Do your students (or you) learn 40 pieces a year?

[slane]

In this country there is a tendency for some teachers to teach to the exam, which means 5 pieces a year! plus a bit of sight reading,scales and aural work. Which is a bit bizaare IMO but I went through such a process when I was learning as a teenager, possibly because I was too lazy to learn more, or perhaps Iwould have been more inspired if more was expected of me! Or perhaps I would have been insulted at being given pieces beneath me. There was terrific snobbery amongst my piano playing peers.

Elissa Milne is a pedagogical composer and compiler of repertoire books for Hal Leonard and other publishers. She's written on the "power of quantity"
https://elissamilne.wordpress.com/2009/11/14/the-surprising-power-of-quantity/

and some teachers have taken her up on the challenge.
https://timtopham.com/2012/01/16/75-pieces-in-one-year-how-ben-went-from-beginner-to-grade-2-in-10-months/

Now Hal Leonard are promoting the idea.
https://elissamilne.wordpress.com/2012/11/24/the-hal-leonard-australia-40-piece-challenge-2013-suggestions-for-getting-started/
Of course there's a lot of for them to gain if people buy more music and she promotes at least three of her series of books in the one article.

But tell me, how many pieces do you learn in a year? Or do you expect your students to learn. Do you think there's power in quantity? IS it just a natural thing for your students to learn that much? and are you teaching in an exam culture?

Personally I've had a teacher as part of my midlife crisis for about 10 weeks and now and it seems quite natural for him to assign lots of easy pieces to make up about 0.8 pieces / week.

[outin]

I would say I worked on about 35-40 pieces on my first year (with a little bit of piano experience from 30 years ago). I cannot say that I learned them all, some we dropped pretty early, some I still work with along with the newer ones.

The 40 pieces includes studies, short pieces and about 2 page long pieces. Now that the pieces are becoming longer and more difficult (and also more interesting, so I want to learn them better) I think I won't be able to do that many the 2nd year, maybe 25-30.

I actually do not know how long it would take to memorize something to a exam standard (if I ever could). Never tried and would probably end up quitting piano because of the boredom before I would reach that level...

[timbo178]

I think it's a great idea. I'll be pushing my students to do it next year.

I've been trying to encourage this with my students this past year, emphasising that I want them to learn lots of repertoire and _keep_ it in their head and fingers. It hasn't quite caught on, but am determined to make it happen next year!

(Edit: so the answer is to the original question is no, not quite 40 per year ...)

[sucom]

I am all for learning as many pieces as possible.  Whenever I hear one of my student's tell me they have only worked on one piece because they wanted to get it right before moving on to another piece I have set for them causes me to respond with 'No, no, don't do that!  Split your practice between two or three for maximum benefit.'

And when they are a reasonable standard, assuming they will not be performing them (obviously more practice required if performing or for an exam), we move on to new pieces. 

[rachmaninoff_forever]

I don't learn anywhere near 40 pieces a year.

[vsrinivasa]

I only learn about 20 or so during the year. Last year I truly properly learnt 33, but I practiced four to six hours a day.

[tranquille]

Hi,

I'm fairly new on this forum.  I am re starting piano lessons in January after having quit as a teenager (many, many years ago)  I think the idea of learning 40 pieces or as close to it as one comfortably can is great.  As a beginner does anyone think it would be cheeky of me to suggest this to my prospective teacher?  If I do suggest it, how would you propose I go about it?

Thanks for any help.

[timbo178]

Wouldn't be cheeky at all, tranquille. By contrast, I think your teacher would be thrilled to have a student who has a clear of idea of what they want to achieve, and is prepared to work hard for it. Just say to your teacher: 'I'd like to challenge myself by taking part in this 40 piece challenge. Could you help me achieve this?'

[j_menz]

I don't get the obsession with numbers here. Why 40? 

