Piano Exam Repertoire: Substitutions Made Easy

By Kirsten Levorson, NCTM

Choosing repertoire for our students taking piano exams can be a complicated business.  We consult the syllabus lists for music that will appeal to the student and match their skill level, we consider the books the student already owns, we consider how the piano exam repertoire fits with other contests and festivals the student will prepare in the same year.  Sometimes it all fits together easily, and other times we need to dig a little deeper to find just the right combination of pieces.

Fortunately, our options include repertoire from the MMTA Contest lists for the current year and four previous years.  That’s a lot of choices! It can be a challenge to remember which year’s list can be used, keep together all the corrections and clarifications, and have all those choices at your fingertips.

MMTA has recently developed an online tool to help you manage those substitution choices and find pieces for your students easily.  Log into the members’ area of the website at www.mnmusicteachers.com and go to https://www.mnmusicteachers.com/repertoire-substitution-list. 

Here you have a searchable database of all the eligible Contest pieces from the combined five year list. You can search by composer, title of the composition, anthology or source, Contest year or level, or Piano Exam level and musical style period (Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Impressionist, 20^th Century and Beyond).

Let’s say you have a student preparing for Piano Exam level four.  You have selected Baroque, Classical and 20^th Century pieces from the syllabus lists, and you’d like to substitute a Burgmuller piece for the Romantic list, but you can’t find your contest lists and don’t remember whether the piece was on the list four years ago or six.  So you go to the Repertoire Substitutions page, enter Burgmuller in the Composer field and level four in the PE Level field. 

Click the Search button, and here are the first of many results shown.

That was easy!

• ·        You can search by the name of an anthology or book title to select pieces from a book your student already owns. 
• ·        Search results indicate at which Piano Exam levels a Contest piece may be used.
• ·        Search results include Notes about using the piece – whether or not to take repeats, for instance.
• ·        Search results also verify the list (Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Impressionist, 20^th Century) where the piece can be substituted for piano exams.  No more guessing and risking an error message.

We hope this new tool helps you plan your students’ repertoire choices with ease.

**Please let us know how this tool works for you – our long term goal is to have all the repertoire for the 2020 edition of syllabus available in a similar searchable database.

Building Your Studio Library

By Kirsten Levorson, NCTM

At a summer meeting of the Piano Exam Development Committee, we had a lively discussion in response to the question: Which anthologies do you find most helpful for students taking piano exams?

We talked about how daunting the syllabus can appear at first glance – how would a new teacher begin to select repertoire? What books would you recommend as an essential part of your studio library? We talked about how different students have different needs.  A family with multiple siblings or a student who works hard and learns quickly may need a bigger book containing many pieces, while other students need the sense of accomplishment that comes from more frequently completing a smaller book with fewer pieces.

Here are some of our favorites for traditional classical literature:

Beginning Piano Solos: 132 Original Masterpieces by Paul Sheftel (Fischer) contains some pieces from our piano exam level one all the way to level seven. One of our members noted that at levels three and four, you could select all four required pieces from this one book.  Great deal at $16.

Essential Keyboard Repertoire by Lynn Freeman Olson (Alfred) with its eight volumes is a foundation of many studio libraries. We love that the books are spiral bound.

Music for Millions, four volumes edited by Denes Agay was the third universal choice among our members. Each of these three series do a great job of presenting material from beginning to advanced repertoire.

Classics for the Developing Pianist: Core Repertoire for Study and Performance is the new five volume series compiled and edited by Ingrid Jacobson Clarfield and Phyllis Alpert Leher and published by Alfred. Many of our committee members had recently purchased the complete set. 

Masterworks Classics, Melodious Masterpieces, and Masterpieces with Flair by Jane McGrath were all books that received high praise from committee members, especially for intermediate and advancing students.

There are many more fine series of anthologies available – we all spoke of using the Bastien Piano Literature series, the Festival Collection, Keith Snell’s Piano Repertoire series, and more. Some of us use a different series with different students.  

If you are wondering what books will work for your students, don’t forget to check the MMTA Resource Reference availableonline. The Resource Reference includes many anthologies, listing for each title all the syllabus pieces it contains and the piece’s syllabus level.