Some very thoughtful ideas, ego0720!
I hesitate to comment on memorization too much because it is still something I'm working on. I feel like I don't memorize quickly enough, although this may be more of a personal insecurity, or having high standards as opposed to reality since I see many posters complain that they take months to memorize a piece of music, but this hasn't been my experience at all. I can pretty much always memorize a piece of music within a few weeks. On the other extreme, we hear of (and occasionally witness!) musicians who have got memorization down to a T, who can learn a piece in a day and perform it the next.
I do feel like memory is a capability that can in some sense be improved generally, and that this does affect your ability to develop subject specific memory as well. Try, at the end of each day, to recall everything you can: images, sounds, fragments of music, smells and touches, thoughts, names, etc. For instance, my piano teacher references a lot of names, dates, etc. during classes, and I try to reproduce as much as I can from memory. I believe that, in a lot of cases, the impressions are stored in your memory, and you need to learn to be able to access them, rather than imprint them in the first place. It is like a hard drive: you have stored information and pointers to that information. I think the information is there, but it is a very difficult problem to have the correct pointers to that information in the human brain. You probably have certain pieces of music which your mind plays on occasion, either while awake or asleep. I find it very difficult to force myself to remember a specific piece of music; however, when it starts randomly playing in my head accurately, I know it has to be there, as otherwise it would be impossible to access it. Certain mental states are also more conducive to recalling specific memories. I've experimented along these lines with music and think it is a good idea to do your own exploration along these lines.
I think how you memorize a piece of music at a given point in time depends on which abilities of yours are more highly developed. I would suggest thinking about it in terms of your current skill level at a particular kind of memory, as opposed to innate aptitude. Innate aptitude will, of course, affect how easy or difficult it is to acquire a given level at a given skill, but what matters in the moment to memorize a new piece is your current level as opposed to a theoretical projected level (your "potential").
There are multiple different abilities which may affect memory. These can be broadly lumped into 4 categories: visual, auditory, motor, and theoretical memory. But if we go more in depth, there is how well you remember the sound of a piece, how well you understand a piece conceptually, how well you understand the language of the music and the idiom, how well you observe and remember patterns and music theory, how good you can predict what comes next in a given style of music, visual memory for the sheet music, ability to visualize your hands and physical mechanism, proprioception, visualization abilities in general, meta-awareness which allows you to learn how to memorize quicker and know exactly how long it takes you to learn something using whatever method.
Personally, for instance, I find that I observe patterns readily and always have, so I endeavor to know, as much as is useful, all of the chords and their function in a piece of music that is classical/early Romantic. I believe I have a good auditory memory (I started off playing by ear and improvising which must have played into this). I can also visualize the hands somewhat well with enough focus.
Given all of that, this is the way I tend to approach memorization (it always changes, but roughly speaking):
- Get the piece in your ear. Sight read it while trying to understand the music as much as you can.
- Once you understand the gist of the music, break it down into natural sections which fit the music. Make general musical decisions.
- Play each section a few times, hands together. If it "just works", then try to play it a few times in succession without making mistakes.
- Analyze each section of a few measures intuitively using patterns/theory to break it down into easily understood statements. For instance, I arpeggio going to IV arpeggio, with this cool grace note figuration which gives it a specific character.
- If you're disciplined enough (!), play the section in your mind's eye on an imaginary piano with both hands.
- Try to incorporate as much detail as feasible on a first pass. If the notes are easy, make sure you have good phrasing for both hands, good voicing and balance, and a melodic line that sings. Try to make sure that the piece has character from the get go. Ideally, if you were a professional, you would do it all with a solid conception of the piece from the get go.
- Think about technical efficiency, and fingering choices which might work better. Sometimes, technical patterns are easy to do once but unreliable when you try to do them 10x in a row. Sometimes, certain fingering choices are easier because they ensure better memorization, for instance if there's a pattern where you can use the same fingering for 4 chords in a row but it would be slightly more comfortable to play one different from the rest. You want to work out as much of this as possible initially, to save yourself time down the road.
Any thoughts would be appreciated!
