How do undergraduate piano students memorize their repertoires?

Abstract

This study investigated the routine procedures employed by nine undergraduate piano students at a Brazilian university while learning and performing memorized pieces and the procedures employed using Chaffin’s performance cue (PC) protocols. The data were collected in two phases. In Phase I, each participant selected one piece that he or she had previously studied and memorized in the preceding academic semester. For Phase II, the students were introduced to Chaffin’s PC protocols, and they were allowed 10 weeks to memorize another piece of their own choosing. Thereafter, a second semi-structured interview with specific criteria was carried out, and the performance of the memorized piano piece was recorded. In Phase I, there were frequent references to structural and expressive cues. In Phase II, the employed PCs were shown to be related to the nature of the style of each piece, which in turn may indicate that explicit memory (content-addressable cues) seems to be associated with the deliberate expression of a given piece’s stylistic structure. Furthermore, tempo also seems to modulate the frequency of the PCs necessary to guarantee a successful memorized performance, for example, a faster tempo results in fewer PCs being employed.