How Many Pieces Should You Learn at Once?

Focus

Many players wonder how many pieces of music it is optimal to juggle and learn at once. There tend to be two trains of thought that people have. Firstly, a player might think that they want to take one piece at a time in order to really focus on that one piece, whereas another player may have a hard time sticking to one piece and wants to dip in and out of multiple pieces. However, the way that we learn tells us something very interesting about what may be the right number of pieces to learn at once.

Firstly, there are the players who think that they should be learning just one piece in order to apply full focus to it. This mode of thinking is borrowed from how we think about things like work or task completion. We often take on one task, try to finish that task, and then move on as a way of organising the way that we think. However, learning music (or anything else for that matter) doesn't really behave in the same way a todo list does, because it can't be completed in one sitting.

The reality is that each piece of music that you learn has a ceiling within any particular practice session. There is essentially a point where you stop being able to absorb anything new within that same piece with the same ease, particularly if you are drilling the same things. In some cases, you could be practicing for 40 minutes and only ever get 20 minutes' worth of work out of it when working on one thing. This doesn't necessarily mean that long sessions are bad, but it does mean that the way that you use the session is much more important than simply believing that more time spent equals better playing.

So if you are someone who is able to put some time into learning the piano, then the question becomes; if you cannot fill the time just drilling the same thing and absorbing it, how do you best divide the time?

Returns

Well, in order to answer that, the first thing to know is that pieces aren't really learnt in sessions. They're learnt between the sessions, when consolidation happens and the things that you've practiced can harden in your brain. We have to forget about something and return to it in order for learning to take place.

This means that often a better measure of improvement is how many times you return to something, rather than how many hours you've spent practicing that thing.

This essentially means that learning three pieces, or four pieces, or five pieces doesn't take three, four, or five times the amount of time that learning one piece does. As previously mentioned, you may be spending 40 minutes practicing one piece but only getting 20 minutes' worth of work out of it. Therefore, if you learned two pieces and spent 40 minutes on them, you would learn two pieces within the exact same amount of time.

This might sound counterintuitive because we are often led to believe that pianists spend hours and hours sitting at the piano. However, the amount of time is far less important than how that time is spent and how often you are able to return to that same material.

There have been many times when I have been asked how it's possible for me to learn a complete one-hour recital programme from memory. The answer is that my practice sessions often included lots of different sections of lots of different pieces. I may have spent some time working on the first page of a piece, then some more time on the last page of a piece, then some time on a second, third, and fourth piece. The only limit to the number of pieces that you can learn is really how many pieces you're capable of returning to and, therefore, how much you can consistently practice. If you are able to spend 20 minutes on one piece, 20 minutes on a second piece, and 20 minutes on a third piece today, are you able to return to all of those pieces tomorrow in order to reinforce consolidation and continue learning them?

If that is the case, then you will learn much quicker by learning multiple pieces at the same time, particularly if each piece contains different challenges. However, if you try to learn eight pieces, for example, and can only revisit those pieces once per week, then this will be much slower than learning far fewer pieces.

That's not to say that each piece requires 20 minutes of practice. Twenty minutes is not a magic number. As long as the piece is improving each time and you're able to consolidate what you've already learned, the piece of music will continue to improve. So the limit becomes the frequency at which you can consolidate a piece, as opposed to the sheer volume of time spent on any particular piece.

Mixing

Having said that, it's also important to know that different pieces at different stages come with certain challenges, and having multiple pieces that are all at the same stage is the most challenging situation to be in. Let's say you start three pieces of music at the same time. That means you'll have to go through the beginning stages of learning three different pieces at the same time. Then you have to go through the middle stage of learning all three pieces at the same time. In any given practice session, that means you're largely focusing on the same kind of activities, and therefore it's much harder for your brain to consolidate that learning.

So the answer is to stagger the learning of pieces. If you started a piece today, you will go through the most difficult part of learning, which is learning the notes, the fingers, the key, the structure, and all of the things that you're going to see for the first time in that music. However, once you are getting more familiar with that piece and you're getting to the middle stage, which is all about problem-solving, isolating, fixing, and making decisions about the music, introducing a second piece where you go back to learning the notes means that you're separating your practice into two different types of activity.

Once that first piece is nearly finished and it's about polishing the piece, and the second piece becomes a problem-solving exercise, then you could introduce a third piece to start that note-learning process again.

Thinking of pieces like this in terms of what stage they're at means that, no matter how bad a day you're having, you always have a piece that you're able to work on. A piece that is nearly finished is much easier to play when you are tired, and a piece that is at the beginning stages is much easier to work on when you are having a particularly focused day.

Most exam boards expect you to learn three to four pieces for any exam grade for these exact reasons. That number tends to allow you to build pieces up to their various stages of learning, and it’s a number that is feasible for you to tackle in any single practice session.

So if you are the type of player who finds that you want to focus on just one piece, it's worth asking yourself if you spend a large amount of your practice sessions drilling the same thing and whether it might be better to introduce a second piece so that you're able to consolidate two things at once. For those players who like to spread their focus thin, it could equally be worth asking whether you are focusing enough on each piece to keep them progressing and whether you're able to revisit them regularly. Learning a piece of music is often determined by the number of times you need to return to the piece, not simply by how long you're able to sit at the piano in one go.

Matt