New Year - New Challenge

September marks the start of a new academic year, and for me as a piano teacher, THIS feels like my New Year! It's a time for planning and reflection, and every year for the past few years, I've considered doing a 30 Piece Challenge with my students. Well this is the year!

Totnes School of Piano will be holding a 30 Piece Challenge for the 2024-25 academic year.

What is a 30 Piece Challenge?

Students learn 30 pieces over the course of the academic year.
Given that there are 31 teaching weeks in the year, that means learning roughly one piece per week! (Although half term weeks and school holidays are off.) You can see where the challenge lies.
Students choose and keep track of their 30 pieces with a 30 piece sticker chart, like the one pictured below (designed by Wendy Stevens at Compose Create):

How exactly does the challenge work?

Students write down a piece to learn (minimum of 16 bars long - 8 bars for beginners), committing to the challenge of learning that piece to almost recital-level standard. That means learning correct notes and rhythms, yes, but also paying attention to phrasing, dynamics and articulation - all those things that make music musical!
Students can choose to remove a piece if they decide not to learn that piece to standard.
Rewards are given after 10 pieces - 20 pieces - and a big reward after 30 pieces, presented at the summer recital in June.

The key to reaching this lofty and worthy goal is to mix up different playing levels and styles:

one or two stretch pieces
four or five pieces at current playing level
plenty of easier, "quick-study" pieces that are a few levels below the current playing level but are nonetheless attractive enough to play to an audience
exploring different classical styles, popular pieces, jazzy pieces, chord charts, etc.

Why a 30 Piece Challenge?

Quantity counts! Often a student will focus on just a few pieces for many months, and while it is good to go for quality, fluency suffers. Imagine at the start of an academic year at school, the teacher handed students three books - and that was all they read all year! Working at different levels - challenging, on level, easy - works out the piano muscles in every way. Read what the founder of this challenge says about this issue HERE.
Learning 30 pieces in the academic year will lead to big improvements in fluency - fluency in sight reading skills, fluency in quick-study skills and technical fluency. It's a lot like learning a language. It's better to master many simpler phrases and to build from there rather than memorise one or two sophisticated paragraphs and perfect accent and inflection. Which student will speak fluently at the end of those two approaches? It's exactly the same with the piano!
Imagine the confidence created in a student who has a repertoire of 30 attractive pieces, in various styles and levels, to play to anyone at any time! I think that the challenge might feel formidable, but a very happy and confident student is waiting on the other side of that challenge.
Students are encouraged to explore different kinds of music. The external rewards of such a challenge will get students over those hurdles and encourage meaningful practice sessions!
Students will play more musically, as the challenge is to play each learned piece as if it was almost recital-ready! So often, the learning of notes and rhythms gets the focus, but the parameters of this challenge relegates those skills to quick-study and sight-reading levels (as in they can do it quickly and almost at sight) and encourages students to pay attention to and develop the ability to shade their music with dynamics and inflect their phrases with articulation.

While the 30 Piece Challenge might not be for every student, the culture of a repertoire-rich studio will have a positive effect all-round. With the strong exam culture surrounding music lessons, it's easy to lose sight of playing and learning to play for pleasure. We hope this challenge will encourage this as well.