ABRSM – Concerto in C Minor

20241006 Practice Diary

I’m on a 35 day streak for piano practice. Some of those practice sessions have been short – Thursday’s was 5 whole minutes. Nevertheless, it’s been good.

It’s my longest daily practice schedule since I turned my attention back to playing the piano about 18 months ago. I’m happy. I’m up to the Ruby Level on Tonic and I don’t see any blocking points between here and 3 November so fingers crossed that I make 50 days soon. After that, November and December will be challenging.

This week, no sight reading to report – I need to sort out my piano magazines and ensure I have consistent access to them. The main new sight reading I did was for the pieces I am preparing which is sort of okay but not quite what I want for sight reading practice. Most recently, Ballade No 1 which I started last week.

For the main four exam pieces there was progress on all of them, not enough in two cases, but a better than zero effort.

Rameau. I can play all of this through, not exactly error free and it’s currently at a slow enough speed that it takes a good chunk of practice time. Of the four pieces, it is the longest in terms of music to be played but it is also the piece I am closest to performance ready with. I have not memorised all of it; there is a section of page 4 left to internalise, and that section was proving very slow to read last week, can now be played at a speed that is consistent with most of ther rest of it. I’m working on speeding up the opening A section and the number of errors I am making there is dropping radically. I’m playing it a lot more consistently. I continue to have some issues with leaps and stretches through the end of page 1, good lot of page 2. But again, far better than last week. It is entirely possible that by the time I have to do this exam, I will hate this piece for the simple reason it has come on so much faster than the others

Debussy: opening section is coming along nicely. I love some of the sound textures, wish my fingers would behave more efficiently. I’m well into page two; there is one stretch that I don’t much like and it is impacting on my certainty about being able to play it smoothly for a while yet. It’s going to come in handy for similar issues in the Liszt piece which I’ll discuss below. Most of page 1 is memorised, not yet quite enough for me not to need to read it. For the future, I suspect the Henle layout is better than the Editions Peters layout.

Some of the sounds in the Debussy remind me of bells; and I suppose that’s reasonable if you are in an armchair in a country village with a church nearby in bucolic France; I’ve no idea whether he did that but it’s the impression it builds within me. Assuming no major accidents, I think this might be done before Christmas or early in the new year. I may have to find public concerts to play it and the Rameau at.

Liszt: This is slow going. I’m not sure why – I think part of it is the rhythmic structure; part of it are the moves of the lefthand around the keyboard. I’m not going to say I’m struggling with it but it is not making as much progress as I would like. It’s not consistent. It’s easier to read than the Debussy but harder to learn. It’s a three page piece and from what I can see, not as many repeats, if any, as JP Rameau has gifted me. I need to set down and seriously think about how to approach this. What I will say is that the chunk of regular playing has expanded but I am still very much confined to page 1 and will relisten and chop it up with a view to starting some other parts of the piece in parallel so that eventually, once I have the start mastered, I will have a lot of the rest of it done. I read through some of page 2 during the week; it’s more interesting but it includes a section which is highly counter intuitive for me; that is the section where the melody comes out through the left hand. This, in one way, is a key reason why I want to learn the piece. It gives me challenges and will provide me with input for the next section.

Rachmaninoff: this is really slow going and I suspect this is the piece that will delay the entire endeavour. On paper, it’s straightforward. I’m not going to say I am a fan of the triplets but for the most part, they aren’t enforcing (yet) any disturbing polyrhythms. But I consistently get them wrong. Mathematically they are fine; aurally I am fighting with them. I love Rachmaninoff so I am not in a mood for giving up on this and replacing it with either Tchaikovsky or Chopin. I could do June by Tchaik as a self selection (I don’t really like the option of January which is on the syllabus for 2025-26. So I am taking this quite slowly and assuming that at some stage, this will start to slide into place.

I did not touch Chopin 17/4 this week so no news on that.

Outside the syllabus, Chopin Ballade No 1. I have no idea what this sounds like to an outsider, and I am at the very beginning of a really long journey here but I love this so much. My initial target is to deal with the first two or so minutes but there are a few challenges to go with this on page 2. We will see.

