Growth Comes With New Repertoire

Incorporating new literature into your practice sessions not only challenges you as a musician, but it also puts you at a significant advantage by providing new ways to approach your instrument. As musicians, our goal is to have musical conversations with one another through the medium of music. But this is difficult to do if we do not have a strong musical vocabulary on our instrument.

It is very common for students to continue practicing a piece that they have mastered because they know the piece in and out and they sound good playing it. This is excellent, but how do we expect to grow as musicians if we don’t introduce and incorporate new repertoire that challenges us to grow? For example, if we only practice a certain set of words in our spoken language, we would find it extremely difficult to communicate with our peers. The same is true in music.

Keep pushing yourself to improve by finding joy in challenging yourself. This will not only make you a better musician, but it will also help you tremendously as you start to make music with your peers. While it may be easy and convenient to practice something that we already know, I encourage you to push through the initial frustration of learning a new piece and not being able to play something “perfectly” the first time. This means that you are challenging yourself and growing as a musician, which is admirable! 

– Daniel Desalles, B.M.E., Drum Instructor