And surely, not all pieces are equal in terms of how hard they will be to learn or how long they are.  What counts as a piece - Tschaikovsky's Album for the young, for example: 1 piece or 40 (or whatever it is)?  All in total shorter than a late Beethoven sonata, and a lot easier to learn.

And what does "learn" in this context mean anyway?

[outin]

I don't get the obsession with numbers here. Why 40? 

I figured it's just a random number which is bigger than 3 or whatever is the number people need to learn for exams.
Should be pretty irrelevant whether it's 35 or 38 or 40?
And there's really no way to measure the actual amount of work by the number of pieces...

[slane]

I don't get the obsession with numbers here. Why 40? 

I think its because there are about 40 school weeks in a year. i.e. it works out 1 piece per week.

And surely, not all pieces are equal in terms of how hard they will be to learn or how long they are.  What counts as a piece - Tschaikovsky's Album for the young, for example: 1 piece or 40 (or whatever it is)?  All in total shorter than a late Beethoven sonata, and a lot easier to learn.

And what does "learn" in this context mean anyway?

Yes indeed. Quite arbitrary. Although Ms Milne goes into a bit of detail about the definition of learn and the difficulty of pieces.  Easier is upto 4 grade levels below (AMEB levels she's talking about) the exam the student is aiming for. In this way the student is more engaged by the variety of the tasks, and the pleasure of achieving something quickly, and their exposure to the repertoire is increased. And on the definition of learn, she says
" Near enough is good enough, but near enough means at tempo and with flow and with communicative intent, not a bald reading-through without any sense of what the music means. "

In her original post of the subject she says
"Many (most?) piano students around the world learn no more than ten pieces per annum.  The idea seems to be that by investing all their energies into a smaller number of works the quality of the students’ performances will be enhanced.  And at first glance this seems to be a reasonable idea.

But what happens is that students take longer and longer (in terms of days and weeks) to master an ever-smaller repertoire, and as the time-frames lengthen, and the repertoire lists shorten, so the student’s enthusiasm for practice seems to ebb almost entirely away."

And the point is
"Firstly, my students gain a wide, practical, lived experience of many distinct musical idioms and forms. Instead of learning one or two pieces from the Baroque period in a year, they may learn ten.  Instead of mastering one piece in a swing groove, they may learn to play fifteen. <snip>

But most importantly of all, my students become very happy.  In fact, I have observed a direct correlation between number of pieces learned and student happiness."

[hfmadopter]

I don't get the obsession with numbers here. Why 40?  

And surely, not all pieces are equal in terms of how hard they will be to learn or how long they are.  What counts as a piece - Tchaikovsky Album for the young, for example: 1 piece or 40 (or whatever it is)?  All in total shorter than a late Beethoven sonata, and a lot easier to learn.

And what does "learn" in this context mean anyway?

My thought as well, I see no obsession for volume. Beethoven's 9th symphony alone is 40 pages long for instance, and if you ( or whom ever) is to play piano accompaniment of that piece, I think the level of knowing it is obvious . A student of first year level may play 10 pieces in a couple of months but they are half a page long each , some a couple lines, some a whole page. No comparison. So a goal of 40 pieces becomes moot, IMO.

As a matter of fact, I think it's a rather silly concept. It may be fine for years 1 and perhaps 2. After that I think it's far better to set a goal of accomplishing some quality pieces not quantity. I mean let's face it, you could play 40 pieces of crap in a year, big whoop.

[tranquille]

I'm fairly new here and have been going over past posts and came upon Bernhard's posts on a similar topic.  He recommends learning 20 new pieces a year to add to one repertoire.  Here's an excerpt of one of his posts on the topic:

"Yes, you can “master” 20 pieces a year if they are within your level and if they are arranged in a progressive order of difficulty so that mastering one provides the resources for mastering the next one. Mastering here means simply good enough for you to be able to perform the piece.

I also believe on working on several pieces in parallel. You could spend a whole year just working on a Bach 2 voice invention, and at the end of that year you would have just that piece to show for your efforts. But would it be considerably better than if you had learned another 19 pieces concurrently? In my experience not only it would not be any better as it may have been worse – since the learning of one piece always informs (both technically and conceptually) the learning of another.

