Reflections – Page 3 – Concerto in C Minor

Piano Magazines

I’m kind of fascinated by piano magazines. I regularly pick up Pianist if I can, and here in Belgium, Pianiste (in French) turns up every once in a while. I’m keeping an eye out for something in Dutch. However, a couple of weeks ago I picked up two German magazines and they differed from the French and English publications in one very critical way and that was the lack of sheet music. Neither German magazine provided scores.

In itself, this is not such a bad thing (although there tends to be a really nice choice of music and guidance for same in the French and English magazines) but it was unusual. On the other hand, Germany seems to have a lot of sheet music shops and there is always IMSLP.

One of the articles which caught my eye in one of them was an article on the place of the piano in the life and writing of Jane Austen. For me that was interesting: it mentioned that [like me] she played a lot of Scottish and Irish dance melodies, gave an overview of where the piano cropped up in the novels. Of course, having more or less learned Pride & Prejudice by heart, you cannot fail to see the place of the piano in the society of that book, on several levels, Lizzie Bennett’s tendency not to practice, her sister Mary’s desperation to practice and show off, and of course, the piano bought by Mr Darcy for his sister. But equally, in the Emma, there is the question of the piano delivered to Jane Fairfax. Writing of that nature is not something I happen across very often. Very much more tends to be on current pianists and repertoire, so some essays on the place of piano in society is really interesting.

The other highlight was the vast number of release reviews which, where possible, includes the model of the chosen piano. I’ll do a piece of data analysis on that later.

I’m interested in any more piano magazines in EN, FR, DE, NL or ES, all of which I have a fighting chance of reading.

Whither Einaudi

I spend a certain amount of time on the internet like every young woman of my age and lately a good chunk of that is on r/piano. Sometimes it’s interesting and occasionally, it feeds my soul with new music. But there are recurring themes and one of those themes is the value of Ludovico Einaudi’s music.

These discussions tend to be polarising. It is clear that an element of the music world seems to despise what he does; they have the right. Taste is very subjective. You see a similar reaction to one of the key pieces from the movie Amelie as well; it’s obvious that many people look down on it. I understand that people might not like the music. I don’t like Bartok and my tolerance for Prokofiev can be a bit limited on the piano side although there is some orchestral stuff which is mindblowing.

But here’s the point: it’s one thing not to like music and quite another thing to look down on the composer. Einaudi is dismissed as too simple, too simplistic, not very sophisticated often by people who deign not to play any of his music. I tend to disagree. In one respect, Einaudi touches many, many more people playing the piano that many classical interpreters of the time.

I’ve often felt that the critic minded world of art, writing and music have missed a key factor in the objective of art, writing and music – they do not exist in a vacuum separate from an audience. I will freely admit that I can sit alone to the world at a piano and play music to my hearts content but ultimately if I want to do it professionally, I need something that a lot of people are going to buy. My audience is never going to be the critics who take a more gate keeping approach to music.

Meanwhile, we constantly bemoan how few people are interested in learning music. It’s ironic really.

Einaudi has made the piano very popular. His sheet music is selling. His concerts are selling out. His music is touching the hearts of a lot of people. If your argument against that is that his audience is unsophisticated, then I think you are somehow missing the point. Music remains popular over 100s of years because it taps into people’s hearts. For this reason I’m not sure it’s safe to say he will be completely forgotten. People’s times come and go.

I haven’t learned any of his pieces through. I’ve worked on one (Una Mattina) from time to time; it’s readable and it feels beautiful to play. I’ve heard one or two classical pianists acknowledge that their views on his music started to change when they actually started playing his music. I find that interesting. It suggests sometimes that the self styled sophisticates who look down on modern piano music that is targeted at the masses are perhaps in themselves not adequately sophisticated to understand the appeal of music that is targeted at being heard and enjoyed rather than being challenging.

