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I think for sight-reading it should be "40 pieces a day" challenge.

Indeed.

I've been doing this with my teacher for the last few weeks. I got to the point where I thought I'd been moved along too fast and needed to cover more variety of pieces at lower levers to solidify the foundation and also work on my sight reading. To my surprise my teacher agreed.

So far it's been a lot of fun and I think I'm finding out there really are no levels for pieces - in other words, I feel like I'm bringing something extra to some of these easier pieces, some level of interpretation that the pieces don't usually get from being played by someone who would be classified as at the grade level of the piece. And I get to do that without struggling with the technical aspects, so that is very enjoyable for me as opposed to spending weeks slogging away.

Also the extra variety of music is helping me - informing me - to be a lot more creative with the stuff I just come up with on my own. I mean, a lot more so - a big difference.

I'm not really very goal-oriented so I don't really care if it's 25 or 50 pieces a year, probably will not even count them.

There is a gulf between reading, for learning a new piece, and sight-reading. But by increasing 'just reading' and covering a much wider range of pieces we develop enough playing skills to be able to tackle sight-reading without such a struggle.

For me, it's like practising scales slowly before practising them prestississimo. The slower exercise makes the faster so much more approachable.

If I'd had to sight-read forty bars a day I'd have given up piano long ago.

I have neither a need nor a desire to sight-read at the level of an accompanist. I need to read only to learn new material. A completely different approach to the text is required. The one must keep the pulse going no matter what and the other must cover everything in the text with mostly the correct fingers and the correct rhythm regardless of tempo. These are vastly different objectives and motives.

You used quotation marks here but you didn't quote me. I never said that this challenge will improve sight-reading but that increasing the quantity of my reading has improved my sight-reading ability. There's a lot in the subtlety. (Like applying "complete" to the piece instead of to the initial learning stage or missing the capital P in Python).

Perhaps you sight-read the lines instead of just reading the full text!

Yes, the improvement to sight-reading may be negligible but the impact of it, in my case, was not. Reading for learning, and in my case reading much more for learning, reduced the 'fear of failure' or whatever it was that made want to avoid sight-reading at all costs, and made me quite enjoy exploring new material.

Since I've been doing this I've learnt pieces by composers I'd never even listened to before, I've a much wider range of material, I've had a huge amount of pleasure from it and I've made time to sit at the piano and just sift through pages and pieces for pleasure. Music that otherwise I wouldn't even have read away from the piano.

Just reading, as opposed to sight-reading, is also a very important skill and I believe it's a much more important one for learning piano.

To take the reading analogy further... Good students, of any subject, push themselves and learn by reading many heavy, technical text books.
I bet some also kick back with a easy to read novel now and again.
This 40 piece method, IMHO, is a great little page turner, and a very welcome break from intense studying.

I wrote:




I understand the point, and Polyphonist is right. I probably should have just said "reading" instead of "sight reading". A lot of the time I am just decoding notes and not really trying to play them in real time.

That said, over time, even reading/decoding should help my sight reading! Ha ha!

Last year I did the 40 piece challenge and I thought I'd share with you how I organised that.

I use the AMEB syllabus which is a basically a huge list of graded music. Unfortunately you have to pay for it, but the NZMEB is similar and you could use that. So that took most of the guess work out of choosing pieces.

I planned to learn 13 fifth grade pieces and 27 2nd grade ones and spend a lot more time on the fifth grade ones. I have a queue of pieces and the harder ones stay on the queue a lot longer than the easy ones. Its a bit hard to explain the actual process of the queue but I start two second grade pieces for every fifth grade piece over a period of 3 weeks and the second grade pieces stay in the queue for 3 weeks each.
At the moment I'm learning Beethove Op49 #2, first mov. The little shepherd, a bourree by bach and the chopin waltz widely referred to as "sostenuto".

Like other people I find that the easier pieces let me focus on one specific technical challenge.
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I also belong to a piano club where we play for each other once a month, so when one of my harder pieces is "finished" I keep playing that once a day until the club meeting, polishing (I hope). And I do the same with one of the easier pieces. So you see, you can learn a lot of repertoire and still polish a lot of pieces in a year.

On Fridays, after my lesson, I play through all my repertoire. Although that's getting a bit long now. I'll have to start organising the pieces in some other way.

For me, the repertoire-rich approach has been amazing. People are really impressed with how far I've come and I feel as if I'm not just getting better, I'm getting better faster. i.e. my learning is accelerating. Or I'm getting more betterer.

The repertoire-rich approach has also been wonderful for my daughter.

Graham Fitch at Practising the Piano has a similar philosophy,
"To redress the balance between the type of painstaking and time-consuming practise involved in perfecting a piece and the ability to read well and learn fast, I am a great believer in quick studies. Learning a piece from scratch involves different skills and different parts of the brain from playing pieces we already know. If we are constantly keeping these particular grey cells active, they get faster and stronger and this makes processing new material quicker and easier. This is where quick studies come in."

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At least for me this is true. My goals are quite modest so the ability to sight-read very complicated music is far too much effort except to learn something new. A side effect of learning to read music though, has been invaluable to my pursuit of playing piano and the ability to sight read more simple scores. Osmosis I guess?