Every teacher I know has one of these on their student list. The student is itching to expand beyond their method book series, reads well enough, wants to play the piece from their favorite movie (or video game), and is quietly about two months from quitting. Maybe for others, it’s the intermediate transfer student who has been stuck in the plateau of despair for 3 years, but aspires to play advanced Debussy works and listens to Clair de Lune on repeat (not speaking from experience here or anything!).
We treat the intermediate plateau as a motivation problem. I have come to think it is mostly a planning problem, and that it happens to us before it happens to the student. While they were beginners, the method book made every decision. Then the books ran out, and every piece became a fresh decision, twenty-five times over, at nine o’clock on a Sunday night. So we pick something safe, a little late, without much of a plan behind it. The student feels that. Not the specific piece. The absence of a direction.
Borrow a frame, then make it yours. Building a curriculum from scratch ate a summer for me and I had abandoned it by October. What worked was starting from a graded frame somebody else already built and changing about half of it. Exam and festival syllabi are useful here even if your student never sits for an exam, because somebody has already sorted several hundred pieces by difficulty. The frame gives you the shape of a year: some technique, something Baroque, something lyrical, something fast, a study, and one piece the student picks. I keep the shape and swap out most of the titles. The shape is the part I do not want to rebuild every August.
Here is where I land for the four students who show up every fall.
The exam or festival student. My old mistake was picking everything at the top of the level, so there was nothing to breathe on. Now one piece is deliberately below level, and it has never once slowed anybody down. The staples in my library: Burgmüller Op. 100, Kabalevsky Op. 27, the Clementi Sonatinas Op. 36, Bach’s Little Preludes, and Schumann’s Album for the Young.
The one who only wants movie and video game music. Do not fight it. Find what they actually love, usually the repeating left hand and the wash of pedal rather than the melody, and pair it with something older that does the same thing. A student playing Einaudi or Yiruma is often ready for Satie’s Gymnopédies, “The Little Shepherd” from Debussy’s Children’s Corner, or the Chopin Prelude in E minor. Keep the piece they asked for on the stand the whole time. That is the deal you are making.
The adult returner. Taste running years ahead of the hands, and a quiet fear of being handed something written for a nine-year-old. One real piece they have wanted for years, plus short pieces that build toward it. The Bach Prelude in C. Satie’s first Gymnopédie. The Chopin Prelude in A major, sixteen bars and unmistakably Chopin. Grieg’s Arietta.
The one who is technically ahead and musically behind. Fewer notes, more musical demand. Bach’s Two-Part Inventions, because you cannot fake voicing. The short Chopin Preludes, especially numbers 4, 6, 7 and 20. And duets, because playing with another person forces listening in a way that no amount of me saying “listen” ever has.
The other half of the fix is that intermediate students sometimes feel they are learning alone on an island. A beginner does not notice. A thirteen-year-old absolutely does. The teachers who hold onto their teenagers nearly all get them in a room together somehow, whether it’s monthly studio class, or a weekly group offering, and the reason the rest of us do not is that everyone is at a different level. How could this possibly work in practice?
What made it workable for me was deciding that the plan belongs to the student, not to the class. The group is just the room they are standing or playing in. That is also the part I ended up building an app for. ClefRoom is built around the same split: you write the shape of a year once, as levels you can edit and reuse, and the titles underneath change student by student. It keeps each student on their own curriculum even inside a group class, and it is free up to 100 students.
I put the year shape and the four student types above into a one-page sheet you can print for each student, with the pieces named and space to add your own. It is free here.
If you do nothing else this week, do the narrowing in advance rather than the choosing. Come to that first lesson with six or eight pieces already laid out, all graded, all within reach, and then let them pick.
The filtering is invisible to them, which is the point. What they feel is that they chose. What you know is that whichever piece they land on will keep them challenged, motivated, and inspired.
Harrison Lavins is a pianist, teacher, and app developer based in Detroit, Michigan, and a co-founder of ClefRoom, a curriculum platform for music studios. ClefRoom is our newest advertiser here on Music Matters Blog, and we are grateful for their support of the online music education community! If you are interested in finding out more about how you can promote your company, event, or product, just send us an e-mail and we will let you know about our advertising packages.
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