Author: admin

Grade 6 exam update

One of the nice things about living in the future is how much better some aspects of it are compared to pass. I submitted my performance exam on Saturday and the results arrived back at 4am this morning. I know for the future that sleeping is better than waiting.

Anyway. The result was a DISTINCTION.

Most of the exams I did as a kid were the practical exams by the RIAM, and the last one I did was 35 years ago. So I had no real idea how rigid the ABRSM would be. They were reasonable I think; the feedback was sensible, it highlighted the issues I knew about (but eventually cut my losses about. The lowest score was 26 marks for Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach’s one hit wonder. The highest was full marks for Elissa Milne’s introductory jazz piece.

I see a lot of discussion on how the performance grades are easier or dumbing down. I don’t really agree. You have the extra piece. And you have the utter trauma of the recording. It must sound seductive, this idea that you can try as many times as you like to get it right. But it means getting four pieces right every single time. I’ve played in public, and I did the practical exams up to grade 5 when I was a teenager. The experience of creating a valid, acceptable, compliant with the rules film was really tough. I live in an apartment with triple glazed windows. Nevertheless I had films wrecked courtesy of:

  • a helicopter
  • a bunch of extremely irate Belgium drivers stuck in a traffic jam
  • a processing of 10 police cars with their sirens blasting
  • a significant number of motor cyclists who appeared not to have any sort of silencers attached to their wheelmobile.
  • a stag party singing Sweet Caroline at the tops of their voices.

It’s really frustrating when you have got through the 4 pieces reasonably cleanly and the film is destroyed owing to circumstances outside your control.

And then there were my own mess ups, centred mainly on CPE Bach but on occasion, Elissa Milne departed my fingers in a less than elegant manner. As it was the last piece I scheduled, those occasions were both times when I had played each of the other three pieces faultlessly.

In short, this was deeply, deeply stressful in a way that no other music exam ever has been.

And I’m going back for more. I will skip Grade 7 and move straight to Grade 8 as I need it for the ARSM which is to follow that. My target date for this is end of next year and I will work to the 2025 syllabus rather than the 2023 as the repertoire list is okay for that. Before I start preparing those pieces though, there will be a short holiday from exam syllabus music.

Recording the Grade 6 video

The Facebook group for ABRSM exams is full of people squealing about how easy the performance grades are. I wonder how many of them have done one. I’ve spent almost two weeks trying to get an acceptable recording for that exam. Amongst the challenges

  • My fingers which can only play CPE Bach when literally no one is looking. They are not fooled by cameras.
  • My brain which decided at one point that I had never before actually heard Indigo Moon by Elissa Milne despite having played it daily for four omnths
  • The not very nice people who race motorbikes up and down the avenue on which I live. I have triple glazed windows.
  • The helicopter flying near the building on Tuesday night.
  • The not very sober people on the beer cycle today yowling Sweet Caroline to me and my ill fortuned neighbours.
  • My brain which decided that Autumn Leaves no 3 too was alien to it several times this week.

The mighty teaching fraternity includes some who say that this is no problem if the piece is secure for you. 3 of these pieces were ultra secure for me except – and this is critical – when the camera was running. Then it was anyone’s guess where I would end up. I’ve played some great jazz chords this week. I didn’t plan to.

Anyway, it’s submitted. It’s not perfect but then perfection does not exist.

Updates to Pianoteq

I haven’t had a look yet but apparently Bosendorfer has arrived on Pianoteq. I disassembled the crazy cabling set up I had for that a while back so I hope I can reassemble it all to see what it sounds like.

Now what

I stand at a crossroads. This must have happened before but I don’t remember it. I spent most of my teenage years pending exams or on summer holidays from the piano. The only time I insisted on doing something I wanted to do, I was learning some of Rach II at 17.

I learned Rach II at 17
A piece not meant for Irish teens.

Treasa Lynch on a Saturday night in June

Anyway, after a week of work, I recorded and submitted Grade 6. I dread something going terribly wrong here and me having to unpublish a whole pile of posts around this in utter shame. The question, is what do I do now? I see two options:

  • Start working on the Grade 8 repertoire (and find a teacher, for the love of god)
  • Take a 2 week break and inflict scales on my neighbours. It cannot be worse than Solfeggiettio has been.
  • Do something completely different from the monster pile of sheet music I own.

Yes, that’s 3 options now that I look more closely.

The four pieces on Grade 8 are pieces I actively want to learn. There are also some pieces for “later” that I could play with too. Brahms 118/2. Chopin’s Ballade No 1. Some of Fauré’s stuff. The world is wide open.

Recent sheet music acquisitions

I found a new sheet music shop in Antwerp last week and while I still don’t have Liszt’s Chorales, or Liszt’s transcriptions of Beethoven’s symphony number 7, I have some new stuff from there, and from Stretta online. I also added to my Henle library app.