Let us look around, shall we? Richter had repertory of over 1500 pieces. Arrau had a similar one. Most professional pianists have a repertory of over 500 pieces. Brendel is possibly the one with the smallest repertory: he has said in interview that his concertrepertory is around 150 pieces. I assume that he has a much larger repertory, 150 are just the pieces he plays publicly.

John Browning once said in interview that he expected his students to bring him a sonata ready and memorised every weekly lesson. He said that most were shocked at his request, but they soon realised he was serious and they just somehow had to manage. He also said that although they complained bitterly of the work load, at the end of the year they were always grateful since not only they had 52 sonatas in their repertory, as in the process of learning them at such a pace, they had figured out ways to learn and memorise them so quickly.

[keypeg]

I believe that Ms. Milne is addressing the product vs. process conundrum.  Especially in the world of exams, teachers will tend to teach a small number of pieces and polish them to perfection in order for the student to get a high grade in exams.  Material taught will be toward grades, rather than toward forming broader skills of musicianship.  This is a composer and teacher who thinks outside the box.  I have the impression that the Piano Plate series is actually aiming to create a kind of anti-exam exam in order to break through that.  It is not a matter of numbers but of mindset.  You will also find the "Marbeth" site (Mary Beth?) addressing this.  I got the expression product vs. produce from that site.

[j_menz]

I'm certainly not against the idea of people doing plenty of stuff outside of their exam repertoire. Good pianists need both depth and breadth, and having played a wider array of pieces to some standard will make one a better pianist.  It seems to me most unfortunate that a student could get to grade seven or eight and have played less than 20 pieces in the last 5 years.

[slane]

keypeg, you're right.

Another element that hasn't been mentioned is the crazy parent factor.
Mothers want the bragging rights to say "The Loin Fruit just passed grade X". Sounds so much more brag worthy than "Loin Fruit is exploring Chopin right now". And that's where a lot of the pressure to get kids through exams (and preferrably skip a few  grades because that's even more brag worthy) comes from.

The 40 piece challenge matches the crazy parent's desire for bragging rights to the purpose of learning the piano ... at least a bit.

The PPlate piano books are about addressing the problem of kids tackling Preliminary without the necessary skills. I imagine that situation also often comes about from parents demanding to know when their 6 year old will be starting Preliminary. Its all soooo wrong!

EDIT: BTW - my daughter is really enjoying the first PPlate book.

[ajspiano]

Another element that hasn't been mentioned is the crazy parent factor.
Mothers want the bragging rights to say "The Loin Fruit just passed grade X". Sounds so much more brag worthy than "Loin Fruit is exploring Chopin right now".

Indeed, I've have parents express to me that lessons are a waste of time if the child does not receive an A.M.E.B. certificate..

..those ones generally aren't agreeable to my thoughts that its much more likely lessons are a waste of time if they do. (well perhaps not a waste, just not the most efficient use of time)

[tranquille]

Wouldn't be cheeky at all, tranquille. By contrast, I think your teacher would be thrilled to have a student who has a clear of idea of what they want to achieve, and is prepared to work hard for it. Just say to your teacher: 'I'd like to challenge myself by taking part in this 40 piece challenge. Could you help me achieve this?'

Thanks.  Will certainly try this when I start with a teacher next year.  Will report back on how  it went.

[asuhayda]

Interesting concept.  I teach my students about 12-15 pieces a year.  Which is usually about the best I can do.  I don't know that I have enough material to teach kids 40 pieces a year.  I definitely agree that young students should get in the habit of learning as much music as possible.  I guess the only thing I would be concerned about is focus.  Although, I don't think it's 100% important for kids to learn every piece absolutely perfectly.  It might, however, be swinging too far in the other direction if they are so spread out.  10 Pieces a quarter is more than I did in University (I think) and I was practicing a LOT..