Whilst I am perfectly well aware that the grading system is (or should be) a guide to study rather than a check list, nonetheless I am interested in knonwing roughly how difficult this or that piece is considered to be. A couple of threads recently (Bachs Inventions, Chopins Fantasie Impromptue) have plumbed the surface of this, but led me to wonder: How you would grade the learning and playing of more than 1 piece from a group at a time?

As an example from elsewhere it has been pointed out that Tatiana Nikolayeva turned up at the 1950 Bach centenary competition prepared to play any of the 48 preludes and fugues on request. I don't think anyone would doubt that this feat is of considerably greater difficulty than learning only one.

Another example (and the reason for asking) is my current work on Bach: Bachs [2 part] Inventions individually are graded at given levels, e.g. nos. 1, 4, 8, 10, 13, 14 have been suggested as being grade 5 standard: I am currently "polishing" the playing of nos. 1, 8, 10 and 13 (as well as a Chopin Waltz, a Debuussy prelude and a Joplin Rag).

Taking the Bach pieces as a group how do people feel this would affect the grade?

I might add that this is of academic interest only - I won't be submitting any of my current repertoire to a graded examination!

I guess it comes down to sheer volume. Learning, for exapmple, 15 odd pages of a concerto is unquestionably difficult, but even when I was around grade 5 standard I could play one page from that concerto pretty well. By the time I turned the page I was dying thoguh. Endurance is part of it. But if the pieces are designed to stand alone, then I don't think learning the entire set is any more difficult than learning any other bunch of pieces of a similar standard. Although perhaps the effort involved in learning a set that is all by the same composer could get a little boring, whereas with a mixed bunch there is more variety.

This is interesting, and I've never really thought about it. Certainly, the graded pieces tend to be of a set length - say, 1 page for grade 3, 3-4 pages for grade 6 and so on. From this we could infer that the sheer quantity of notes in a piece contribute to its difficulty level.

It seems to be the case for me that the quantity of music which can be "held ready" at any given time is dramatically affected by how difficult that music is for me to read/memorise/internalise. For example, I could sight read through my 32-page "Keyboard Anthology, grades 3 & 4" pretty well, and given a couple of weeks I could polish those pieces and feel fairly comfortable performing any of them on request. However, at present I am learning just 3 pieces of grade 6-8 standard, totalling about 12 pages - and it's a real struggle by comparison. I've been slogging away for about a month and I would not yet be prepared to play any of them to, say, an examiner.

So I suppose what I'm saying is, if I ever reach the stage where all of Bach's 48 are easy pieces to me (please! ), then being ready to perform any of them at the drop of a hat will not be such an astonishing feat.

Theoretically, I guess that a group of pieces should be graded via either the mode difficult piece in the set (if there are a lot of difficult pieces of the same grade), or the mean difficulty in a broad set of music. Of course, if it was 5 FRSM pieces, and 5 Grade 0 pieces, then it should be graded at FRSM rather than Grade 0, but from a practical perspective, the Grade 0 pieces shouldn't be included in the first place.

I don't think the length of the overall program should come into it really, apart from adding 1 to the number of the Grade in some cases, but no more than that? After all, even an hour of Grade 1 pieces would still be Grade 1, perhaps maybe Grade 2 simply because the candidate would have the will power to perform that long. But it does say that they have a good memory, admittedly. Remember that anything above 5 hours or so would be out of the question for a pianist with the risk of RSI - so thus we cannot go into the unrealistic situation of a 5 hour repertoire for a Grade 1 Pianist!

In terms of being able to play out of a broad spectrum of pieces, as I said before, this requires a very good memory, but should still not necessarily change the Grade of the program. Let's say there was a performer with an immense memory that could play any 3 pieces from the Grade 3 syllabus of any board from memory. This may be an accomplished feat, but one would not be able to say 'This would be a Grade 5 program', because they would still probably not have the technical ability to play 1 piece from Grade 5 (although I'll give you that in them playing such a vast array of Grade 3 pieces, they have probably picked up the ability along the way)!

~Wobby~

I haven't looked at piano exam music for years, but ABRSM seems to ignore the length of e.g. woodwind and brass pieces as a contributing factor in their difficulty, even though for early stage brass players in particular stamina can be a major issue.

I think that's rather the point: If you played the same grade 3 piece repeatedly for an hour, so what? If you play all diferrent grade 3 pieces for an hour you must have demonstrated a rather wider range of techniques than would be required for the grade, though not enough to be pushed up too far, I agree.

I like the idea of pushing maybe 1 grade for the array and maybe 1 for the stamina: It seems right somehow.