Playing a piece from beginning to end with increasing fluency does not guarantee that you can begin independently in the middle. Repeated run-throughs can build a serial action chain: one group of sounds and gestures automatically cues the next. If a performance breaks down, that cue disappears. Your hands may know how to continue, yet not know how to enter at the present location. The memory has not necessarily vanished; its route of retrieval is too narrow.
Research on music memory calls deliberately prepared locations — such as formal sections, harmonic turns, fingering problems or expressive changes — performance cues. They work like landmarks on a mental map of the piece: encountered during a fluent performance but also available as restart points after an error. In practice, choose the beginning of a section, name its harmony, voicing or musical direction, then begin there and connect it to the next short passage. If you must retreat several bars to recover the feel, that location is not yet independently accessible.
The aim is not to turn every bar into a starting point or to destroy the long line. A small number of structurally clear entries allow automatic movement to remain supported by a musical map. Starting in the middle tests not courage, but whether you know where you are.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1331806/full
https://musiclab.uconn.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/290/2018/01/2016-Chaffin-Demos-Logan-Performing_from_Memory.pdf
If you read and practise scores in <a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/scoreflow/id6796205656">ScoreFlow</a>, you can carry this “enter from a structural landmark” test into each session instead of treating complete run-throughs as the only measure of fluency.
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