One of the things I love about Tiersen’s music for the film Amelie is even today – twenty plus years after the movie came out – it is inspiring teenagers to play the piano.

I kind of think that’s more important than forcing Mikrokosmos on kids who don’t want to learn it. The objective of learning music is not to be the greatest pianist on the planet; there isn’t ever going to be one despite the regular arguments I see again on r/piano. It’s about giving people pleasure in the activity so that they do it all their life. There are health benefits to playing an instrument especially as people get older.

It’s not different to sport: disregarding the kids who are not going to win your school medals means you are failing those kids who need healthy habits for their lives.

In this context, I wonder how much more credibility Einaudi might have with the criterati if he was just less successful.

On the administration side of things

I bought some more sheet music yesterday; all from Henle so all with the distinctive blue covers, so I will skip the photos for this.

Brahms Opus 76
Brahms Opus 119
Liszt Sonata in B minor
Brahms Ballades

I have bought a crazy amount of sheet music and that doesn’t include the pieces I also pull from IMSLP to whom I intend to give some money soon. I know deep down that until I get past the necessary block I have with one of the exam pieces I am learning, I will not do anything more than tip away at bits of these collections. I bought the Liszt Sonata – a piece I never expect to even start learning in its completeness simply because I love the second movement.

But it’s nice to dream and I Feel No Guilt about this. However.

I need to tidy the sheet music into some sort of usable system so that I can find it more easily. This involves bookshelf reorganisation. I dread it, I already have piles of actual books around the place. The oldest sheet music I possess is in Ireland and the oldest that I have here is my copy of Rach II which I bought in about 1988. So it’s like, 35 years old. I take care of my music and even my exam books are in pretty decent nick given that they cost one or two pounds also around 35 years ago variously. Yes I know it seems crazy that someone working grade 4 or 5 also bought Rach 2. But I like dreaming of the possible and I’m never going to forgive the people who focus on how hard something will be instead of how motivated I am. I still can’t play bits of it but I totally get lost in it when I am working on pieces of it just for the pure pleasure of doing so. The journey matters not the end. Anyway, I digress. The Liszt cropped up on Igor Levit’s latest album; I have quite a few bits of Liszt that were bought to be read rather than played. A bit like Islamey by Balakirev. I’m not even going to try. Okay. Back to the objective.

I have a mix of music: a lot of so called classical – basically written 100 or more years ago – and more modern stuff like Tiersen, Arnalds and Einaudi. I’m going to write about Einaudi after I am done with this. I bought mag boxes to store them in because they are mostly not hardback and the music can be fragile and when you don’t have a lot of it, mag boxes keep it somewhat safe. Now I am thinking that the alphabet is going to have to be my friend and that I will just have to sort that way. But I want to keep a mag box aside for the kind of loose single piece sheets and also for the Grade 6 and Grade 8 piano pieces. Currently the 6 is cluttering my piano. I want to declutter my piano but that’s going to be challenging as I’ve all sorts of tools and notes there. I also have the free stuff that came with the piano (stuff that includes Burgmuller and Chopin plus a couple of collections of Various). So there needs to be a collections section as well. I also tended to sort by publisher which was fine when most of it was Henle. Most of it still is but I’d prefer to sort by composer now that a bit more Barenreiter is coming in and I bought the Chopin Institute’s issue of the Chopin Sonatas.

So I’m writing about doing this instead of doing it which is…an interesting bit of procrastination.

Music of my childhood

RIAM Books of the mid1980s — Music books of my childhood

I was looking for a piece of music I learned to play when I was about 11 or 12 and I knew some of the exam books I used at the time were still at home. I even knew when where they were. The piece of music was a Sonatina and some research around exam organisations didn’t turn up anything when I searched IMSLP. So the piece was in the grade 2 book. It was a Sonatina in G by Thomas Attwood. You can find the music here (youtube sorry). I’m also interested in a Sonatine piece that was on the Grade III book.

