Recently I have seen online various adverts that talk about secret knowledge of being able to successfully remember how to play pieces of music that you have already learned months or even years ago.
It is no big secret, it is just using what is called muscle memory. (As an aside, it is purely a marketing tactic to get you to pay for information that you could probably access elsewhere.)
For those of you that are unfamiliar with the term of muscle memory, it is where your body, or certain parts like your hands and fingers know how to perform an action without you having to put any conscious thought into it. A classic example of this is driving. When we accelerate, brake, turn right, turn left or put on the indicator, we don’t need to think about how we actually do it – it seems to come automatically. Technically, it is not driving automatically or on auto-pilot, rather it is using muscle memory.
The same thing can happen when you play the piano – you can rely on muscle memory to play entire pieces of music. I’ve experienced this first hand because there are pieces of music that I learned to play as a child and a teenager that I can still play today. They might not be the most polished, however I can play them without even thinking about it – all I need to do is put my hands in the starting position and just get started and the muscle memory will take me to the end of the piece.
Muscle memory doesn’t just work for the select lucky people. Everyone is capable of having muscle memory work for them.
The way to get the muscle memory happening is to practice a piece of music (or a section) many times. Two or three times won’t do it , you really need to practice something dozens of times in the exact same way. The process of being able to have some piece of music entrenched in your muscle memory cannot be shortened. You have to know a piece of music really, really well. You can test yourself as to how much of a piece of music is committed to your muscle memory by trying to play the piece without any print music and without really thinking much at all about it.
Once you have something that you can play just using your muscle memory, then you will be able to play it for years to come.
And that is the reason why professional musicians can perform very long pieces of music without any print music in front of them.
So if there is a piece of music that you really enjoy playing, trying practicing it until your fingers have the muscle memory of it and you will easily be able to play it for many years to come.