The Memorizing of Piano Music for Performance

Extract

In introducing for your consideration this afternoon the subject of memory in connection with piano playing, I can hardly doubt that my subject is one in which every earnest student and every competent teacher of the piano must feel no slight or passing interest. From the time the beginner learns the alphabetical names of the notes of the keyboard, by remembering their position in relation to the groups of two and three black notes, until he reaches — if he ever does — the highest summit of his profession as a pianist, does the cultivation of the power of memory, in one form or another, enter in no small degree into his studies.