Summer Piano Listening List

This summer I’m sending my piano students home with the Summer 60: 60 Days of Piano Music! The goal is for them to listen to a piece most days over summer vacation and complete the entire list by the end of August.

It is SO immensely important for students to listen to music and it’s often one of the things that get lost in the shuffle of life. But the summer, the time of long car rides and barbeques, basically demands music! So why not add a little piano music into the mix?!

The Summer 60 is divided into six categories:

  • Top 20 Sizzlers: 20 pieces for solo piano that most people would recognize even if they don’t listen to classical music
  • Baroque Beach Bonanza: A selection of eight pieces from the Baroque period with pieces by J.S. Bach, Arcangelo Corelli, George Frideric Handel, Georg Philipp Telemann, Jean-Philippe Rameau, Dietrich Buxtehude, and Domenico Scarlatti
  • Classical Campfire Concert: A selection of eight pieces from the Classical period with pieces by C.P.E. Bach, J.C. Bach, Muzio Clementi, Luigi Boccherini, Christoph Willibald Gluck, Joseph Haydn, and Carl Czerny
  • Red-Hot Romantic Remix: A selection of eight pieces from the Romantic period with pieces by John Field, Felix Mendelssohn, Clara Schumann, Edvard Grieg, Modest Mussorgsky, Antonin Dvorak, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Amy Beach
  • Modern Midsummer Melodies: A selection of eight pieces from the Modern period with pieces by Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, Alexander Scriabin, Maurice Ravel, Arnold Schoenberg, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Bela Bartok, and Dmitri Shostakovich
  • Contemporary Summer Coda: A selection of eight pieces from the Contemporary period with pieces by Philip Glass, Gyorgy Ligeti, Unsuk Chin, Luciano Berio, Lera Auerbach, Errolyn Wallen, Ludovico Eunadi, and Takeshi Kokayashi.

You might be asking, where’s Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, Brahms, and all the other heavy-hitters?! They are in the Top 20 Sizzlers!! I decided, in order to have a wide variety of composers and music, anyone who was in the Top 20 Sizzlers wouldn’t be added to the period selections (with the sole exception of J.S. Bach because we ALWAYS make an exception for Bach!).

A list of piano music lays on the grass in the sun next to a pair of toucan sunglasses and a colorful beach ball.

Each piece on the list is around 5 minutes (or less! Only a few are longer) so it should be easy to squeeze a quick listen in among all the fun summer activities! Some great times to listen are while driving around town, while winding down before bed, while setting the table, and before practicing (wink! wink! Summer is a fantastic time for practicing!!).

Students can listen to the pieces in any order (but listening to them in order does give them an idea of how piano music has changed over the centuries, which is really neat!). When they’ve listened to a piece, they can check the box next to the piece and rate the piece on the emoji scale on the right:

  • Frowny face: Ugh… I never want to hear that again
  • Straight face: That was good, but not my favorite
  • Smiley face: That was fantastic! Why did it have to end?!

The emoji scale can help students to figure out their musical taste!

Summer 60: 60 Days of Piano Music is available as a printable download in the Toucan Piano Store. Happy listening!!

Explore more creative teaching ideas
  • Rhythm Olympics
    Students will go for gold in the Rhythm Olympics, a multi-level multi-week rhythm game! Students compete in 5 rhythm sporting events in the hopes of collecting all 5 gold medals and being crowned a Rhythm Olympics champion!!!
  • Slurs & Ladders: The Recital Prep Game
    If there is one game my students beg to play year after year (and sometimes when we don’t even have a recital anytime soon!) is this recital prep game. It’s a great de-stressor and it shows students how prepared they are to perform while also injecting some fun and joy back into those recital pieces that may be sounding a little tired.
  • Music Friendship Bracelets
    Colorful friendship bracelets make great student gifts for your next recital or they could be a craft for your students to make at a group lesson or studio event! They are colorful, easy to make, and show off our piano pride!

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Musical Madness

I think as teachers we all wish our students listened to more music, especially piano music. I assign listening homework every now and then and, before Covid, we would do a Composer of the Month (we would spend that month learning about a specific composer’s life, the period he/she lived in, and his/her music). We put “Composer on the Month” on hiatus while we were all virtual because of the logistics of getting the print-outs to everyone (it was a lot of stuff). But since resuming in-person lessons, I’ve found out that the kids really miss it and want to bring it back… and this is where March’s Musical Madness comes in!

I have so many students who love to play basketball so I decided to jump on the March Madness bandwagon and do a little competition of our own. Over the next month and a half we are going to be embarking on weekly showdowns between two great composers of classical music to see who will come out on top and be our first “Composer of the Month” of 2022! We will also have our first piano party since 2019 to celebrate the end of Musical Madness!

I chose to focus on the Romantic composers (because my brain hurt when trying to narrow all of the classical periods down to 8 composers!), more specifically Chopin, Liszt, R. Schumann, Brahms, Felix Mendelssohn, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, Dvořák, and Rachmaninoff. Other groups of composers I thought of focusing on were female composers, impressionist composers, and living composers… I feel I will definitely be revisiting these groups in the future for other music appreciation events.

Musical Madness: Romantic Composers. (All composer portraits were found on Google. Some of the portraits are by artist Hadi Karimi. You can check out his amazing series of portraits of classical composers at https://hadikarimi.com/ )

I made a frame for the portraits of the composers I chose so that they would resemble basketball cards (do kids still collect cards??). And then I wrote their names in the brackets of our Musical Madness poster.

Each week two composers will face off to see who will make it to the next round. At my lessons I will give a quick introduction to that week’s composers to spark my students’ curiosity. Then I will send an email to all my piano families with one piano piece by each of the composers (I try to keep each piece under 5 minutes). My students will listen to the pieces at home and choose their favorite between the two. At their next lesson, they will give their vote to their favorite. The composer with the most votes moves on to the next round and the loser is out. Our first showdown is between Sergei Rachmaninoff and Antonín Dvořák!

I’m just glad I’m not the one voting… this is really hard!

I taped the composer cards to the poster so I can swap them out each week. The composers waiting to jump into the competition are taped to the wall next to the poster. I’m very excited to see which composer will take it all!

If you would like to play your own version on Musical Madness and bring some beautiful music into your students’ homes, the poster and blank composer cards are available in the Toucan Piano Shop. I made three different poster sizes (with cards that fit each size) to best fit your needs: letter size (if you want to print it out for each of your students to have their own copy), 12″ x 18″, and 18″ x 24″. All three sizes come with your purchase. I hope you have as much fun as we are having!

Let’s stay in touch, join the list!

As a “toucan” of our appreciation download a free set of note flashcards (link in our Welcome email)!

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