Scramble games help student to memorize the music score?

[dora96]

Hi

I am just wondering if you have heard about scramble games to help student to memorize the music score. I am very much encouraging students to memorize their music. Especially after they finished their exam, most students after few months won't remember their music. I ask them keep their repertoires memorized and well maintained. They are so hard to learn and taking them at least 12 months to polish up to performance level. However, once new repertoires come in and old is gone. It is time consuming to ask students to practice everything they have learned. Besides very few will commit this sort of practice. 

I causally come across scramble games in lecture to help students to memorize music score in a fun way. Have you heard about it? I try to do my self randomly chose the different bars and measures in the song whether I can start playing by memory. I don't know it is the way to do it. If you know any method that can make memorizing music score fun and interesting please let me know. Thank you guys

[syncope]

well, in my experience, it does give the student the feeling that they can master something difficult that way, which gives a great kick (that is if they CAN play wherever you ask them to play by heart soon enough). So that's possitive.
But I wouldn't do it "randomly" but of course per section of the piece. Because music is logic that way and then they can learn it in "sentences" too, instead of word+ word+word. (You wouldn't ask a poet/poemreader to read word 14 till 17, but for instance, the last sentence of the poem.)

Cheers,

[keyofc]

This sounds interesting - I've never seen them.
Do you know of any website that has an example?

[lostinidlewonder]

With my students I do not require them to remember all the pieces we have gone through. Some students I have done over 100 pieces over the years, and I certainly do not require them to remember them all perfectly. However, I do expect them to be able to relearn the music and it must be at much faster rate when they first learned it. This process of relearning music you have already done in the past is a common skill for all musicians.

I certainly do not memorize all of my repertoire, only what needs to be performed in public or which I love very much. I have a large amount of music however I can relearn and re-memorize in less than a couple of days (which otherwise would have taken me a few weeks if learned from scratch). This same rapid relearning action I like to see in my own students.

Since we keep a journal of everything we do in a lesson, when we relearn something we always turn back to the notes we made when we first learned it. The student has proof that they can get through much more than they did the first time through. Often if there are say 8 lessons to master one piece, when we relearn the music we can go through 4 lessons in one go and by the following week complete the last part of the rememorization. This give the student confidence and does not demoralize them when they forget their music. They know that they can relearn it much faster than how long it took them to learn it the first time. How to recall memory is a good brain exercise with the piano too. It is interesting to discover what small things cause you to forget how to queue large chunks of information to be played which is otherwise all in your head already.

I like to describe it like walking through a bush. The first time you walk through its tough, but you stomp through it and make a pathway. The second time you come the path is still there, but things might have grown back in the way, so you have to stomp them down first so that your path is clear once more.

[dan101]

Scramble is fun and it may help minimally. Unfortunately, touch (tactile) memory on a piano comes from repetition... and a lot of it. There's no real substitute, in my opinion.