On the latter, I added Consolation No 2 by Liszt which I will be starting soon as it is now on my Grade 8 syllabus. I have another edition of it which I will do a compare (mostly the book is gateway Liszt so I want to ensure it hasn’t been dumbed down in any way).

From Stretta, I picked up Early Morning in Istanbul by Fazil Say. I love his music and that has been on my list for a while.

From the bricks and mortar shop, I acquired the Rachmaninoff Moments Musicaux, the Henle edition because I dislike trying to read the Boosey edition. I also picked up some Slavonic dances by Dvorak (and now that I think of it, possibly one of his Humoresques went onto the Henle app as well). The Izmir Suite by Fazil Say arrived into my possession too – I wasn’t familiar with that particular piece and how bad could it possibly be? There are two pieces from it knocking on my ARSM repertoire list. We will see how it goes./

I also picked up the Liszt transcriptions of Schubert songs. I got that because Erlkonig is in it and I am a glutton for punishment. LAstly I picked the Barenreiter Edition of Pavane by Fauré which means I now have two different piano versions of this. Per the notes of the editor, a lot of different transcriptions of this are knocking around. Hmmm.

What will I play next?

Every once in a while there is a wave of questions on Reddit of the kind “I can play Fantaisie Impromptu [or other early advanced/advanced piece] what should I play next.”

I often wonder where these questions come from. I mean, if you are playing a Liszt Consolation or anything by Chopin, and you don’t know what else to play, this isn’t actually your core problem. Much like we tell would be writers that they need to read more by other writers, I think pianists need to listen to a lot of other pianists. Chop and Liszt on their own have a metric tonne of music – if you can play one of them, why not listen to more of their music and explore it? You’ll surely find stuff you want to play that way.

The world is full of amazing stuff. Fauré’s piano output. Brahms. Beethoven. Mozart. Genuinely, if you have to ask a piano forum, the issue is probably that you are not listening to enough music.

Practice diary 20240615

I practised every day this week and I think that’s the longest streak so far.

Apart from practising music, I also practised recording for the ABRSM digital exam submission. I don’t really want to talk about that until I get a result, so more lately. For now though, I am on a break from the grade 6 pieces and this brings the question, what now? Do I take a break? Do I get stuck into grade 8 immediately? What about all the sheet music I bought recently? More scales? I don’t know.

While I was playing Solfeggietto today, I was reflecting on how fast that piece went (sort of) – I started it in February. In a way, the grade 6 pieces feel awfully easy now; they were anything but when I had finished the grade 5 theory exam and yet, now I play all of them, mostly at ease, provided there isn’t a camera there. Someone somewhere on social media talked about how the conviction that practising something allowed you to go from not being able to do something to becoming very good at it.

If you had asked me 5 years ago if I would ever get as far as playing some of this music I love, this Mendelssohn, that CPE Bach, I would probably have said no. I’m 51 years old. I didn’t have the time.

But I made that time, and here we are.

Any reliable edition

I recorded and submitted Grade 6 today. Yesterday, for reasons, I had a look at TCL’s diploma lists and something interesting caught my eye.

I’ve already more or less decided what I would play for the FTCL/FRSM level provided it is compliant with the time requirements. But I still take a look at the list and what caught my eye on the FTCL list yesterday was that one of the repertoire pieces was the Volodos arrangement of Malaguena by Ernesto Lecuono. It’s a great piece of music, have loved it both as an orchestral piece and as a solo piano piece for a long time. This is the kind of thing that would pique my interest under any normal circumstances. The thing is, I don’t think it’s been published.

I can’t find it on stretta which is my go to source for any published music, it’s not on nkoda which absolutely is not. The only place it is turning up is Musescore. I don’t like their subscription model and anyway, a lot of what is there is transcriptions done by X, retranscribed by way. TCL call for “any reliable edition”.

What is a reliable edition of a transcription done by Volodos, but not published anywhere?

Updated ABRSM – general notes and what it means for me personally

ABRSM issued their updated syllabus for 2025-2026. You can find it here [if I remember to link it] [which I will at some stage].

Structurally, they have changed the initial 3 pieces in each list – the pieces that get pushed out into the books for each grade – and then they’ve added a bunch of additional alternatives for each list. For me, I had a choice of ignoring this, or looking to see if there was anything worth changing for me. In theory, I can use the 2023-24 syllabus until end of 2025 but I’m four months behind on a plan that foresaw that for late 2025. So I wanted to check if I would have to review the repertoire selection for myself. Technically the answer to that is no. The new syllabus left in place 3 of the 4 pieces I had selected, and of those three, they were each from separate lists. This also meant that if I didn’t want to change anything, I could just prepare those four pieces and they would be valid for both syllabuses. All four of them have had read throughs but I’m still finishing grade 6.

