentrating on your breathing. We breathe unconsciously, but we can be quite conscious of how we are breathing on stage. So practise being aware of your breaths in and out while simultaneously concentrating on retrieving that blueprint.
Hands separate practise. We practise hands together most of the time, and it becomes easy to rely on one hand to figure out what the other hand is meant to be doing. Practising hands separately, particularly the left hand by itself, can be quite a bit more difficult, but is good practise to do. You can also play one hand while ‘ghost-playing’ the other hand – placing your fingers on the keys they’re meant to play but not actually pressing them.
Play the right hand notes with the left hand and vice versa. This one is a bit of a brain twister, and is particularly for Baroque repertoire. This one really forces you to rely on the blueprint – muscle memory will not help you at all.
Focused practise on sections. Isolate particular sections and focus your practise sessions on them.
Practise different sections randomly. In the Beethoven Sonata we looked at, you might practise the First Subject, skip the Modulating Bridge, jump to the Second Subject, go back to the bridge and finish with the cadence material. Or you might play the Second Subject in the Exposition followed by the Second Subject in the Recapitulation. This will help strengthen the structure of the blueprint in your mind.
Practise sections in reverse. Start at the end of the piece and practise the last phrase. Then start at the second-last phrase and go through till the end. Work your way backwards until you reach the start of the piece. This really tests your ability to start anywhere in the piece, not just at the start. This will help avoid the problem where you come to a half because a memory lapse and you are unable to pick it back up.
The 7 steps of hell. This is a little game you can play by yourself. You have to play a section, or the whole piece without mistakes, without memory lapses seven times in a row. If you play it through perfectly, you proceed to the next step. If you make a mistake, you go back a step. Or to make it harder, you start from zero again. This puts performance pressure on you.
Perform for a small audience. Do this multiple times in the lead-up to your performance. Treat it as a proper little recital. Audience has to be quiet and attentive. You might have pianist colleagues follow the score and give feedback.
Record yourself. You don’t necessarily have to listen back to it, especially if recording it with your smartphone which won’t pick up all the nuances in your performance and make it sound bad when it wasn’t. The very fact that it’s being recorded changes the way you approach the run-through. You are aiming for a smooth performance with few mistakes. It’s good practise for the stage.
At the piano, with the music. Even if the music is memorised, it’s still a good idea to run through with the music in front of you.
At the piano, without the music. One the music is memorised, much of our practise lands in this category.
Away from the piano, with the music. Mental practise away from the piano is extremely effective. It’s also quite hard. You have to imagine your fingers pressing the keys down. But again, this sort of practise helps to reinforce the blueprint in your mind. It’s good to pay attention to all the little details: dynamics, articulation etc.
Away from the piano, without the music. The ultimate test. Can you play through the piece in your mind from beginning to end? Can you start at random sections in your mind? Can you write out the entire piece from memory? That’s quite time consuming, but can be quite a worthwhile task.

Those are just a few ideas. Brainstorm, be creative and come up with your own ways! As you become a more experienced performer, you will be able to better judge when something is properly memorised. For me, when a piece is memorised, that marks the beginning of my process. At that point, there is still so much work to be done to ensure that it’s ready for the stage.

If you follow the principles outlined here, you will be well on the way to being far more comfortable in performing from memory on stage.

References

Medina, John (2011-05-30). Brain Rules: 12 principles for surviving and thriving at work, home, and school (Kindle Locations 1623-1624). Scribe Publications. Kindle Edition.
Ibid. (Kindle Locations 1449-1450).
Brown, Peter C. (2014-04-14). Make It Stick (pp. 28-29). Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition.
Ibid. (p. 43).
Ibid. (p. 49).