20240929 Practice log

Another week has passed, I’m up a level in the practice gamification on Tonic. I’m not sure I am in the best frame of mind to be writing this.

Anyway, in summary I am making slow and painful progress and I am spending a lot of time on the piano. I feel like I should be getting more return on my time investment but i am not, so there.

a) Rameau. I can now, with some difficulty, play it through in 9 minutes. This is twice as long (at least) as I should be able to play it. But I am making progress, and three quarters of it is memorised, and the last page is coming together. I am not sure when it will be done but technically it’s at polish level, it just needs a manic amount of polishing.

b) Debussy. I made progress on this. Page 1 is almost memorised, and it’s reading quickly. I’ve moved forward with it to I dunny, around 20% of page 2. The piece is printed on 5 pages for the Editions Peter edition, a little less on my Henle app. Plus point about the Peters print is that the paper is not bright white. But that being said, the Henle layout which is slightly denser, is also otherwise much easier to read. I must have a look at the app to see if I can adjust the page colour.

c) Rachmaninoff. I made some progress on this. Not a lot because I am struggling with reading the rhythm (yo, all those triplets). But it’s further on than it was last week which is the least I can always hope for.

d) Liszt. I am not totally happy with this although I am doing more of it. I’m not happy with how page 1 is coming along – some of it is beautiful, some of it is beautiful, the two beautiful bits played together are an infuriating shipwreck and I’m very frustrated with that. I have started into parts of page 2, the harder parts are actually easier to play, the easier parts are not easier to play. I am hoping that progress there will eventually see the whole piece knit together.

e) Chopin 17/4. Oh yeah, you did not know about this. In fact, because I’m deepl frustrated with the romantic pieces this time round, and because I had set aside a decent amount of time to do this, I decided to add this Chopin piece to the mix and when the time comes, select two of the three to play for list B and List D. It seems (so far) more accessible than the Liszt. I’m not qualified to compare to the Rachmaninoff to be honest – the construction is so different between the later Romantic and the earlier stars, as it were. I like some of the chords in this though and I will see how it goes

f) Ballade No 1, Chopin. I want to pick up some of the opening structure of this and it’s somewhat readable (more than the Liszt COnsolation No 2 that I’m struggling with at the moment). So I touch this from time to time.

Practice wise, I come home from work, I eat, and I do some bits and pieces around the house and then I practice for between 60 and 90 Minutes. Today so far it was a little over two hours. I started with Reverie because I find the Rameau is too engaging and the other pieces are getting little attention. They all need more attention.

I’m reasonably certain I can bring these pieces up to performance level for the simple reason that while I cannot see progress on a daily basis, I can see it on a weekly basis. What troubles me is that I have scheduled lack of practice time coming up for most of November and December. I just cannot avoid it. My workload is about to increase at work too. So while rationally I can do this, the truth is, today at least I miss a lot of the feeling good about it. I’m not very happy about this and I feel difficult inside. I do still play repertoire because I want to retain three of the 4 Grade 6 pieces I did – they are nice, people like them and most of them time, they aren’t a total car crash.

We will see.

20240922 Practice Diary

It’s sobering to think that we are almost at the end of September. We’re passing the midpoint where the days are longer than the nights and soon, winter will be here. It’s well dark by the time half past eight rolls around in the evening. In Brussels, however, we have a little more warmth than we could have expected; it’s been 24 degrees most days this last week.

But I have been practising. Not so much sight reading because I haven’t pieces set up to be reading. If I ever have time to do this, I’d like to put together a sequence of pieces that you can find in IMSLP, create a giant pdf of all those pieces and share it as a sight reading resource. So, no major updates. No new Felix Le Couppey, for example. It’s a pity but I have a new copy of PIaniste at least so there should be some material there for me to take a look at in the coming few days.

So, on to what I’ve been doing this week which is mostly, Les Cyclopes by Jean-Philippe Rameau. There is something quite compelling about practising this (let’s not call what I inflict on the piece anything as positive as “playing it”. In summary this is:

50% memorised
100% read-through
End to End playable
with a lot of errors.

