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.