The Winter Repertoire Challenge is ideal for players of all ages, and offers a great opportunity for developing your Active Repertoire at the piano. Are you up for it?
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Autumn Repertoire Challenge
The Autumn Repertoire Challenge is ideal for players of all ages, and offers a great starting point for developing and building an Active Repertoire at the piano. Are you up for it?
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Summer Repertoire Challenge
The Summer Repertoire Challenge is ideal for young players (and their teachers!) embarking on the long school holidays, and offers a great starting point for developing an Active Repertoire at the piano!
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Active Repertoire Challenge 2019
This is a question which for too many pianists leads to such answers as:
- I’m working on Allegro, but it’s not yet ready to play;
- I finished learning Andante last month, but I’ve forgotten it now;
- I don’t have my music books with me, so …
What a pity!
The reality is that too many of us can’t sit down at the piano – without notice, without notation, and without embarrassment – and simply play something!
Active Repertoire: An Adult Student’s Perspective
Guest Post by Joni Hawkes
The recent articles on Active Repertoire on Pianodao have struck a chord with me … quite literally.
As an adult beginner into my third year of lessons, I have often found myself avoiding situations where I might be asked to play something, because I simply couldn’t play anything spontaneously without my trusty sheet music to hand.
The more pieces that I learned, the more they were becoming just a growing collection of stuff I couldn’t play.
The concept of Active Repertoire (always having 3 pieces that I enjoy playing, without notice, without embarrassment and without notation) has completely changed my approach to playing.
I now start every practice session by playing my 3 favourite pieces, and whilst I still have the book in front of me, I’m finding that with each session I’m increasingly looking away from the music as I play.
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Three types of Repertoire
Since writing my article What can you play? readers have shown quite an interest in my concept of Active Repertoire.
Now I am going to explain a little more about how Active Repertoire fits into the wider picture of your piano journey.
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What Can You Play?
One of the major stumbling blocks for players is that we too often feel that we are struggling, making little progress, and perhaps just haven’t got what it takes to become a “good player” (however we define what that even is!).
To enjoy playing an instrument, we need to move beyond this negative self-talk. And I suggest that one of the most easy and powerful ways we can all achieve this is to adjust the balance between working and playing during our personal piano time.
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