This piece has some interesting challenges, namely some leaps that I am sure are much much easier on the harpsichord than on the piano. There is also some what I call syncopation but probably has a different technical term somewhere along the line. These have been the biggest challenges. For the second lot of syncopation, I have given this many hours of my life. I will die early because of this but I can only say it would make the other two rounds easier (which it did). This piece, these few bars, when I get them right, it is a source of complete shock to me, so much so that it knocks me out of kilter for the oncoming express train of left hand leaps. I find them infuriating because they are not hard as such; they are harmonically logical, I listen to 8 different recordings of this and they are all in my ear, But my brain glitches. On this YouTube short you can see a lot of evidence of the errors and the glitches.

Opening part of Les Cyclopes, JP Rameau as murdered by Treasa

The thing is, I didn’t expect to be at this stage with any of the four pieces by now. In particular, given that I had such a complete failure with a Bach invention last year (but not with his son’s Solfeggio), I expected this to take me until about March next year. But I expect to be polishing this sooner rather than later provided I miss no practice for the next six weeks (I will lose half of November and most of December so I will have delays anyway).

That being said; listening to the recording has been helpful; it feels a lot faster playing it than it sounds when I listen back. I’m also not happy with the expression but there, I don’t have a lot of guidance. The pieces, originally written for harpsichord have no dynamic markings but the low Ds are eventually quite marcato courtesy of the need to jump well over an octave angling upwards. I’m not alone on this – you can listen to almost any recording of the piece on piano except maybe Grigory Sokolov.

The recordings vary in length from 2 minutes forty five to over four minutes which indicates there’s a wide variation in thinking around the pace of the piece. I don’t see the need to aim for the fastest rendition of it – I’m not sure I could cleanly get all of the scaled or arpeggiated sections, the later of which turn up 2 via the repeats as do the scales which are somewhat faster again. When I play this I want it to be crisp and clean. Close observers will acknowledge there’s quite a bit of work to be done on that front at least. I also want to see about playing this on an acoustic piano soon just to get a feel for avoiding mud. I play this without pedals and I haven’t seen any reason to change that yet. Need really to memorise it though because frankly, the page turns are killing me.

I’ve been practising up to 2 hours days this week and that’s mostly been the Cyclopes so for the other pieces, there isn’t a whole pile to report. I don’t have stats to back this up but I think the piece that got most attention beside Rameau was Reverie by Claude Debussy. I only started it last week so really very early stages here. I’m struggling to memorise it but find it remarkably easy to read (so far at least). The Edition Peters issue which I am learning from has 5 pages and let’s say I’m about 20% of the way through that for play through. The page turn from 1 to 2 isn’t really all that pleasant tbh so I’m going to take a look at the Henle edition of it which I think is on my iPad (if not, it will be very shortly after the iPad is charged).

For the Rachmaninoff and the Liszt, they have not received a lot of attention; neither got played at all today but get at least touched. For the Liszt, I am not very happy with how I play some of page one – it’s not the fireworksist fireworks that Franz has been able to offer the discerning and uniquely talented with more time to practise than I, but it has its challenges in terms of ensuring a legato sound (I feel that Claude has some unpleasant surprises in store here too) and I’d like to smooth those transitions over. Even the pedal isn’t able to hide the lack of cantabile which afflicts me here. If I’ve feeling brave, I may record/publish some of those efforts next week, but only if I am feeling brave and can drag myself away from JP Rameau, mercurial 18th century love of my life at the moment.

For Rachmaninoff, the approach here is very much more slow because as is his wont, it’s in D flat which is totally not my favourite key in the whole world. My target is to get the first 8 bars under control sometime soon, again, I will need to cheat on JP Rameau to do that but since I want to be able to submit an exam sometime next year, it’s going to have to be done.

In the background, I continue to play Mendelssohn 19b/6 and SPE Bach Solfeggietto regularly with the occasional visit to Rebikov, all of which I would like to keep in my repertoire. It’s not consistently successful but I do find it good to finish off a practice session with one of the three of them so that I can finish on a reasonably high note as opposed to misery caused by mercurial French composers down the years.

