Lesson 5: Distilling the Repertoire
Jonathan Roberts
In this lesson, we will focus on how to distill a piece of repertoire down to its basic components, in order to help students develop the necessary skills to play it well. This way, your students not only learn a great piece of music, but they gain many skills that will contribute to their overall musicianship.

This method can help to draw the student in and provide a more compelling experience than simply handing them a score and asking them to learn it by the next lesson.

To practice this skill on your own, sit down with a copy of a piece, pencil in hand, and spend five minutes marking every musical concept that you observe on the score. You’ll quickly find that there are so many ways to relate the technical and musicianship components for the relevant level to this repertoire.

Prompt:
Select one piece of repertoire and perform the exercise described in the previous paragraph. In the forum, create a new discussion to share the list of skills and concepts you’ve distilled from your repertoire selection.

Discuss this resource

Sign in or sign up to join the conversation.

Back to top