Refreshing your repertoire

How to get your songs back quickly, easily, and enjoyably

You used to play "Stella by Starlight" all the time, but life has interfered for several months and you only now are getting back to the piano. What would be more natural than to pull out the sheet music and play your old favorite? Only something sad happens: you start to play and immediately start to make mistakes. Worse, you get to the middle section and you can't honestly play it at all. Horrors ! You've forgotten your old fave!

It happens to us all, even the truly great professionals. Unless we continually play our own "repertoire" we forget it, to greater or lesser degree. We need to refresh that repertoire, and any ideas or methods that would speed up the process would be very useful indeed. I am going to give you a quick and successful method, right after I've explained 3 things to you shouldn't be doing if you want to refresh your repertoire quickly, successfully, and enjoyably.

1. Don't spend time worrying about your memory.

Every human being forgets their repertoire and you are no exception. It's not a sign of creeping senility. The greatest pianists of all time played over their pieces incessantly. The fact is that humans forget things and considering that a piece of music has hundreds, if not thousands of notes, each with its unique fingering, duration, volume, etc., the real surprise that we could even play the thing in the first place. Accept that you're only a human pianist, not an ipod !

2. Don't confuse refreshing your repertoire and practicing a new piece.

Practice is what you do to learn the music in the first place. Refreshing is what you do to get it back. Different goals, and thus the means of accomplishing the goals are different, too. Let me restate this - "practice" is intense effort to learn the music and correct errors, while "refreshment" is finding ways of getting that learning back. Most complaints about slow refreshment of repertoire boil down to a person using the techniques of practicing instead of the techniques of refreshment.

3. Don't try to refresh music you never really learned in the first place.

Sometimes you try to "get back" a piece that you never really had. Maybe you could play the first few bars pretty well but struggled through the rest. In this case, you need to be applying the techniques of quality practice to eliminate the struggle. That, however, is a separate series of essays. The whole point here is that you will waste your time trying to bring back something you never really had.

WHAT TO DO INSTEAD !

1. Write up a list of the music you want to refresh. Keep the list to a reasonable length.

2. Gather up the sheet music and put it together in a separate folder so you can go from piece to piece.

3. Each day, play through each piece no more than twice.

4. If your hands make a mistake, stop and replay that area at the most a couple times, then move on.

You can expect day by day progress in remembering the music. "Remembering" - that's the key idea here. You already know the piece, but that memory, whether we mean your memory of WHAT to do or your hands' "memory" of HOW to do it, is still there and only needs to be recalled. Your action of playing each piece over and over is simply you reminding you, both psychologically and physiologically, of the "what" and "how" of the music.

It's important for this approach to work to remember that you are trying to improve a bit at a time. Ask yourself this at the end of each session, "Did I play my pieces better than I did last session?" NOT, "Is the music as good as it used to be?" See the difference? It's a matter of making the correct comparisons. If things are improving steadily, then quit worrying, since the trend is in the right direction - just keep doing what is producing the improvement and enjoy the process as it unfolds.

Also, note that if your renditions do NOT improve using this approach, likely the music was NOT well practiced in the first place, and you can't recall what you never really knew. This is a very different situation and you need to return to using good practice techniques. I cover these in detail in my ebook How to WIN at Piano Lessons: Successful Strategies for Non-Mozarts" which is available directly from me. Cost is $25, likely the best $25 you'll spend on learning piano, since I offer up the most successful actions I've learned from 22 years of teaching adult students just like you. Email me directly for more info: danstarrorg@yahoo.com