Here’s what was in those books

Grade 2 List A

Sonatina in G – Attwood
A Little Song – Kabelevsky
Mazurka – Berkovich

Grade 2 List B

Sonatine (2nd movement) Haslinger
Dolly’s Complaint – Franck
Serenade Andalouse – Poot

Grade 3 List A

Sonatine (2nd movement) – Pleyel
Pentatonic Tune – Bartók
First Loss = Schumann

Grade 3 List B

Sonatina – Hook
A Little Song – Khachaturian
Gay Story – Shostakovich

Grade 4 List A

Sonatine – Dussek
Bagatelle – Beethoven (A flat)
Knight Errant – Furze

Grade 4 List B

Sonata in C – Mozart
Novelette – Khabalevsky
Tuesday’s Child – Bennett

Looking at the list, what strikes me is that Khabalevsky turned up a couple of times.

I’m reasonably sure that I did Grade 5 as well but the book was nowhere to be found, I don’t remember what colour the cover was but I am reasonably sure that Fur Elise was on the list. If anyone from the RIAM from nearly 40 years is still knocking around, I’d be interested to know.

Notebooks

When I was doing some research around the prelude in C major from the first Well Tempered Clavier, I came across a reference to Anna Magdalena’s Notebook. It’s a collection of music which JS Bach put together for his wife and it includes the prelude in C major.

I liked the idea, and also I own some of these things:

More baby sketchbookd — They are around A6 sized. Small. Anyway.

There are lots of clips of pieces of music which I like – parts of Tchaikovsky’s 2nd piano concerto, for example, elements of the piano parts of Rachmaninoff’s Sonata for Cello and Piano (I really want to include mention of the piano because it isn’t merely a backdrop to the stringed instrument here) and there is an extraordinary opening for one of the Schuman violin sonatas which I came across in a very old clip of Helene Grimaud:

A very young Helene Grimaud working on Schumann

I like the idea of a notebook full of extracts I like, and might even try to learn if they don’t try to injure me (looking at you, Sergey). But I thought the A6 notebooks were a little too small for that (I fancy being the type of person who has a notebook to sketch out compositional ideas while waiting for dinner to be served which is why I have the A6 notebooks). So I got this.

Music sketchbook A4 — A4 Henle Notes sketchbook for music.

BR: Grand Obsession, Perri Knize

I spent some time lately searching for books about pianos; I’ll be honest and say I was hunting for the piano equivalent of a coffee table book but the problem with looking for piano books is that you have to sort through a lot of piano sheet music. In itself, this is not totally bad – it means the sheet music exists – on the other hand, you need to be lucky. I found Grand Obsession on several lists of “Top N Books about pianos”. I’d read the other common candidates, namely The Piano Shop on the Left Bank (one of the best books ever), Play It Again, etc. I have Forgotten Siberian Pianos somewhere which I need to dig out. But I had not heard of this Grand Obsession and the premise sounded right up my street, as in I have found a German piano that intrigues me, that I am considering buying.

So I ordered it from Amazon, as you do when you know full well none of the bookshops around you will have it. Trust me; they don’t. And I was impatient.

The premise is enticing: middle aged woman falls for a “rare” German piano, buys it, ships it from New York to somewhere else, I think it was Minnesota and from then on, the piano displays its true temperament. On paper, this could be me, without the American stuff. I have found a rare German piano (No inverted commas here to some extent), and I am middle aged with wild cravings for salt and sugar and mad needs for naps on a Friday afternoon. My relationship to the piano is not that similar though. I did play on and off most of the time from when I was 20, there was no loaded conversation about what instrument I would learn as my parents were open to most things within reason. We had a piano at home. I played in one shape or another from the age of 8. I decorated the piano when I was 5. I had lessons. So, hmmm. Maybe this idea that I might identify with this was a bit naive.

