How do you know what pieces you should be learning?

[shadowzerg]

Hey, I'ma self taught pianist trying to find a greater sense of direction. I've learned some pieces but as I've only been playing 10 months, I don't know what exactly I should be learning. I plan to become virtuoso one day and assume I should be playing anything that will increase my technique (Which is pretty much everything haha.) The hardest piece I've tackled so far is Chopin's Valse op64. nr.2. Can someone help breed my sense of direction? Thanks in advance

[brogers70]

It's good to be ambitious, and I think it is possible to learn to play the piano well without a teacher, especially if you do not have access to a good teacher. Still, a teacher could help. I'd suggest looking for the many useful posts by Bernhard in here for general advice.

As to picking pieces to work on, I'd say just experiment. Pick a piece that you like to listen to that does not seem too hard, maybe a two part invention or a simple Schubert waltz. Find the most difficult part of the piece. Start working there hands separate, then hands together. Break your work up into small bits so that you can see progress in 10-15 minutes - even if you have to work on something as small as half a measure. Work on 4-5 pieces like that, making sure you have specific, small goals for each 10-15 minute period of practice. Once you've been doing that for a while, you'll develop a sense of how long it takes to learn a piece of a given level of difficulty. Then you can pick progressively harder pieces with a realistic view of how frustrating you'll find them. You just want to avoid too huge a leap in difficulty - if you try to learn the Waldstein sonata tomorrow there's no doubt you could break it down into small enough bits that you could make progress on a small bit in every 10-15 minute practice segment, but you'd get bored because it would take to long.

Learning without a teacher requires that you experiment all the time. If someone tells you something about fingering, how to hold your wrists, what you should or shouldn't try to learn now, just test what they say. Don't take advice without trying it out. And read Bernhard and CC Chang. If you're doing this with an idea to a musical career though, it will probably be worth finding a teacher.

[shadowzerg]

Thanks man. I've read some of Chang and the many powerful posts by Bernhard. I have good method to learn pieces, I just don't know what quite to learn. I am a memorizer, I have 12 pieces memorized and playable total. My first piece was a level 4 and everything after was either at that level or a progressive step up. Most of the pieces I've been learning have been random contemporary pieces that I liked but I'm beginning to lean towards classics, that's why I learned the waltz. I have plans for a second handed music career majoring Medicine first and Music as a second. I know a teacher could be useful but I'm a little rebellious in that department.


I just want to make sure I don't waste my mental capacity on pieces that aren't needed. I wish to play La Campanella, all of Gaspard De La Nuit, 6 of Chopin's etudes (Torrent, Waterfall, Winterwind, Ocean, Revolutionary, and op.10 nr1), and many other virtuosic pieces. I just need to find out what will get me there. I wish to be able to play them by 5th year of play. I've logged 10 months now and am trying to conquer the FI and 10(Random but difficult to me) other pieces O_O.

[i_am_joey_jo]

Setting your goals too high will lead to disappointment.  You cannot and never will become a virtuoso without a teacher.  If you look at the few who have made it, they were all taught.

With a 5 year plan to become such you will feel lost when that time is up and you have not attained your goals.  Even the most professional concert musicians are mostly not virtuosos.

Do not play to attain a certain level.  Play to enjoy what you are playing at the moment.  You cannot rush something like that and very few people who have been playing their whole lives never even come close to meeting that level.

Virtuosity also involves theory knowledge and I would think a University education or such would be needed for such.  There are no Mozarts of today.  There are people who are 14 who can play well but I doubt they have made any noteworthy compositions.

[lostinidlewonder]

First of all you must do pieces you enjoy that is the most important thing. You may not like the sound of a piece but enjoy what technical abilities you learn from it, we should not think of "like" a piece as simply just a piece you like the sound of, if you are interested in technique and doing things you didn't know you should find enjoyment in this too.

Work out what is easy, average, difficult for yourself. There are many shades in between and the number of shades depends on your technical/memory/musical capabilities. The better you get the more everything stats to feel the same and difficulties can be solved via past experiences. You should be focusing on pieces which you can easily manage with a few challenges. The challenges should not be too great, exactly what % of the score depends on the individual again. Personally if I find 20% of the score is very challenging I will try something else. It is just a matter of efficiency, you will simply waste your time puzzling through difficulties which might be automatically solved via more experience.

