The music you choose for your orchestras to learn makes a huge difference in how they sound when they perform. Selecting repertoire is probably one of the most important things we do as music teachers. With thousands of pieces to choose from, how do you even start?
Choosing music can be incredibly overwhelming, but the ability to choose great music for your particular ensemble is a skill that you can develop and refine over time. The longer you teach, the more music you’ll become familiar with and the more quickly and easily you’ll be able to find pieces that complement and challenge your students. In the meantime, here are some tips for choosing the perfect program.
Think about the current ability level and strengths of your ensemble.
Ideally, the music you play should challenge your students and help them reach the next level but shouldn’t be too far out of their reach. I’ve found this is a lot easier when you think about specific skills. Do your students know how to shift? Can they play rhythms confidently? What bow strokes are they comfortable with? If your students don’t even know what shifting is, don’t give them a piece with a lot of shifting.
Remember that you are choosing music for the entire ensemble, not individual players. Every ensemble will have its own strengths and weaknesses. You may have a particularly strong cello section, or a viola section of only two players. Even a piece that is the perfect skill level might not work well for your ensemble.
Think about the skills you want your students to practice and learn.
Most of the time I use repertoire to reinforce skills that my students already know, not to teach entirely new things. When I’m choosing music for the next upcoming concert, I specifically look for music that will give the students more practice with the skills that we learned during the past concert cycle. If we’ve spent a lot of time working on shifting, then I will look for pieces that require everyone to shift somewhere. Learning music is a cyclical process, not a linear one. Students need to keep coming back to skills and practicing them in different contexts.
What gaps need to be filled in your students’ knowledge? There will always be gaps. Students come from different teachers, schools, and home situations. Some of them won’t know how to count or read notes. Others might need work on their bow hold. Once you identify the gaps, you can choose music that will give you opportunities to fill in those gaps.
Also consider the gaps in orchestral repertoire in general. Beginning and intermediate orchestra music is almost always in the keys of D and G major and their relative minors, with occasional pieces in A, C, or F major. If you don’t go out of your way to find music in other keys, students could easily go through both middle school and high school without playing in any other keys. Viola parts are notoriously easy – until they aren’t, and suddenly viola players need to read treble clef and shift into upper positions. I intentionally search out pieces that fill in those gaps between student repertoire and all the “real” music out there.
Remember that notes and rhythms aren’t the only thing that makes music difficult.
Teaching students to play musically requires many different skills. Students need to practice tone quality, intonation, bow control and bow strokes, ensemble skills, and more. Make sure you program a variety of pieces that practice a variety of skills. I almost always program at least one easier slow piece to work on things like intonation and tone quality. If students are always working on notes and rhythms and never get to focus on musicality, we are doing them a disservice.
Expose your students to a variety of styles.
Playing a variety of styles and composers is so important for so many reasons. Students learn something different from every style and genre they play. Baroque and classical music sounds great with string ensembles and I believe every string player should get to play some of that. I also believe that students will learn a huge amount of technique by playing fiddle music, film music, jazz music, world music, and even pop music. Students will be better rhythmically, technically, and musically if they are taught to play a wide variety of music.
When choosing music, ask yourself questions like “What composers should my students know?” “What styles of music should they play that we haven’t done yet?” “Am I programming too much of one particular style?” Not only does variety help students’ growth as musicians, it also makes playing a lot more fun.
Allow students some choice in what they play.
There is so much that goes into choosing great music for an ensemble, but one of the most important considerations is whether the students will enjoy it or not. You can choose the most perfect piece that teaches all the right skills, but it will be painful to rehearse and perform if your students hate it.
When I look for music, I almost always come up with twice as many pieces than we can actually learn. There is so much great music out there to choose from. Once I’ve come up with five or six pieces that I feel would work well for this concert, I often let the students listen to the pieces and vote on their favorites. I’m not giving up my role as a teacher to find appropriate music, but my students get some say as well. I’ve found that when I do that, my students are far more excited about the music and we perform better.
Be patient, take your time, and get suggestions.
Looking for music is a weeks-long process for me. I listen to dozens of pieces over and over again until I finally narrow it down to the right program for my ensembles. I often ask other teachers for music suggestions. In the process, I keep a list of great pieces that didn’t make the cut this time around but might be perfect for another year and another ensemble.
Patience and planning are key to a great concert program. Yes, it takes a lot of time and effort, but the payoff comes in spades as you watch your students learn and grow through a concert cycle and then watch their excitement as they perform their favorite pieces for friends and family.
It’s ultimately about making music. Music is worth it.