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I am very much a beginner, on Book 3A of Piano Adventures. It takes me sometimes one week to learn a new piece, sometimes three weeks, but not usually more than that. I just don't know when to put an old piece to rest and continue on with new stuff. How do you know when you don't need to review something you've worked on for a while?

Hi Alans,

Usually the piano teacher will evaluate when you should be able to drop an old piece, once they feel sufficiently satisfied that you've learned the piece properly and expressed it with confidence. If you do not have a piano teacher, I would drop a piece after I self-evaluate myself as playing it sufficiently. It really is up to you unless you're under the guidance of a teacher. Try listening to youtube videos of others playing your pieces to evaluate whether you're on the right track.

For passing my students, usually when I can be confident that the student can perform the piece in front of others confidently.

I'm assuming you haven't got a teacher, otherwise you wouldn't be asking the question....

You have a long way to go, so you should keep moving on, with progressively more challenging pieces, and drop the ones you've finished with. Almost certainly, you'll soon find that as you improve, you can easily play again those pieces you've mastered a few months ago (and left behind), whenever you feel like it, without having to 'practice' them - if you really want to. But chances are, unless there was something specially appealing about those old pieces, you won't be interested in them anymore, because they were just stepping stones towards your goal, whatever they may be.

If you're regularly moving on to other pieces it's not critical but you shouldn't drop a piece until it's about as good as any other piece you play.

In a method book, such as Piano Adventures, it would be worth reviewing pieces you've finished, maybe run through the previous lessons at a rate of three or four a day on Saturdays and Sundays to make sure you can still play them.

If you can't still play them then you either didn't learn them well enough first time or you learnt them too quickly without absorbing the music - not unreasonable in a method book.

One to three weeks may be sufficient to be able to play them but it's a short time to spend on a piece you intend to keep. Once you get beyond the method books you should be coming across more music that once learnt, you'll want to keep it in your repertoire and perfect it some more. Method book music may not fit the bill but the discipline may be worth it until you find better material. Are you bringing out the melody above the accompaniment? Are you articulating the phrases well, playing each phrase in one 'breath' and leaving space before the next phrase? Are you shaping the phrases dynamically? Are you paying attention to the accents in the bar, strong, weak, medium, weak, etc? Are you reading the whole text and not just the notes?

If you're working, say, three pieces each day, and you're working on two adjacent pieces with a third one from a few lessons back it may be worth dropping the older piece and returning to it later or getting stuck into whatever it is that's holding you back and wrap it up once and for all.

If a piece is dragging, the chances are you skipped lightly over a difficulty instead of fixing it properly at the outset - the curse of those who frequently play through the music they're learning instead of learning it properly first - and this is a good opportunity to really find out what it is that's holding you up.

Thank-you for your posts, this has given me a lot to think about. Because I am much more advanced on other instruments, I think I have been under the impression that the geography of the instrument is most important and I need to get from point A to point B as quickly as I can and move on. Richard-you have given me a great deal to consider now as I almost never take into account "breathing" or musicality. I just worry about finding my way through the piece. I will try and take all of this into account and slow myself down.

Piano Adventures and other methods also sell/provide recordings associated with their method books as MIDI files, audio CDs or both. These can be very useful if you are self-teaching.

I'd like to take a different position than the ones posted so far.

If you were taking lessons from a good teacher, then that teacher would be trying to bring you into skills. The pieces are your practice field for those skills. Quite a few teachers will stop a piece before it is polished because whatever skill has been reached. If you had such a teacher, the most important thing for you to focus on would be whatever that teacher stresses: relaxed motion, familiarity with they keyboard, or whatever it is. A method book will be stressing particular things in each lesson, and again, that is what you should strive toward. (I think the non-adult book would have more of that?)

If that is so, then I would NOT want to keep at each piece until it is polished. Rather, I would want to see what skills are being taught, and make sure that I get that skill before moving on. In the next piece, I'd want to review the skill to make sure it doesn't fade.

Since you play other instruments and are more advanced in them, you might be able to extrapolate some things being taught through the pieces that they don't mention specifically, and stress them in your learning as well.

In regards to playing a piece musically, etc. - being able to do so largely depends on technique, i.e. the physical skills that you have. Technique is built up in stages. Your body builds its coordination in new movements, and this takes time. HOW to do this also plays into it. If you try to force things you are not ready for, you can set yourself up for tension and poor habits.

There are things you can do immediately. Phrasing - i.e. letting the music breathe - is one. Stopping and starting, or pausing, doesn't require any special technique.