This is not to say that to play piece A you need to first study pieces B and C. The study of music is not that formulated. However there are certain experiences that you might more readily appreciate from an easier piece rather than learning it in a piece which challenges you. Simply the more music you have learnt the better you will be prepared to solve difficulties in other pieces. Simply studying pieces to gain technique is useless, we should be aiming to produce a desired sound. Mastering 50 pieces at your level will better equip you at learning an advanced piece. You will naturally discover that the difficulty of pieces increases on its own accord. Just avoid pieces which stumps you all the time and play pieces where the learning process is in leaps and bounds and you can notice the progress every time you sit down.

I see people who work on pieces too difficult for them like someone doing a jigsaw puzzle of 20,000 pieces. They work and work hard but the progress is small and you can't see larger chunks being completed at a time, you find it confusing to sort through all the information. Where people who study at their level can start to piece together a picture much faster and see results and progress. They can more readily measure their progress learning pieces at their level. Unfortunately our level might not be as good as we think when we start playing pieces that are actually at our level. Do not worry, focus on this and you will improve much faster.

This is not to say that you should never practice difficult pieces, in fact never neglect difficult pieces, you simply must have some experience in them, you must try things you cannot do naturally, just challenge yourself and try small parts of difficult piece if you feel too intimidated. This is a good workout and when reverting back to pieces at your level you may in fact trick your brain into feeling like the pieces at your level are actually quite easy!

An important skill is to improve your reading skills. This is a key factor to your learning rate, poor reading skills sets you up for a slow learning rate. People who play piano for many years with poor reading skills depend on their memory and learning new pieces for them is always a brute force step by step procedure. Those with good reading skills know how to acquire muscular memory more readily through their conscious observations in the score. They do not have to commit a piece to stored memory at the beginning like a pure memorizer because they can queue the action by sighting the score and thus the repetitions can be done without forcing the brain to store the information to produce the repetition. It is a more organic approach, you can play through an entire piece over and over again and eventually it becomes memorized and learned. You may have to go back and focus memory work on small parts but the majority is solved through sight reading. So do not neglect your sight reading skills it is as important as your technique or musical expression.

[dss62467]

Wow - nice response Lost!   

[brogers70]

I just want to make sure I don't waste my mental capacity on pieces that aren't needed. I wish to play La Campanella, all of Gaspard De La Nuit, 6 of Chopin's etudes (Torrent, Waterfall, Winterwind, Ocean, Revolutionary, and op.10 nr1), and many other virtuosic pieces. I just need to find out what will get me there. I wish to be able to play them by 5th year of play. I've logged 10 months now and am trying to conquer the FI and 10(Random but difficult to me) other pieces O_O.

You want to do that AND get through medical school? There's nothing wrong with being ambitious, but be sure to remain flexible and realistic. If you can get to the point where you can play Mozart sonatas, Schubert Impromptus, and the easier fugues from the Well Tempered Clavier you'll have reached a level of skill at which there is an enormous amount of wonderful music you'll be able to play. Not to say you can't aim at ultra virtuoso pieces, but there's a lot of great music that's challenging but still a good deal easier than the pieces you mentioned.

I played classical guitar in high school and college but had to give it up for years while I went to med school and did residency; there just wasn't time to play enough to keep my technique up to snuff. Then I took up piano at 40 and 10 years later I can play the sort of pieces I mentioned above. I can live without playing Gaspard de la Nuit. I guess you can look at piano playing as an extreme sport, but you don't have to.

[shadowzerg]

I may have given off the wrong image I see. Okay, I started playing the piano due to a piece on a game I heard called A Sign of Hope. I said this to say that the reason I started playing and the reason I play now is for pure enjoyment. I'm not learning to just flaunt technique and boost an ego. I listed those difficult pieces because I actually LOVE the way they sound. Now I realize I may be highly ambitious but I'm not naive. I'm highly flexible with my claims and am willing to change them if needed. To the poster that said it's impossible to become a virtuoso without a teacher, I almost fell out of my chair laughing. I have a cousin whose been playing for 12 years completely self taught who SIGHT READS pieces like Islamey and Rach's Concertos for FUN. As a warm up haha, he's now practicing Kapustin.

I don't want to learn pieces for pure technical or difficult aspects. I'm really going for musical quality with those as an added bonus. I've been doing a lot of contemporary pieces like Twilight Shore and 13th Side ( You can search these on Youtube) and everything has been difficult for me because I constantly scale up. This is most likely due to starting with a difficult piece and figuring out how to play it entirely by myself. Thanks for your awesome response lost and others. I'm really just trying to make sure that I don't learn anything useless but it seems like everything is useful to some extent. 