20240914 Practice Log

According to Tonic, I am on a practice streak of 14 days. I find this difficult to believe because it doesn’t feel like I’ve touched the piano every day for two whole weeks. On the other hand, I was on the Silver League last week, made it [just about] up to the Gold League and I’m leading that now so I will definitely pass to the next one which is either Diamond or Platinum. I can’t remember. I also finally accumulated the crazy number of points I needed to move from Level 7 to Level 8 on their scale. So on that gamification front, looking good.

On the music front, where are we, really? I’m prepping Grade 8 for ABRSM, so that bit hasn’t changed anyway. Until some day this week this meant Rameau and Liszt. As of the day before yesterday, there is a bit of Debussy and Rachmaninoff in the mix now. So roll call on the pieces:

Rameau Les Cyclopes: this is moving forward very slowly. But it is moving forward and I feel hopeful that a lot of it will be done by Christmas this year. I’ve solved the fingering issue I mentioned here. Now the question is internalising the notes so that I can play them at the required pace (it’s funny how fast I come to a grinding halt here). Mostly I spend time touching out the notes in line with a metronome – I’d film this except this morning I was practicing in my night dress – to ensure that I get them at an even pace. I’m happy with this.

Liszt Consolation No 2: I like to think this will enable me to play Brahms 118 at some point in the future – for some reason it gives me a similar vibe, I don’t know why. Anyway, this too is moving forward, albeit more slowly than I expected. I have some major challenges coming up when I pass through this pass but truly the problems I have are the memorisation issues.

Debussy Reverie: In a fit of pique on Thursday night and against the advice of my inner teacher who seems to feel I should get more of Les Cyclopes and Consolation No 2 under control before siphoning off practice time to the French and the Russians amongst my aspirations, I pulled out Reverie. Page one is not very difficult to read so why not. I’m happy I did (take that, inner teacher). The challenges are, needless to mention, in the musicality and with the timing here and there. There is a polyrhythm I need to get under control. But I like the feeling of it, and while it seems counterintuitive, I’m starting with the metronome early here.

Rachmaninoff Moment Musical 16/5: This comes with a lot of baggage. It is in the key of D flat. It is a neverending train of triplets on the left hand. There are few if any impossible chords to play (unique for the composer in question). The target set for this for the next few weeks is short. It is 5 whole bars. There is a chord split between right and left hands which is just soul destroyingly beautiful to hear.

On the pieces front, so good. I’ve also been doing a lot of sight reading but I’m going to split that out to a different entry.

All in all, it’s been a good week. I’m quite happy with it. The target date for Grade 8 was initially set at the end of 2025 because I thought I’d be doing the older syllabus and the exams had to be done by 31 December. But since I am doing the newer syllabus, this is no longer necessary. In part, I gave extra time because I was skipping the Grade 7 exam [didn’t much like the syllabus when I reviewed them and anyway I had other targets on the diploma front]. I’m wondering how much of the extra time I will need. It’s quite confusing because when I sit at the piano, I don’t feel it’s going particularly quickly – my most recent comparison was the Solfeggietto which went really fast compared to the other 3 pieces on the grade 6 = but against that, it’s making the kind of progress that suggests with a good run, I could see this come in before next summer. Being realistic though, this won’t happen because I will miss most of December and a couple of weeks in November as well. That being said, the practice time is moving in the general direction of 90 minutes. This is reasonsable I think if 4 pieces are on the schedule.

Okay, that’s it for this.

Repertoire selection, reflections and more

One of the things I do when I finish one exam – okay, it looks like I have done tonnes of them but really I have not – is allow myself to look forward to Exam N+1. In practical terms, this means that when I finished Grade 5, I could select pieces for Grade 8 and now that Grade 6 is done, the next up is ARSM.

I don’t have a teacher at the moment so there is an element of suggesting that maybe I should wait. But I have one very clear criteria about pieces that I prepare for exams and it is this: I have to like them. Thus, I’m going to choose them, and while I’ll take general advice like “cover several time periods”, I’ll not be told what to learn to play. I’m 52 years old I don’t have all that much time to be lived. You can see the current state of affairs in my exam planning here under Goals and Objectives.