That is not so for other things. Take for example the idea of bringing out the melody while keeping the accompaniment soft. Before doing this, you first need to learn how to produce even, controlled sounds through good movement and get that into your body. Next you may learn how to play loud or soft at will either hand, and then do soft or loud in both. Finally, after you have these skills, you are ready to make one hand loud, and one hand soft. The way I was taught, I started with extremes - quite loud in one hand, as quiet as possible in the other. Once that was coordinated, I learned to shade it and be subtle.

So if you have not yet mastered a good even touch - or if you don't really know how to play loud and soft - then it is not time to bring out one voice over the other. You may bring tension into your body, or you may get frustrated. If you had a teacher, he would know when to bring that in.

I think you get the most out of each piece if you polish every one. Not just the main teaching goal, but all aspects of the music. And you develop the skills required to polish a piece, which are important in themselves. That's how I was taught, and that's how I teach, anyway. So much of the learning happens during the polishing stage.

It is very hard to know when to move on. I self-taught a bit before having a teacher, and that's probably one of the first questions in my mind. I end up just winging it since there was no one to tell me otherwise. I would play a piece until I got all the notes and dynamics and could play it back at the tempo as marked, then I would move on. Was I in for a shock when I got a teacher and I had to stay on the same piece for what seemed at the time an eternity compared to my own judgment of "finished". Partly, it's because there are so many unwritten things that I never could possibly know that is in the music other than the written dynamics and the actual notes without a teacher.

So it is hard question to answer maybe even impossible if you don't have a teacher and don't have the frame of mind of what a musician may expect out of any particular piece of music. I would say just do what it feels right until it feels wrong. One thing you should do is record yourself, then listen. Try to learn music that comes with recordings. Compare yours with the teaching recordings. You have to listen really carefully. Not as good as a real teacher, but better than nothing. When you manage to play really close to the teaching recording, move on.

I much more like Keystring's approach, but I understand people are different.

My teacher does not expect me to polish pieces we work on before I drop it or put it into rest. I don't even learn every piece in the whole. I could never handle such a requirement, because some of the pieces are not so much to my taste and I would probably get bored and stop playing

Polishing every piece would have taken me a lot of time that I feel was used more productively in learning other skills. I think I could have really polished maybe 6-8 pieces in a year, but instead we worked on more than 50 on my first two years, learning something from each one of them. Since most pieces will be forgotten anyway, is it really worth it? And what would be the use of weekly lessons then, because we didn't have any new material for weeks to look into?

Polishing a piece is a skill itself, but I want to reserve practicing it to pieces that I feel are worth it. I mostly do it during the long summer break from lessons. Then again no piece will ever be polished enough if you ask me...There's always something that could be better. I think I am too much a perfectionist for such an approach to work for me.

I think everyone might be different, and my own experience may be colored by the fact that when I did have a teacher, lessons were much more structured around marching through pieces than around an articulated set of skills goals.

When I stopped lessons, I felt like I'd been doing a lot of rushing to learn pieces, and doing it in a way that always ended up with at least one "grit your teeth and pray" moment, that would more often than not come out badly.

So I decided that now that I was on my own, I would slow down, go back to the beginning, and learn pieces in a slower and better way. I still don't have a clearly articulated list of skills (I don't know enough to easily generate such a list for myself), so I can't really adopt the model of learning a piece only until I've mastered the skill it's teaching me.

I try to learn whatever I'm learning well, and some pieces present obvious technical challenges that I try to work in with the scraps of technique ideas I can scavenge from the Internet (PW included). That doesn't mean I get everything to a perfect state before dropping it idly and starting another piece in its place. It does mean that I'm trying to play nicely at whatever stage of layered learning I'm at with that piece.

"Nicely" isn't quite the right word. I guess what I mean is, I don't want a piece ever to be in a place, even at the very beginning, when all I can say about it is "well, I can sort of hack through it but I'd have to go back and fix a lot of entrenched problem spots if I wanted to take it to the next layer." There might be aspects I haven't put into the piece yet, but I don't want there to be wrong spots I've left to fester. Hmmmm, I'm not sure that explains it correctly either.

I'll see if I can think of a specific piece and talk about the layers I would use, to see if that better illustrates what I'm trying to say.

The thing that worries me about the idea of rushing through method book pieces (or any other pieces), only learning whatever isolated skill that piece is there to teach, is that I think there should ideally be a gradual improvement of all skills as you proceed, once they've been introduced. So if you get to the end of the method book and are still playing lots of wrong notes, lots of wrong rhythms, with a tense hand and rigid wrists, then it seems to me you would have missed a lot of what would have been good to be working on in each and every piece, even if there was only one piece each for each new note, each new rhythm, and the idea of relaxation, and even if you can get the loud/soft dynamic contrast perfectly on the piece that introduces that, and the staccato/legato on that technique's piece, and so on.

Also: what does "polishing a piece" mean?

