Here is a really good viewer question about when to drop a piece of music. If you think about it, you study piano for years and years and develop a sizable repertoire. You can’t possibly keep all those pieces current in your repertoire all the time since you would be spending countless hours each day just refreshing old pieces! So at a certain point you have to drop some pieces just so you have the time to work on new repertoire.
So how do you know when to drop a piece? There are a few indications that you should drop a piece. Number one is if you want to study a new piece of music and you just don’t have the time, you’re going to have to let some pieces go. What I suggest is to try to refresh your repertoire from time to time so that you never let things get too far gone where you have to completely relearn pieces since even playing them over occasionally with the score can keep it in your memory somewhat. You’re going to be able to bring pieces back to performance level more easily.
The other aspect of when to drop a piece is sometimes you hit a brick wall. You try to take a piece as far as you can and you can’t seem to make any progress with it. Sometimes letting off of it for a while and coming back to it with fresh insights, particularly if you’ve been studying other pieces, can make a world of difference. You may get revelations about how to approach the piece that you couldn’t go further with after you develop other techniques by studying other music. So those are two good reasons to drop pieces. Thanks for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com. info@livingpianos.com