The ARSM recital length is 30 minutes. Assuming I go for the highest choices on my list so far, eg, some Brahms, Fauré, Gershwin and Ravel, I have accounted for 21 minutes. So I will look at adding possibly one of Granados’ Goyescas too. I will still need to find something vaguely Baroque and I probably can’t escape Bach this time. Or possibly Scarlatti.

One of the approaches I take there is to just listen to the options. There may some nice things in WTC that appeal, there may be some Haydn. The issue is the time balance. I can’t give 12 minutes to a Bach piece I don’t actively dislike but don’t really want to learn when Pavane Pour Un Enfant Defunt is there and has been on my learning list forever.

In any case, for both Grade 8 and ARSM, learning playlists are being put together and this will hopefully allow me to identify a 5 minute piece that demonstrates depth.

20240824 Practice Diary

It’s been a while since I’ve been practising, sadly. When I got to Hamburg I had not played in about 3 weeks. But I am getting back there this week and what am I working on.

Liszt Consolation Number 2. This is a gorgeous piece of Accessible Liszt for which the left hand starts on a half between the first and second beat. It’s not a polyrhythm but I am finding it a bit counter intuitive. There are moments it comes right for me and I think god, how can I create something so beautiful, and then there are moments it does not.

Rameau Les Cyclopes. I love this and the first page of it is mostly a joy to work with. It’s not listenable (sorry to my Tonic stream audience) as a performance yet as there is a pesky arpeggio in it which must surely have been easier on a harpsichord. So this is very much the subject of slow practice and I need to start putting time in on metronome practice with arpeggios in general.

Repertoire: I keep practising three of the pieces I did for Grade 6 as they are appropriate for, inter alia, playing Steinways in piano stores. Those pieces were by Mendelssohn, Rebikov and CPE Bach. CPE Bach does not work most mornings for some reason and yet it’s the one I use to warm up mostly.

Sight reading: this week I took two pieces from the issue of Pianist sitting on my piano (well one of them =- I have two). It’s the August-September Edition and the two pieces were:

Aria by Antonio Fragoso. He was a young composer when he died – 1897 to 1918 so this is basically late Romanticish. It’s a pretty piece in Gminor which makes extensive use of the sustain pedal. Worth a look if you are looking for sightreading practice. Pianist marked it Intermediate
Eastern Promise by Melanie Spanswick. This is in A Minor with one or two rhythm tests in it for all that it is a short piece. Again, good sightreading practice if this is a weak point you are trying to fix.

Neither of these pieces are on my 40 pieces challange which has pretty much fallen apart. With 4 months left in the year, I will need to scale that done and reassess how I manage it as a project for next year (or I could star the project a new this week which which case I am 5% in. I will reflect on that the next time I am staring out the window of a bus. At some point, I need to write a bit on sight reading, how I feel about it, and what I want to be able to do.

I did no scales this week. I am a very bad person.

Meanderings

It’s the last Saturday in July and to be honest, I’m not really sure where this year went, and especially, where the last six weeks or so. I have piano time booked in a couple of hours time and I haven’t been practising so nothing much is going to come out of that.

The opening ceremony of the Olympics was last night and we were gifted the sight of Alexandre Kantorow playing Ravels in what has to be the worst rain storm I’ve seen in Paris. My heart went out to the organisers, and yet…it was a superb ceremony which touched on loads of facets of French life, and not merely the ones thought “worthy”. The right wing are blowing fuses this morning.

I’m not sure what audience I write for here – I don’t push the site much – it’s kind of a place for me to do social media without the social bit, I guess. Lately, Reddit has been depressing in ways that it’s hard to respond to without being heavily sarcastic. So many people want to be able to play the piano; so few of them willing to actually work at it. Yesterday I came across a thread from someone who can’t play, doesn’t want to learn, will not engage a teacher. Bet someone some money they could learn the opening movement of the Moonlight Sonata without lessons, without a teacher.

The main issue I have with people like this is not so much that they have stupid ideas – I still want to learn to snowboard after all – it’s that they think anyone who can play the piano has an obligation to be polite about what is essentially a very impolite question. There are a lot of people who want to play the piano, are willing to put in work but still won’t pay teachers and expect the online community to teach them for free. I don’t see the likes of Sam Altman and Elon Musk living on vapor but any number of rich people in the tech sector expect other sectors to implode and provide work for free. I’m reading Chip War at the moment which isn’t helping my mood.