For me, polishing a piece means getting it to the point where it could be performed and the audience would have a pleasant experience, even if the performance is on a bad day. Definitely no "grit your teeth and pray" moments.

I agree about this only being worth the time for pieces that are worth it, but, I wonder why anyone would ever study music that isn't worth it? There is so much repertoire available for the piano at all levels. No point in learning bad music.

And total agreement about "slower and better"

I have a bit of a personality problem I guess

I have a very distinct taste. Most music that I really like is far too complicated and difficult for me to learn at this stage. I also can get bored easily if a piece doesn't present real challenges anymore and learning the rest of it is just routine. I can work consistently and long on something if I have the inner motivation and really want to make it better, but not if I don't feel any connection to the music. Some pieces I have kept "polishing" for a couple of years actually.

Some pieces I pick because they seem "ok" (meaning I don't really dislike them), but after a while they become a drag. I don't like any other music from the classical era except some advanced pieces by Hummel. I felt I needed to study some classical sonatinas and etudes for the technique, but after some time my dislike grew too much to continue because I got so sick of listening to them. The music is not bad, it's just not for me. The same with Bach (with maybe one exception). Or almost any etudes except Chopin's and Scriabin's... I feel I benefited a lot from studying pieces from Burgmuller op 100, but 2 weeks or so with each one of those was simply all I could take, enough to work through the real challenges of those pieces. If I just grind my teeth and stay with it (I have tried several times) I end up avoiding practice sessions, which is a good warning sign. Normally it's hard to keep me away...

My teacher never put me on method books and that's good because I partly blame the boring stuff in them for me quitting as a child.

I do kind of envy those people who can take any piece and enjoy playing and learning it. Being picky makes life more difficult

Beginners learn many pieces - easy arrangements of classical tunes etc - from method books for a while before playing 'proper' music (as written by real composers, in their original form).

But even learning something like Beethoven's Minuet in G (WoO 10/2) will take near-beginners many weeks to polish, and it likely still won't be voiced properly as it's difficult enough just to play the figures in thirds smoothly. Is it really worth spending all that time to polish up such a piece when within a few months, the student could probably sight-read it and play it better, with improved technique - if he was allowed to go on to other pieces that keep stretching his skills?

When students get beyond early intermediate standard and are playing pieces that professional pianists won't be ashamed to play in public (like Für Elise ), then it's worth spending more time to polish up, if the student likes it enough. The worst thing is make a student spend so long working on a piece (no matter how intrinsically good it is) that he gets fed up with it.

A practical question, since you teach. So you have a student who is a beginner and only has the coordination to play notes evenly - maybe is able to play loud and soft with both hands doing the same thing. So do you get the student to play one voice loud and the other soft before the student has that coordination? Or do you have the student polish the piece up to that student's level of skills at that time? And is the purpose of teaching that of producing pieces, or of developing skills? Do you yourself have ideas on that, maybe a matter of balance?

The time and effort required to be put into a piece after I think it's finished.

earlofmar: very funny

bennevis and keystring: I do think it is worth spending the time to play pieces well at all levels. One basic goal of Suzuki teaching is for the students to produce beautiful, musical pieces that they can feel proud performing for others. Sound quality goes right along with note learning. And the sound quality is related to difficulty. I wouldn't give that Beethoven Minuet to a near beginner -- too many musical issues plus lots of parallel thirds, just as you say. You'd never get a beautiful performance of that from a near beginner. A better introduction to parallel thirds would be a piece that either only has a couple of them, or has a lot of them in very predictable patterns where it is easy to make logical fingering and there isn't too much 4545 or other physical issues.

Someone who is having trouble playing the hands at different volume levels should absolutely stick with pieces that have a single note melody against very simple accompaniment, until that skill is securely learned and the single note melody sings out. That's definitely something that needs to be learned before moving on to true two voice polyphony like the Anna Magdalena Bach minuets. If students are skipped on to more advanced material before easier material can be played beautifully, I think it handicaps later learning.

Even minus the Suzuki philosophy, I guess I'd rather have a studio full of students playing easier pieces beautifully than full of students playing Fuer Elise badly.

Also, earlier in my teaching life I was more tolerant of note problems (never of musical problems!) than I am now, and I notice that the students who started with me during that time now struggle mightily for accuracy in their intermediate pieces. I really think it's best to learn well to start with.

hreichgott:
It's not so much that I wouldn't try to play any piece beautifully from the start. My teacher doesn't believe in learning the notes first and then add the rest. But I mainly practice phrases and sections. Getting the whole piece together doesn't always happen. Playing from a score is really tedious for my eyes, so polishing a piece for me also requires memorization and that is a most time consuming process for me, no matter how simple the piece is.