Stuck in a Repertoire Rut? Here are 5 Ways to Get More Mileage Out of the Music You Love!
You know the feeling. It's October, the folders are passed out, and you're rehearsing the same piece the same way you did last Tuesday. And the Tuesday before that. The students sound fine. You're a little bored. And if you're honest, they might be getting bored as well.
That's a repertoire rut.
The instinct is to go shopping for new music. I get it, because I've done it! But a lot of the time, the music isn't the problem. The piece you’re rehearsing over and over again already has plenty to teach. We just tend to use it for one job: getting it ready for the concert.
Here are five ways to get more mileage out of the music you already love, whether you teach a general music class or a high school ensemble. None of them require a new purchase. Most take ten minutes or less.
First, where's your rut?
When we hit a repertoire rut, it won’t always be the same. The underlying cause can be very different. This is a clear case of something I say a lot: context drives the ship. What causes a rut at the elementary general music level could be different from the cause of a rut in high school choir. And because ruts aren't all the same, the fix isn't either. Here are some of the ruts I’ve personally experienced (I’ve actually said these out loud to my colleagues multiple times!), along with some recommended go-to moves if this sounds you.
“My students can play it, but they can't tell me much about it." Start with #1, Unpack the piece.
“Composing and improvising hardly ever make it into my class." Start with #2, Grow a motive.
"Students follow my interpretation. They rarely make musical choices of their own." Start with #3, Compare and choose.
"Most of my rehearsal time is me finding and fixing problems.” Start with #4, Hand over the rehearsal.
"I keep coming back to the same pieces, and they’re starting to feel stale." Start with #5, Re-imagine it.
Does more than one apply to you at the moment? That's normal. Pick the one that bugs you the most and start there.
#1 - Unpack the piece
Before handing out a piece, give it 20 minutes of intentional thought time beyond what you would normally give it. The question is simple: what could a student learn from this? You already know the list of things they'll need to fix and the common pitfalls you’ll be working through. Set those aside for now.
Look at the piece through five lenses:
Musical elements. What's the form? Where does the texture change? What's interesting about the melody, harmony, or rhythm?
Technical skills. What new skill does it ask for? A key, a range, an articulation, a meter?
Creative entry points. Where could students make a musical choice, improvise, or compose?
Context. Who wrote it, when, where, and why? Whose tradition does it come from, and whose voices are missing from how we usually present it?
Connection. What in this piece might matter to your students' lives? How can your students see themselves in this music?
How this can play out in general music: Try this with a folk song you teach every year. One call-and-response song can carry form, phrase, steady beat, improvisation, and cultural context through an entire unit.This is the strategy that changes how you see every other piece of repertoire. You stop choosing between "repertoire" and "curriculum," because the piece is the curriculum with the right planning and unpacking.
#2 - Grow a motive
Every piece has a few moments that make it sound like itself and familiar. A rhythmic figure. A melodic hook, an ostinato, a cadence. Pull one out and hand it to your students to build with. Here’s one process I’ve done with my 7th and 8th graders in band, and it worked fairly well:
Isolate a 2- to 4-beat motive and have everyone play or sing it.
Ask students to change one thing about it: the rhythm, the direction, the dynamic, or the articulation.
Partners combine their variations into a short 4- or 8-bar phrase.
Share a few, then go back to the original and ask, "How did the composer develop this idea later in the piece?"
The unintentional byproduct of this process for me and my students was when that motive came back around in the full piece — my students were actually able to hear it, because they've had their hands on it.
How this can play out in general music: Take the rhythm of a song's first phrase and have everyone clap or chant it. Small groups change one thing and turn their version into a body percussion or unpitched instrument composition. Then sing the song again and listen for where that rhythm shows up. Let your students tinker with it. It’s always more fun when they tinker.
#3 - Compare and choose
Find two or three recordings of the music you are rehearsing that really contrast. Play the same 30-second excerpt from each one. Then ask:
What's different about tempo, dynamics, tone, or balance?
Which version do you prefer and why?
What should our interpretation sound like?
Now let the class vote on one interpretive decision, and rehearse it their way. Record your own group and add it to the lineup next time.
How this can play out in general music: Take a song or piece your students know and put two very different versions side by side. That might be the original next to a cover, a version in another style, or a performance from another culture. Students map the differences on a simple listening chart, then choose one idea to try in their own performance (while striving for authenticity!).
#4 - Hand over the rehearsal
You're the best diagnostician in the room. That's exactly why your students need practice doing it themselves. If every problem in rehearsal gets found and fixed by you, students learn to wait for you to find it.
Pick one of these and start small:
Student sectional leaders. Give each section a 5-minute block, one specific goal ("Clean the rhythm in mm. 24–32"), and a simple checklist.
Record, listen, diagnose. Play back a run-through. Before you say a word, students name one strength and one thing to fix.
Self-assessment rubric. Use a 3- or 4-level rubric with only two criteria, like tone and rhythmic accuracy. Students rate themselves before and after a week of rehearsal.
Conductor for a minute. A student conducts a short passage and gives the ensemble one piece of feedback.
How this can play out in general music: Small groups rehearse a song or ostinato on their own, then perform for another group. The listeners respond with sentence starters like "I noticed..." and "Next time, try..." Then groups run it once more using that feedback.
Your concert might be one night, but being able to hear a problem and fix it without you in front of them is a skill you could be developing along the way that can be applied later. And students often fix problems faster when they're the ones who found them in the first place.
#5 - Re-imagine it (A good option if you don’t mind breaking some rules)
This is the one for the piece you've programmed so many times you could conduct it in your sleep. A piece can live in more than one form, so let students change it.
Change the genre. What would this melody sound like as a lullaby? A march? A pop ballad?
Re-orchestrate. Give the melody to a different section, or let a small chamber group arrange a passage for their own instruments.
Strip it down. Play a section with only the bass line and melody. What do students notice about how the harmony works?
Add a layer. Students write an ostinato, a countermelody, or a percussion part to go with it.
Go digital. Students remix a phrase in one of the many apps for notation or loops.
How this can play out in general music: Pick a song students know well and have groups arrange it for Orff instruments, ukulele, boomwhackers, or body percussion. Every group makes its own version. Perform them back to back and talk about what changed. I think this is one of my favorite ways to spice things up in this setting.
Get creative!
These are five ideas, but you don’t need anything fancy to help yourself out of the repertoire rut. And I would never recommend that anyone do a complete overhaul of their upcoming concert program (that’s a fast-track to overwhelm for everyone!). Choose one piece you're teaching right now and one strategy from this list. Give it two weeks. Tweak it, adapt it, and see how it goes. Listen to how your students talk about the music. Notice what they can tell you about it and do with it that they couldn't before. That's your bonus mileage.
Your repertoire already has everything you need (which is probably why you chose it in the first place). Let’s have some fun and see how we can make it work a little bit harder for you and your students!