Anyway.

My Grade 6 Certificate arrived this morning. It still has HMS Queen as patron on the certificate which feels a bit funny given I grew up in a republic and don’t really like this whole inherited power thing at all. Plus she is dead. But the certificate made me happy when it arrived yesterday. Oh, yes I ordered it, and yes I knew it was coming. But…

I needed it to show up. I get mixed results, especially from people not close to me, when it comes up that I’m back doing piano exams. Why would I bother, people ask.

It’s the tone of voice that really doesn’t help. It can be dismissive. People are impressed that I might play every day (oops to that lately) but the idea that I might align it with a goal….it’s problematic. Rationally, I know I can ignore this but often, it doesn’t do my somewhat fragile self esteem much good.

I’m always delighted when people tell me they are starting any project. It can be further education, or it can be tactile, like building a Lego piece, or training for a triathlon. There’s a point at which it’s important to have goals for yourself. If you’re minded to ask why someone would bother doing something you don’t value, remember they might value it differently.

20240628 Practice Diary

I wasn’t near a piano for around half of this week, so here we are. Not a lot of practice done. But to be fair, I’m at the beginning of my new cycle so it’s not totally tragic.

This week, I started Rameau’s Les Cyclopes. Of the Grade 8 pieces I have chosen, it is my favourite, and the one I really want to learn. It’s got some challenges but I think once I’ve mastered the ones on the first page, the others should fall easily enough. I’m going to give it a couple of weeks on its own, and then, from around mid July onwards, I will add one of the more recent compositions.

Probably the Rachmaninoff, as it’s in D flat, and I have been working on the very nice scales to go with it. I would like if some sort of shape was on the two of them by Christmas and by around September I will start either the Liszt or the Debussy.

In addition to the travelling, it’s been swelteringly hot in Brussels. It hasn’t been totally pleasant to play in. I’m still waiting for the Grade 6 certificate to come through, to mark this year’s second major achievement (it’s less than a year since I put Grade 5 theory away).

In other news I got denied posting access to the ABRSM Exams group on FaceBook. This might have been the biggest achievement of the week. Apparently I didn’t agree to the rules. I don’t remember even getting a request to do so, so *shrugs*. It isn’t life essential at the moment.

Practice Diary 20240622

I’m on a 29 day streak!!!!!! Tomorrow I get another badge in Tonic provided I play in the morning. This is handy because I don’t have a piano for Monday and Tuesday and most of Wednesday.

So, having finished Grade 6, and pondering on what I would do, in the end I did some work on a piece of music by Fazil Say and then switched to Rameau’s Les Cyclopes. The latter is on my Grade 8 schedule and although I hadn’t planned to start that until I came back from Ireland next week, the truth is I could not stay away from that – I have really been looking forward to that piece and I wanted to get started.

So I’ve broken it into pieces and I am working on two pieces of it to start with (maybe 30 minutes in). I struggled with the Fazil Say piece in contrast, made less progress.

When I decided to drop the JS Bach piece in February, I chose the CPE Bach piece because I needed something that would feed into the Rameau. This seems to be very sensible as a lot of what I need to be able to do with the Rameau came out of the Solfeggio too. The primary skill I am missing are efficient baroque trills. I have a trills course via ToneBase and YouTube is probably swimming in them.

Outside that, I’ve been maintaining the Grade 6 pieces – all four of them are handy party pieces.

On the technique front, with the lovely Mr Rachmaninoff on my to be learned list in the next year, the D flat scales are in.

Around practice organisation, I’ve managed to maintain the streak of daily practice by guaranteeing 5 minutes every morning before I go to work. For the last month or so, that was CPE Bach time but now, I think it’ s scales time. I’ve already noted that I have some fun with the D Flat stuff and then I also need to look at some of the D minors. I’m inclined to separate that away from the Grade 8 planning aside from supporting the keys of the 4 pieces I am learning. The breakdown for the next few weeks will be Random stuff, Rameau, and some technique work.

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.