How do pianists memorize such long songs?

Many talented pianists can actually read the sheet music as they go so there’s no need to remember the song.

Personally, I can’t read music fast enough so playing a song becomes muscle memory (via my brain and my fingers)

Or something really long, like Beethoven’s 5th Piano Concerto.

La Campanella is not very long relatively speaking but is played at lightening speed.

practicing for hours a day

Check out Schostakovich’s Piano Concerto for both length and harmonic dissonance, making it a challenge to learn.

Listen to 1st movement here

I’ve wondered as well; seeing someone play the Rach 3 with no sheet music in front of them…it’s crazy, especially the ossia cadenza part.

One chunk at a time.

As harple says, it’s about practicing passages over and over, and then just doing them in order. It helps that there’s a ton of patterns in music, so it makes sense intuitively, plus we practice the patterns ahead of time as well as whole passages – a lot of music is made up of scales & arpeggios, and these are drummed deeply into our brains and fingers so that playing them is almost an automatic thing. It also helps to listen to a recording of the piece a bunch of times.

@wildpotato: There is also the knowledge of chord structure and harmony and having perfect pitch that helps with the memorization in addition to muscle memory.

It would be an incredibly rare pianist who could play the pieces you named but not read music. Professional classical pianists play with the music in front of them.

^^Until they have to give a performance, with an occasional exception.

Sitting in my son’s piano lesson as I write. He is playing a short piece that he pretty much memorized in two weeks, with only half an hour a day of practice. Think what he would do if he actually worked at it.

I also see how if he understood how music works, it would be even easier to memorize, because there are patterns that are often repeated in music.

If you have a good ear, music is easier to remember. If you can understand the patterns of music then you can often predict what will come next. Between that and repetition, you can memorize very long pieces. The more you play them, the more you remember.

After a lot of practicing it goes into muscle memory and you don’t even think about it.

“Professional classical pianists play with the music in front of them.” Maybe when they’re practising, but I’ve never seen anyone bring any music on stage in the several years we attended the Carnegie Hall piano soloist series. They just know their pieces, and a few extra for encores. When you see some madman (i.e. genius) playing Franz Liszt you wonder how all those notes even fit on the score and/or how anyone could read them all at playing speed anyway.

It’s not unusual for the pianist to have music in front of them when they are playing with others, e.g. an orchestra, but I’ve heard this is annotated so they can see what the other parts will be doing, not to help them remember the piece.

You can ask this on a piano or classical music board if you like. The vast majority of classical piano performances, whether solo-recital, chamber, or with orchestra, are done with the music in front of the pianist. There are lots of free PDFs online of Liszt scores if you want to see them (complex pieces simply take more horizontal space—fewer measures per line than in a less dense piece).

Really, @marmoset? I’ve seen accomanists use music, I’ve seen…. well, accompanists for dance classes use music. I can’t recall seeing a solo piano performer use music. And my children have all been told to memorize pieces before a performance.

People also memorize scriptures, long poems, speeches, a tribe’s entire narrative history, and lengthy genealogies, not to mention dialogue in stage plays. Anything that has internal structure, coherence, and patterns such as rhythm and rhyme is easier to memorize than something arbitrary and disconnected.

A memorable scene in Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth is the one where the jongleur character, whose job is is to recite epic poems and ballads, explains that he doesn’t have to remember the whole thing at once. He recites it line by line, and as he completes each line, his memory delivers the next one.

And anyway, how many of us would really know if they missed a note?

Vladimir Horovitch played the piano as though possessed. I attended one of his last public concert in NYC and he hit some clunkers. No one cared.

Here’s one critic’s description of his technique: “As a technician Horowitz was one of the most honest in the history of modern pianism. He achieved his dazzling effects by fingers alone, using the pedal sparingly. Notes of scales could not be more evenly matched (his Scarlatti was technically fabulous); chords could not be attacked more precisely; octaves could not be sharper or more exciting; leaps could not be hit more accurately.”

“No matter how difficult and complicated the piece, Horowitz would make it sound easy. And above all there were his stupendous fortissimos—that orchestral body of tone that only Horowitz could produce.”

Here’s what Horowitz himself said: ”I take terrible risks. Because my playing is very clear, when I make a mistake, you hear it. But the score is not a bible, and I am never afraid to dare. The music is behind those dots. You search for it, and that is what I mean by the grand manner. I play, so to speak, from the other side of the score, looking back.”

@gailcalled Re: your post two above – muscle memory definitely comes into play. Knowing chord structures, keeping harmonies in mind (I play the clarinet, so my hands work on the same musical line at the same time – this may be different for pianists), and having a good ear for pitch is mostly background info my brain processes but doesn’t make me aware of at the time I’m playing the piece – though I’m sure the knowledge does help, I don’t base memorization strategies around those factors. Music theory class was cool because I got to examine those background processes in a more conscious way.

@Jeruba I think I usually notice when performers miss a note, because something sounds off for a split second. It’s like a blip, the auditory version of a tiny fly bumbling across your field of vision. Perhaps this is because I enjoy (and have worked on) a good sense of relative and absolute pitch.

@marmoset I feel like maybe you are interpreting the question differently than most of us – no one claims that instrumentalists learn pieces without using the sheet music initially. I suppose some must, but I have never met any, and this is not the way they train us. I and everyone I know learn off the sheet music, then memorize it. And it is considered…not better, but more professional, to memorize for performance. I was taught that it shows consideration for your audience because then they can see you properly and because you are more attuned to playing for them rather than simply playing perfectly. And in some cultures it is necessary – my Russian and Ukranian clarinet teachers were not allowed to perform with music in front of them, back when they were in school in their home countries.

@wildpotato: My son was a pretty good clarinets; we had used reeds, inferior reeds, reed leftovers and reed bits and pieces everywhere while he was in HS.

Memorizing a complicated piano piece is similar to learning all four parts of a string quartet and then playing them simultaneously.

It helps to understand the key and the chords if you’re a concert pianist. (I cannot imagine anyone who performs in public not knowing music theory and harmony.)

See the opening of the Appassionata, or the Waldstein, for example.

Knowing the chords is half the battle.

@wildpotato, I know there are some who would detect a wrong note, but I think you’re exceptional. Especially when there are a lot of notes going by very fast, a mistake is over almost before it happens. “How many of us?” was meant to imply that it’s unusual but not impossible. Even when I know the piece of music very well, I think I would tend to filter out tiny deviations because I am listening for pleasure rather than critically..

However, when I said “missed a note” I meant literally omit it, not play it wrong. Can you hear that too? The OP said “I’m always amazed they don’t forget a single note.” I would be amazed if someone could tell me that she knew for sure they didn’t.

edit; “clarinetist”

@Jeruba: Hearing a missed note would require some skills, it is true. If you have studied the piece seriously, however, and can play it in your head, you might spot an absent friend.

They practice every single day. For example, when I learned Fur Elise (the complicated one), it was hard for me because I couldn’t recall how the song went. But, I practiced, practiced, and practiced, and finally, one day, I got it!