Make playing new music a regular part of your practice while developing the skills to read, learn and enjoy more repertoire.
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What if discovering new music became a regular part of your practice?
Piano practice can easily become concentrated on a small number of pieces, each demanding weeks or months of attention. Learning music in depth is important, but regular encounters with unfamiliar repertoire offer something different: greater variety, broader musical experience and a powerful way to strengthen the skills we use whenever we meet a new score.
In New Music Every Day, Ken Johansen explores two complementary ways of doing this: sight-reading, our first encounter with unfamiliar music, and quick study, where we take a piece further and learn it to a level of technical comfort, musical understanding and expressive engagement without turning it into a major long-term project.
Using music across a range of difficulty levels, Ken will show how to approach unfamiliar scores, recognise patterns, understand what you are seeing and hearing, and decide what deserves further attention.
The session will also address an often-overlooked question: how do we know whether a piece is actually worth committing to? A quick study gives us a way to find out through practical experience. Some pieces may prove rewarding and manageable; others may turn out to be too difficult, require more technical work than we have time for, or simply fail to hold our interest.
Used regularly, this approach can change the shape of your practice: helping you experience more music, make better repertoire choices and avoid sinking weeks into pieces that are a poor fit. At the same time, you build the reading, recognition and learning skills that make each new score easier to approach, leaving more of your practice time for actually making music.
Understand the difference between a first reading, a quick study and a longer-term project, and how to decide which approach a piece needs. Ken defines a quick study as learning a piece to a level of technical comfort, musical understanding and expressive engagement within roughly one to five practice sessions.
See how scanning, pattern recognition, rhythm, internal hearing and analysis can help you make sense of unfamiliar music more quickly and confidently.
Learn what to do after the first read-through, from fingering and focused practice to deciding what deserves attention and when it is time to move on.
Discover how to judge whether a piece is suitable for sight-reading, quick study or deeper work, so that you can choose music that stretches you without leaving you stuck.
This session is for pianists who want to learn and experience more music without every piece becoming a major project; who find new scores slow or difficult to approach; who want a clearer process for what to do after the first read-through; or who would like to make better repertoire choices and bring more variety and discovery into their practice. The ideas are relevant across a broad range of levels, from developing to advanced pianists, and teachers will also find useful ways to help students broaden their repertoire and strengthen their reading and learning skills.
Ken will combine presentation and demonstration, using music across a range of difficulty levels to show how the process changes as the repertoire becomes more demanding. You'll see how an unfamiliar piece can move from an initial scan and first reading into quick study, and how to recognise when it is better suited to longer-term work.
The session will be recorded and all ticket holders will receive access to the recording shortly afterwards.
To book this event on its own for £40, or £24 for Online Academy subscribers, click the Buy button below. Subscribers should sign in first to receive the discounted price.
Online Academy subscribers can book all four events for £90 with the Member Event Pass.
Not currently a subscriber? The Birthday Experience includes all four events, unlimited replays and three months of non-renewing Online Academy membership for £135.
