Retiring Pieces from Repertoire
Found in: Arrangements & Variations, Playing-Based Methodology, Reading
Mark M., New York
I am moving for the first time into Time for More Music. So I’m at a point where I will soon be able to tell students that it’s okay to retire certain pieces from their repertoire. Although I’ve seen recommendations about when one might choose to do that and how big a repertoire is worth maintaining at minimum, I don’t recall ever seeing or hearing any discussion about just how to go about retiring a piece, and I have something specific in mind when I say that.
We spend this time teaching pieces and having students maintain those pieces, keeping them alive in their repertoire. We ask them to do this for what can seem like a long time. For some teachers like myself who do a lot of content from all the streams and therefore take longer absolute amounts of time to get through Foundation levels and to get to milestones in the reading program, it’s even longer than it would be for other teachers and students.
Best I can tell from the RR, RN and TFMM programs, the extent of the use of the Music Books is to see some streams. You name the notes in Reading Rhythm, and you ask students to go see how a number of pieces they know have elements that match our Masters of the Rhythm experience. With each next ingredient added, a few more examples to go look at. Reading Notes comes along, and we have them do so streams using the Music Books. And unless I’m mistaken, that’s it. And it doesn’t seem to me to be sufficient use of that second-nature knowledge they’ve spent so long maintaining regarding how to play those pieces, not sufficient in terms of what that profound knowledge could contribute at this point in the program.
It seems to me that there is an enormous opportunity here. As TFMM is done, and pieces are learned in whole from the page, there is the opportunity to then go back to the pieces they know to play them from/with the page, in whole, not just as isolated rhythm or notes streams. To see all the things about each piece that we have them see when looking at new pieces in TFMM. I would think that there would be potential through this to dramatically build their reading muscles.
In fact, I assumed all along that this would be one of the key destinations/elements of the reading program, set up as it is based on the idea that we learn all these pieces for a long time and then use that knowledge to reverse engineer reading knowledge up onto the page. I assumed that this would be done in a fairly substantial way with those known pieces as opposed to just doing some rhythm and notes streams with them.
I imagine telling students, okay, now you can start to retire pieces from your playlist. Always maintain at least X pieces that you like, because it’s important to have a playlist, a repertoire, but we can now start to pare things down. However, in order to eliminate a piece from your list, here’s what you have to do first to prove to yourself (and to me) that you’ve gotten everything we’d want you get out of this piece. We need you to prove that you can not only accurately play this piece like you’ve been doing for so long, but that you understand it from a reading perspective, too, and that you’ve sufficiently used both of those aspects together to strengthen your general ability to connect things you see on the page to things you do on the keyboard. So _____.
I don’t know how to fill in that blank, but it seems to me that there’d be something powerful there that would simultaneously serve two important purposes — powerfully serving students’ increasing reading abilities, and providing a concrete and highly meaningful benchmark for retiring pieces from the repertoire. Perhaps it’s simply elucidating each piece in the same way one would as if with TFMM or any other never-before known piece to be learned from the page? Perhaps something else or something in addition that connects that elucidation more directly to the second-nature performance? Something else?
Gordon Harvey, Australia
This is a good point, Mark.
One thing that occurs to me which I’ve never done is to transpose Foundation pieces. For example, soon after introducing key signature, you could ask students to work out Dreams Come True in 1b. Without mentioning that it’s the key of FMaj, you would simply ask them to move the hands up so they have F on the bottom and play the song as normal on the white keys, then look for any B’s to flat. This would be a very nice, simple intro to applied key signature which would also mean that students’ first experience of working out a key would be in the context of a familiar song. Once they’ve done this and you’ve praised them greatly because they’ve just transposed something, they could then retire the song. In fact, this is such an obviously valuable thing to do that I wonder if everybody else in the world has already been doing it.
I typically retire Foundation songs but retain all or some of their Arrangements. If you haven’t thought of it, remember that there are student materials for Arrangements 3 that include the music books for Arrangements 1 & 2. Thus, you can use these books for reverse engineering.
Another idea would be to show them Foundation or Arrangement songs with the titles hidden and see how long it takes them to figure out the song, like we already do for the High and Low C streams in RN. This might also be a gentle way of introducing some slightly more advanced reading concepts. For example, doing this with Jackson Blues would introduce intervals bigger than 5ths in the LH.
Laurie Richards, Nebraska
In a big nutshell, here is how I see the process working:
- Train the brain to process music in a new way while learning a large repertoire using playing-based techniques (LAWOL)
- During this process, layer in RR, then RN, utilizing the written music from the songs already learned to “reverse-engineer” onto the page. This helps solidify the reading concepts learned and takes the guesswork out (not knowing whether or not a rhythm or pitch was read correctly since they already know the song)
- Layer in TFMM, where a systematic approach to learning a new piece of written music is taught. Students learn how to figure out any piece of music
- Once students are reading fairly confidently, they are allowed to choose their own playlist (I personally require the most recent pieces stay on the playlist for a while)
It is unnecessary to require that students ‘prove’ anything about all of their playlist songs. Some will be able to more strongly utilize playing-based skills; others reading-based skills; either way they will be using both in some capacity. But to prove they understand everything there is to know re: RB and PB skills about every piece would be overkill in my book. It’s more about the process than arriving at a destination. That’s not to say that it couldn’t be a valuable exercise to do occasionally – review PB and RB strategies for a particular piece. And now that they are reading, they can go back to those songs any time and play them fairly easily, or relearn them if they want.
By the time your students finish up TFMM, the earlier songs have in many ways served their purpose – provided a vehicle for learning numerous playing-based tools and strategies, as well as a body of 5th-based pieces to solidify interval-reading in RN and many rhythm-reading examples to process as MORs. The way to continue strengthening these skills is to apply them to new pieces rather than milking the old songs, in my opinion.
It’s a really cool process!
Elaine F., South Carolina
Nice elucidation. One idea might be to apply their ability to transcribe notes, understand time signatures etc by asking them to write out one ( or more) of their songs on staff paper. This would take some time– and no need to to all the songs or even all the ones they are retiring…. but how cool would it be to have them master all the RR and RN elements and demonstrate it in that way. They could see that there are many ways to write the same rhythm, etc–
I don’t know that SM guide them in knowing which direction the stems go– we might have to add that.
Barbara M.
I do as you suggest and have them go through the levels playing the pieces from the page. I think it helps the learning to click into place.
I think you can start the process of reading the first 3 level songs from the page after all the location points have been introduced in Reading Notes.
As far as retiring pieces, once the arrangement of the piece is learned (which contains the melody), they may retire that piece. I also allow them to drop the arrangements of EITHER: Dreams, Nightstorm, or I’ll Be There
– only if they have truly mastered the elements of each. Some choose to keep them all.
After Level 7, they have more freedom to choose more pieces to retire. I give them a list which includes Fluff Pie, Family Tree, I’ll Be There, The Pipes, One More Time, Miles, Home, Beautiful Boy, D Part, and Caught
Between, and they may choose to retire some of those pieces.