My own approach is not to assign sonata movements for an exam unless the student can play the whole sonata. I also disagree with having just a single movement of a sonata played on an exam – but I understand that constraints of time may require it to be so. Yet the grading system exists, and I for one consider it a bureaucratic, rather than a real assessment. This leads to an even more general question: Should we grade music at all? Personally I don’t think we should simply because difficulty is highly personal, and a piece that may be considered grade 8 for one person will be considered grade 1 for another. The ABRSM always grade sonata movements, never the whole sonata for a very simple reason: they do not hear whole sonatas in their exams (up to grade, and it allows them to have more pieces within any grade.
What are the alternatives? If you are going to grade the Moonlight as a whole, which grade should one attach to it? The grade of the most difficult technical movement (the third)? The grade of the most difficult movement musically (the first)? Or should one average the difficulty of each movement and come up with a mean and standard deviation for the difficulty of the sonata? So take all this grading of pieces with a large pinch of salt.Īlso my philosophy nowadays is that there are only two kinds of pieces: easy and impossible, and the diference between them is practice. 9) and a piece by Schumann (Phantasietanz) that in my opinion cannot possibly be of the same level of difficulty (Schumann is far, far more difficult). For instance grade 5 ABRSM this year has a Waltz by Brahms (op. I find myself often surprised at the grades attached to certain pieces. In other words, they do not include advanced, virtuosic pieces.
#MAPLE LEAF RAG PLAYER PIANO PROFESSIONAL#
These grades refer only to pieces that would be considered easy by most professional pianists. The system I am most familiar with is the ABRSM where grades go from 1 – 8. Different educational establishments have different systems.
On hearing that a former student of his was going to play the Moonlight on a recital, a famous piano professor asked: “How is that difficult movement coming along?” He was actually referring to the first movement. As for the Moonlight, here is an interesting story.