Music memorisation and practising strategies have long been debated by instrumental music teachers. As part of World Piano Day, Chara Steliou, a PhD student in our Music department, is looking to explore how piano teachers teach music memorisation in one-to-one piano lessons and how piano students perform when learning a piece from memory.
To memorise or not to memorise? This was a question that kept coming to my mind throughout my years as a piano student but even later as a professional pianist and piano teacher. To a large extent, pianists are expected to perform from memory in concerts and competitions; however, are piano students taught how to memorise during their piano lessons? Despite more than a century of research on music memorisation and practising strategies, there is a lack of comprehensive evidence on how instrumental music teachers teach memorisation to children and adolescents in one-to-one lessons and how piano students perform when learning from memory.
My first PhD study has examined piano teachers’ perceptions of music memorisation in one-to-one piano lessons. In this online questionnaire, we surveyed 37 piano teachers who teach children and adolescents and found that music memorisation is perceived by most teachers as a skill that develops through practice rather than a natural talent. Teaching memorisation fell into four categories: aural, visual, kinaesthetic, and analytical. This study shows that kinaesthetic and analytical methods are qualitatively dominant which suggests that aural and visual memorisation methods might be less explored by piano teachers of children and adolescents and future research could be conducted in this area.
My PhD is now focusing on the way piano students memorise music and it aims to create a new method in which students are taught step-by-step how to memorise by using practical exercises during their lesson time. Throughout my teaching career I have developed a set of piano memorisation techniques which I will be using to teach two groups of piano students. In this intervention study, we will be testing the two groups who will be learning a piece of music with memorisation techniques I have developed and with muscle memory/repetition. We will then compare the groups and assess whether their performance improved in terms of note correctness, musicality, technique, stress and stage performance.
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