How do you keep track of and maintain your repertoire?

[anacrusis]

The amount of music I have studied is now hours upon hours upon hours of various pieces from the repertoire. I have started to reflect on how I can best keep track of, or organize, and especially maintain as much of this repertoire I can. Pieces I haven't played for a couple of years I can usually still sight read somewhat sloppily, provided it was well studied when I learned it. Often memorization is mostly still there too. But it's starting to become a real issue as the repertoire I have studied keeps growing of how to maintain as much as possible in a playable state.

So I wanted to ask other pianists here, how do you keep track of and maintain your repertoire? Do you keep older pieces in shape? Or do you just focus on your current recital programme?

[lelle]

I'm actually trying to code something for my own private use to solve this problem. For now I use word documents and excel sheets lol.

[ranjit]

I'm actually trying to code something for my own private use to solve this problem. For now I use word documents and excel sheets lol.

That sounds interesting! I think having something like Anki for spaced repetition might actually work. What kind of program do you want to make? I might try my hand at coding it too.

[lelle]

I'm thinking of maybe an app or similar. There are already some repertoire tracker apps out there but as far as I can tell they don't have the more advanced things I'd like to see. But so far it's mostly a glint in my eye as I play around with some code. What would you want from a program that tracks your repertoire?

I'm aware of Anki, had a study mate att university who swore by it, but I found it totally unintuitive to use haha. Do you find it useful?

[ranjit]

I'm aware of Anki, had a study mate att university who swore by it, but I found it totally unintuitive to use haha. Do you find it useful?

I'm curious what ideas you might have.

I never used Anki, but I never had to. I think the idea of spaced repetition makes a lot of sense for piano pieces.  Play a specific piece after 1 day,  3 days,  7 days, 14 days, etc.

[brogers70]

I'm an amateur and play little recitals occasionally. I just let everything drop after I'm done with a given program and start working on the next. Except that I'll keep one shortish piece in hand, playing through it or tweaking it a bit every day or two, so that if somebody asks me to play something, there's always something that feels easy and comfortable. I found that trying to maintain a bunch of pieces, say an hour's worth, while working on a new hour's worth really slowed down the rate at which I could learn new things. But I'm not a pro and I don't need to have an hour or two of repertoire ready to go at the drop of a hat.

[transitional]

I don't bother to keep track of and maintain the easiest pieces, knowing that they can be picked back up very easily and sometimes sightread later.

[thorn]

I'm curious what ideas you might have.

I never used Anki, but I never had to. I think the idea of spaced repetition makes a lot of sense for piano pieces.  Play a specific piece after 1 day,  3 days,  7 days, 14 days, etc.

I used Anki for about 4 years in the early days of learning Japanese. While I definitely owe a lot to it, I don't see it working for piano repertoire for two reasons:
1) Review times. With Japanese my main time for reviewing flashcards was on the bus/train (or waiting on platforms for them to arrive). Even at the point I had 10K cards and 2-300 reviews per day, I'd get through most of them on a 40m bus journey. With piano, depending on the length of your pieces 40m could only be 2-3 cards and you can't do them literally any time/anywhere.

2) Review buildups: The more repertoire you add, the more daily cards you'd have so in line with what I said above it's just impractical to me (and skipping cards defeats the point of using SRS). There were times in my Japanese study where a couple of days of missing reviews became 1,000 cards to catch up on. Of course nobody will have as much repertoire as I had Japanese cards, but it's still an issue I'd be concerned about.

So in my opinion you're better off just keeping a repertoire list/spreadsheet or whatever and just making sure you play everything on there at least once a month. That's what I'd ideally like to do, but life gets in the way- I'm rubbish at maintaining repertoire tbh ><

[anacrusis]

Thanks for the insight so far everyone! 

So in my opinion you're better off just keeping a repertoire list/spreadsheet or whatever and just making sure you play everything on there at least once a month.

I think what I've played over my lifetime amounts to dozens upon dozens upon dozens of hours at this point. I recall playing through everything I had studied by Debussy up until that point and that alone was well over 2 hours. I need something more systematic.

[thorn]

Thanks for the insight so far everyone! 

I think what I've played over my lifetime amounts to dozens upon dozens upon dozens of hours at this point. I recall playing through everything I had studied by Debussy up until that point and that alone was well over 2 hours. I need something more systematic.

Oh I wouldn't dream of trying to maintain everything I've ever learned in my life! Just the stuff I enjoy playing.

[anacrusis]

Oh I wouldn't dream of trying to maintain everything I've ever learned in my life! Just the stuff I enjoy playing.

That's fair! I don't think I want to maintain everything in prime condition, but have as much music as possible basically ready to be picked up in 1-2 weeks.