I had flexibility on the free selection however – I have some time limitations (so this ruled out The Girl With the Flaxen Hair which was just too short per the syllabus requirements – but June by Tchaikovsky was replaced by January – however, again that didn’t have to affect me. However, I’m allowing it to. One of the things that concerned me is that the repertoire was top heavy in late 19th century/early 20th century pieces. I wanted to rebalance that slightly and find something more mid 19th century. The choice ultimately was between a Chopin Mazurka (nice, but…) and, somewhat surprisingly, a Liszt Consolation; no 2. I am going to do that and now I have a more varied range of music. Once I have Grade 6 submitted (and hopefully passed) I will need to start working on selecting repertoire for ARSM so that this is lined up. For that I need to look at the regulations because there is some scope for selecting from outside the syllabus, and there is some scope for raiding the Grade 8 lists as well. I can have up to 10 minutes of self selected music. I’ll also want to build some flexibility into this because of course, I may change over the course of the 18 months I have set aside for the Grade 8.

Grade 8 is a gatekeeper. I have to do it before I touch the ARSM. We will see – now doubt I will post more about this later.

That being said, I had a look at the online discussion about the ABRSM new syllabus. Grade 8 features Rondo Alla Turca as A1 – this means it’s in the book which means a disproportionate number of students will probably want to do it. It’s a well known piece and students like playing things that are famous; that their friends might even know. This puts it in much the same box as Fur Elise, a piece which in its own right is beautiful, but devastatingly prone to being hackneyed. Nevertheless, I’m disappointed to hear teachers complain about this. The point about it perhaps being a dumbing down (previous years have included all of that sonata) is probably a justifiable discussion point but complaining about having to listen to it for 2 years was a bit much, I felt.

There was also some concern about The Girl With the Flaxen Hair turning up on List B. I have to confess I found that mystifying. For most of my life I tended to split the lists into Very old, Reasonably Old and More modern and possibly objectionable. Debussy has two pieces on the Grade 8 syllabus, one on List B and one on List C. Some teachers felt it was a somewhat short piece. Given that the select selected piece should be at least 3 minutes long, I tend to agree with that criticism, and I don’t see what puts it on List B when Reverie is on List C.

An additional arrival to Grade 8 – and I thought about it for myself – was Maple Leave Rag. I started learning that, or some version of it when I was about 14. It didn’t go above the other pieces I wanted to play in preference, however.

In general, one of the other complaints made was the number of Nikki Iles arrangements, especially in the lower grades (but not exclusively). I tend to agree with that. As far as possible, I prefer to do the original rather than a simplified transcription if the music was written for piano.

Yet I’m not totally unhappy with the approach. The number of pieces available as alternatives to the book list has been increased. Given that there seems to be quite a few adult learners around who may not want to suffer their way through stuff they simply don’t like (and why should they have to?), it’s good that there is an enhanced choice for them.

It’s possible my view would change if I were teaching this syllabus but in general, as a student, I didn’t see too much to upset me for grade 8.

Practice diary 20240610

I was without internet for the weekend and also my desk space is quite disrupted so I’m a bit late with the practice diary.

I’m currently on a 16 day streak. I’m hoping I can get to 30 days without breaking this time and who knows how that is going to go. In addition, I’m in that space where I’m trying to record the exam and infuriatingly this is suggesting I’ve never seen these 4 pieces of music in my life. It hasn’t been helped by stress relating to the internet outage (happened Friday, fixed today). Now, it’s like I can play any of these pieces provided there isn’t a camera going. If there is, Carl Philipp Emmanuel goes on strike. I’m making mistakes I’ve not made with that piece ever, before Saturday. It’s really infuriating.

All the more so because, well I can play all four pieces, and I’d like to submit them and then move on to the next piece of work which is the grade 8 selection. I’ve slowly started working on some Rachmaninoff but really slowly because obviously the priority is to get Grade 6 paid for and submitted.

Because all my time is going into the final run at this, I haven’t been reading music so I assume my sight reading as deteriorated a little again. It’s disappointing.

Let’s hope I get the exam submitted this week.

As a general note though, I’m really delighted to have made this. It isn’t that I didn’t believe I could do it technically; it’s that I wasn’t sure I could stick at it; my personal life has tended to get a bit disrupted and one of the reasons I am a few month’s late submitting this (four in total) is because I spent a lot of January and May travelling, and I lost December as well. Not only that, until February I was working on a JS Bach piece. Having dropped that fiasco and picked up the less calcitrant CPE Bach, I’m really pleased I even feel like recording this exam. Passing it would be * chef’s kiss *