[lostinidlewonder]

... I started playing and the reason I play now is for pure enjoyment. I'm not learning to just flaunt technique and boost an ego. I listed those difficult pieces because I actually LOVE the way they sound. Now I realize I may be highly ambitious but I'm not naive. I'm highly flexible with my claims and am willing to change them if needed.

Playing for enjoyment is of key important so at least you are on the right track here! Not many people enjoy struggling only with difficult pieces but everyone is different. I think it is important to have long term goals and dreams, pieces that you aspire to master no matter the difficulty. This is a good attitude to have, it is aiming for the stars. But how smart do you want to be about achieving your goals? Do you have any sense of efficiency when it comes to learning piano?

You simply do not know all the ways in which to approach the piano because you cannot attempt it all, you must choose one and go with it since you are only one person. A teacher however deals with countless students in their lifetime, they have seen the countless ways in which people approach music, they also realize what is an efficient path for the individual student based. The most efficient path is always what works for the individual however aligned to a tradition and developments of good piano learning that educators of piano have drawn from the two hundred + odd years of keyboard teaching knowledge so far.

To the poster that said it's impossible to become a virtuoso without a teacher, I almost fell out of my chair laughing. I have a cousin whose been playing for 12 years completely self taught who SIGHT READS pieces like Islamey and Rach's Concertos for FUN. As a warm up haha, he's now practicing Kapustin.

It is not impossible but highly unlikely. Everyone needs a teacher everyone needs someone to learn from. If you don't you simply ignore all the knowledge that is already out there and you may indeed think you are doing something clever but really simply are doing something that has already been discovered!

If your cousin sight reads very fluently the pieces you suggest then he most probably has attempted the pieces you have suggested many times and also has heard them many times. So he does not actually sight read them from scratch, most of us rarely observe people sight reading things for the first time unless they are a teacher. If he can sight read something at that standard fluently from first viewing then he is extremely talented and a top sight reader.

When studying music you are put in situations where you simply "do not know you do not know" it is a trap which catches many people and a teacher is very helpful to avoid these instances. Of course some of us are autodidactic and predominantly learn by themselves and have a keen sense of their own learning but even these people need a small alignment in the correct direction now and then. You don't have to have it but then things do take longer than they would. If time is not important then this doesn't matter for yourself, however most of us realize we have limited time in this world, some of us want to get through more faster, some just like the journey no matter how far they get, each of us has different aspirations.

I'm really just trying to make sure that I don't learn anything useless but it seems like everything is useful to some extent.  

Nothing you learn will be useless, I think if you learn too many of the same pieces with the same procedure this can be useless. For example I have come across students who only play triad chords in the LH vs melody in the RH and have learnt countless pieces of this nature. Once you have the idea move on, there is many other things to find out. I also think it is useless to play pieces where you do not feel comfortable and cannot envisage comfort of playing passages. Envisaging the comfort is very important, if you have the sense (through past piece experience) of where you have to be for a difficult technical passage (even though you cannot play the passage) then the piece is doable, however if you have no concept of the comfort to play the passage the piece is out of your league by far and simply would take way too long to master and appreciate its musical/technical value. It is a terrible trap I have seen many ambitious students fall into, it wastes their time. You become complacent playing difficult pieces without mastery, where your attitude should be to play all pieces with mastery (something achievable by playing things at your level and little notches above).

[shadowzerg]

Thank you lost! See the thing is, while I have no teacher I do have alignment....you guys. Any time I'm at a loss in those "don't know" moments I search the net or call my cousin(lives in another state). When it comes to his sight reading, he always does it from scratch if he can. He said he likes to draw his own interpretation of the music which may be arrogant or naive but it works. The method I'm using to learn is Bernhard 7x20 method. I was previously just memorizing small passages and repeating them until they were perfectly playable. Bernhard has helped me to refine that method and make small changes. 

Now that I know what pieces to learn and how I should be learning/focusing, there's another topic that I'd like advice on. Something you mentioned earlier....sight reading. Now I've talked this over with my cousin many times but he always give the same answer....just read. Now I can see why that would work in a 12 year period but I want adequate reading when I go into college. The whole just reading thing doesn't seem very appealing to me. He also recommended reading HIGHLY difficult pieces so that everything else seems easier. I tried this but it is the most GRUELING experience ever encountered in my life. Reading a four minute long piece in 2 hours is NOT fun! What do you guys suggest?


P.S. If you're thinking about saying just read tell me how and what I should be reading. Assume my reading is at level 0 (Even though the second I see a note on the sheet I know exactly what and where it is).

[shadowzerg]

Bump for more wisdom.