[avguste]

personally, I use an Apple app called "Practice"

[danielwalker]

personally, I use an Apple app called "Practice"

Is this app available on Android? I searched the keyword Practice on CH Play and it gave me too many suggestions. I don't know which one to choose.

[pontiman]

Hello,

About 5 years ago I bought a large iPad (around $1,000) and began converting all of my music to forScore and now honestly, I would never go back to using paper music for multiple reasons.  I still keep all my old paper scores, and occasionally buy printed music, but I immediately scan it into my device if I decide to begin practicing / playing it.

Most classical music is now downloadable and once it is on your device you can use an apple pen (another $100, sigh) and finger / edit the heck out of any piece.   Anything you can't get on line you can scan into your iPad with a free scanning app (I use it often for older paper pieces I have with fingering and notes).

Organizationally, you can classify your music into Genres, then sub categories like Labels and Tags.  Every piece has a name and a composer so for example if you want to see all of your Chopin you just select that composer.

The chief benefit you have (once your repertoire is on the device) is all of your music is on your iPad (really in the cloud) and wherever you go you can bring it with you.  When I play a recital or for example if I am playing in church, I do a playlist under a label I create and all of the pieces are there one after another in my order I choose.  The only disadvantage of using an iPad I see is that only 1 page shows, so if you play by score you need to turn the page, but honestly turning a page is so easy (you tap the lower corner) and you can also by a bluetooth pedal.

As far as keeping your repertoire "playable", I had a piano teacher once say, the better you learn the piece now, the easier it will be to re-learn it a year or two from now if need be. 

Good luck!

[lelle]

Hello,

About 5 years ago I bought a large iPad (around $1,000) and began converting all of my music to forScore and now honestly, I would never go back to using paper music for multiple reasons.  I still keep all my old paper scores, and occasionally buy printed music, but I immediately scan it into my device if I decide to begin practicing / playing it.

Most classical music is now downloadable and once it is on your device you can use an apple pen (another $100, sigh) and finger / edit the heck out of any piece.   Anything you can't get on line you can scan into your iPad with a free scanning app (I use it often for older paper pieces I have with fingering and notes).

Organizationally, you can classify your music into Genres, then sub categories like Labels and Tags.  Every piece has a name and a composer so for example if you want to see all of your Chopin you just select that composer.

The chief benefit you have (once your repertoire is on the device) is all of your music is on your iPad (really in the cloud) and wherever you go you can bring it with you.  When I play a recital or for example if I am playing in church, I do a playlist under a label I create and all of the pieces are there one after another in my order I choose.  The only disadvantage of using an iPad I see is that only 1 page shows, so if you play by score you need to turn the page, but honestly turning a page is so easy (you tap the lower corner) and you can also by a bluetooth pedal.

As far as keeping your repertoire "playable", I had a piano teacher once say, the better you learn the piece now, the easier it will be to re-learn it a year or two from now if need be. 

Good luck!

I do something like this but with another app. The problem with this if you compare it to OP:s question is that it doesn't keep track of your actual repertoire, at least not in my case, since I have tons of scores loaded into the app that I haven't actually studied yet.

[xdanielyj]

Well, I do what Josef Hofmann recommended his students to do. Spend 30 minutes or so playing pieces that you played in the past to keep them fresh in your memories.

[anacrusis]

Well, I do what Josef Hofmann recommended his students to do. Spend 30 minutes or so playing pieces that you played in the past to keep them fresh in your memories.

How do you structure that though, like setting up a rotation so you make sure everything you want to maintain gets practised? I have a couple of hours of music like that at the very least.

[ranjit]

Here's an idea, and I'm not sure how practical it is for you. (I don't do this btw, I'm still not so advanced haha). But perhaps you could browse through the scores every so often? That's quicker than playing through the whole piece, but if you have it memorized well, I think it should still help to keep it fresh.

[bryfarr]

I asked myself this very question.  The solution:  Excel.  Each row is a piece and there are columns that assign different qualifications (as well as composer and title) like priority.  At this point I have about 5 levels of priority:  High 1, High 2, Medium 1,2,3, Read, Play Occasionally, On Hold, Future.  I also have notes about the status/goal with the piece: learn, memorize, record, perform.  I set the goal of record for most pieces.  Pieces move around between the priorities, and some go On Hold.  When I'm done with a piece, usually after a satisfactory recording, it goes to Play Occasionally. This is how I stay focused on a core set of pieces over a period of time.  Some days I'll dedicate to the "completed" pieces, the "play occasionally".  Recently I decided to move Prokofiev Sonata 3 from High 1 to Play Occasionally, even though I didn't record it.  Feels like I'll never get there with this one.
I would copy paste an image of this spreadsheet but it doesn't seem possible in here.

Regarding building Apps for this - I'm a database programmer and could easily code an app but why spend my time doing that when Excel works perfectly? The answer is: some people like to code apps...