Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Article "against" the 40 pieces a year movement

I think the entire idea of 40 pieces a year is a hyperbole. This would only work for the low, low, lowest of the beginners in method books. And those kids really should not be testing, anyway. I don't typically allow my students to sit for exams until they've played piano for 4 or 5 years.

Furthermore, without a structured curriculum of sight reading, forcing students to learn 40 pieces a year may or may not make them better readers. If these kids learned to read notes the wrong way, and they reinforce their wrong way of reading 40 times a year, do you really think their sight reading will improve??

If you mean intervalic reading, I think many people learned how to do it without explanation and curriculum just because they had to read much. In fact if a teacher doesn't teach how to do it, the only chance for a student is to find the correct way intuitively and it requires some pressure.

I think a lot of people learned to read music _in spite of_ horrible instruction. If you have seen as many Transfer Wrecks as I have, you'll notice that there are many ways that instruction for reading music notation can go wrong.

Teaching by intervallic reading is just one of the many things that the teacher needs to do.

I'd be curious to know some of your methods for teaching your students reading. I'm in the boat @Iaroslav mentioned and have been learning without guidance. Reason being, I never had a teacher offer any advice on reading. About. a 6 weeks ago I started my own journey to improve my reading with a coupe sight reading books. It has improved my reading tremendously. Although I do wonder what other methods I may have learned with instruction.

I just read the whole thread. It reminds me of a pianist friend, he works in bar and cruise ship and take request from client, he knows hundreds and hundreds of songs. With 4 pieces a year, he would not have a job.

But after 50 years he would have 200 songs, enough to please any cruise ship patrons!

But that's taking the concept of four pieces a year to its literal extreme, which isn't viable, in my opinion.

Cheers,

For anyone interested in reading the article, it is available here.

Not very well researched or reasoned imho. It is an opinion piece, with an anecdote of one student's experience.

Thanks! I knew it would show up somewhere eventually!

Sam

Thanks for posting this! She makes a reasonable case, and it is clear that her students learn other easier pieces. She just suggests that they stay with four pieces for a year until they own them. I can see the value in learning pieces deeply like this, and I agree with that part of her premise.

Thank you, studiocentrale!


It's an interesting article, but is it built upon correct understanding?
Does the 40-Piece Challenge really suppose working on just one piece in a week and dropping it immediately after this?

No, it hasn't. The forty piece challenge is supplementary. She clearly hasn't understood it.

One of the premises is that the exam repertoire is supplemented. Another is that the initial target is around 25-30 pieces, as being enough to keep a student interested as less than that can lead to boredom.

Another is that the forty pieces are learning experiences not finished and memorised recital pieces. Another is that the supplementary pieces are up to four grades lower than the student's current level. There's a whole slew of material that hasn't been read or understood by the writer.

I think it is perfectly fine to learn 40 pieces a year. The effective way is to have a couple of pieces under work which means that you have couple of weeks to learn each piece. I am about to finish my first year of learning piano and i have gone through around 50 pages of exercises and short pieces. Normally i have three pieces under work at any given time so i can for example play the first week with separate hands, second week hands together and third week i can concentrate on dynamics. It is possibly a different thing if you are learning some advanced pieces but for example it is normal for an intermediate etude book to have 30-50 pieces and that is good for one year of study. I don't say that it is better to play a lot of stuff necessarely, but it is perfectly doable and i dont see anything wrong with that.