Memorization of Piano Music: A Challenge for Chinese Piano Students

As many Chinese piano students have encountered various kinds of problem to memorize the music, which negatively influences their musical development, this paper reports a comprehensive study on the memorization of piano music and introduces the efficient ways to accomplish the memorization. Correlative analysis demonstrate that 1) like any other ability, the ability to memorize piano music needs a lot of practice; 2) for pianists who are making great efforts to fulfill their inevitable memorization task, it is important to persistently have a positive attitude towards the goal through the entire memorizing process; 3) rather than regarding memorization as a time-consuming and must-do tradition that has been handed down from the piano predecessors, it is more reasonable to regard the memorization process as an opportunity to wholly free the performers from the written page and to truly own the piece. Hopefully, this study can provide some assistance to both Chinese piano teachers and students to conquer the issue.