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Hi Tracy,
I think random practice can be useful with memorizing. But that can potentially also add a bit too much complexity in the early stages of learning a piece. As in, from a motor standpoint, the idea is to make practice increasingly challenging as your comfort level grows. So blocked practice might be more helpful in the early stages of learning than random practice, whether you’re working on memory or not.
As far as memorizing with random practice goes, I think you can certainly use random practice with memory work, but the first step may be to divide up the music into musically meaningful chunks. For instance, my daughter was working on a piece which is pretty repetitive, and she kept mixing up the different sections, so we created a bunch of flashcards of the different sections, with different labels for each, and she tried pulling them out of a bag and playing those sections in random order. And then playing through the piece in its entirety to see if she could keep the sections straight in her head. The thing that seems to help most is having those chunks of music labeled in a structurally meaningful way, which fits with what some of the research on memorization for musicians seems to indicate.
Rather than getting into it all of that here, my go-to video recommendation for memorization in musicians is Univ of Arizona viola prof Molly Gebrian’s video and podcast episode on the research in this area. She was a neuro major in college so really gets the research in this area and how it applies to musicians. I think this will give you tons of ideas on how to approach memorization and how this fits pretty organically into the learning process itself – in that I think you can memorization a piece at the same time that you’re working on the nuances.
Here are the links:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7PO5fyuz1-xCNCZ9hii7SUpwQzLUZlU3
Hope this helps!
Noa
p.s. Incidentally, yes, 1a, 1b, 1c, 2a, 2b, 2c, etc. would indeed technically be called serial practice as opposed to random which would be truly random. I just tend to use random as a blanket term for that sort of thing, but probably ought to be clearer in the future. =)