The first step to finding appropriate repertoire is to determine your current level. So, how do you pick piano music to fit all of these categories? Determine Your Current Level Typically, when you first begin lessons at any age, the method books you use will contain smaller pieces that you can easily learn within a week, and it’s a nice feeling when your teacher places that sticker on the page the next week (even if you’re an adult!). For newer students, however, I suggest having a smaller category: pieces you can learn in a week. The idea is that you are always learning one piece from each of these categories. Josh Wright, he explains that you should have a few categories of repertoire based upon how long it takes you to learn the pieces: 1 month, 2–3 months, 6 months, and (if you’re an advanced student) a year, and sight reading. The second way to maintain your momentum by learning a lot of repertoire and to avoid frustration and burnout in your studies is to strategically pick your repertoire. We should pick piano music whose bite-sized chunks fit our level. We can only reduce pieces down so much though, so the point of this post comes into play. So for learning a large piece, each day your goal should be a set number of measures, reaching a certain speed, or listening to a number of performances and choosing your approach to certain passages. There are a couple of ways to solve this problem, the first of which is what all the pop-psychology blogs say about goal-setting: break the larger goal into single, actionable steps. As creating music requires presence, this creates an obstacle to our deepest desires and goals as musicians. Think about the, albeit brief, sense of relief you feel when you place a check mark next to an item on your to-do list.Īlthough learning musical repertoire is a longer process than going to the grocery store or mailing a thank-you note to dear Aunt Bertha for the lovely flowers she sent on your birthday, we still experience tension from incomplete tasks that poses difficulty to living in the present. The human mind has a tendency to fixate on unfinished tasks, called the Zeigarnik Effect, and this tendency creates a tension that builds up in the back of our minds as more and more unfinished tasks pile up. Some Psychology of Learning a Piece of Music This guide is meant to help you find your own repertoire, whether you have a great teacher or not. But many pianists don’t have the luxury of having a teacher. Thus, teachers are a important part of the piano journey. We choose all of our goals to challenge us in every aspect of who we are.Ĭhallenge is good, but psychologically, we also need goals that we can check off quickly and easily to encourage us and relieve stress. I could go on for days about how goal-setting (maybe just in America - that’s my only experience, so maybe it’s different elsewhere) has become an activity that burns us out. Teachers are one of the best resources for picking music that challenges you but is within your current abilities to achieve.
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