I’m going to say that the book is clearly written by someone who can write, but after that, there isn’t a lot that I liked about it. It left me utterly cold about the piano world in the US. A good chunk of the start f the book was around the hunt for a piano, and how amazing the Piano World forums were. I understand it but I also found it a touch tedious. The advice was to pretty much play every piano she could find and “she would know”. Eventually, the piano showed up in New York. She did not live in New York. The piano was a Grotrian Steinweg and from what I can gather, it was a new one. It seemed to be the source of a monumental amount of drama: played beautifully the first time it was played; was the subject of arguments because it was more than Knize had budgeted. 9-11 changed things apparently, both in Knize (we live for the moment) and the piano shop (we need the money). I’ve whole mixed feelings about this.

I understand the falling in love with a piano. I’ve never met a piano sales engineer who tried to sell me a piano I genuinely have not budgeted for. So the whole conversation about eventually buying/financing the piano left me totally meh. After that, we get into the army of technicians. Problem: “piano does not play the way it did the first time I played it months before 9-11”. Solution: several hundred pages away.

It proceeded not to play the way it did the first time she played it for most of the rest of the book. The sole interesting part of the book for me was the visit to the Grotrian factory (something I would not mind doing in general). The long discussions with the technicians she got to look at the piano, the piano dealer, they wore me out. Early in the book, one technician said it was a question of tuning. The piano was fixed by it being tuned by him a particular way near the end of the book. I struggle to understand why I had to read through 370 pages include a discussion of Rudolf Steiner in the section around trying to understand the science about why some people are affected by some pianos. That was depressing.

I can’t understand the reviews I have seen about this book. Some wisely suggest it is for lovers of pianos. Not this one anyway but then since I don’t like Bartók my credentials are in doubt.

Lucid yet lyrical, analytical yet deeply affecting

Quite. I don’t quite agree with the Washington Post

I don’t especially recommend reading this. I was deeply frustrated by the descriptions of what technicians were doing to the piano. Maybe it’s because I grew up in Europe and of course it is different here, but I would not be happy to see technicians doing what they were doing to the hammers on that piano. I didn’t feel on the same journey in terms of a dream piano. It’s well written. It is somewhat of a fairy story. It is too close and too wrong for me. Other people clearly enjoyed it. Not me.

The learning period of a piece

I’ve been working a piece of music lately – one of Mendelssohn’s Gondellieder – I’ve already written about it here – and in the context of some content I have seen on the question of exam preparation and general repertoire learning, I want to comment some discussions around how long it should take you to learn a piece of music. This piece has taken longer than I would like and there are a couple of reasons for this. I intend to figure out a way to do a youtube video on this later.

I tend to think a lot of questions like this come from adult learners with not a lot of confidence. I seem parallel questions from other people who “played until they had to give up for practical/academic reasons” about 20 years ago and are concerned it is too late to pick it up again. Is it really gone?

Chris Maene Piano Collection — Here are some nice historic pianos to break the wall of text.

I’ve also been looking at online teachers who teach to one or other of the grading system. The teacher in question does excellent supporting youtube videos as does the teacher whose video about how long it should take to be learning pieces so arguably, they are arguing from experience and I am arguing from my reality which might be difficult. The Mendelssohn has taken longer than I expected from the outset and even so I am not in favour of blanket statements that the process of learning the notes and perfecting the delivery of said piece should only take 8 weeks for the most part provided you practice X time per day. Otherwise it is too hard. Alternatively, the idea that you should be able to prepare exam pieces in 4 to 6 weeks is equally ambitious.

Most people will, at some point will try a piece that is beyond them. I did that with Rach II at 15 and I put crazy time into parts of its second movement when I was 17. There are a lot of things which feed into the learning process but above all, it doesn’t matter how hard or how easy the process is (honestly, Bach’s WTC Prelude in C is baby level easy for me at this point and I will write about that some day as well).

In one respect, the most important thing for any pianist is to develop a consistent habit that works for them. It’s 9.50pm here as I write this – most evenings I am playing at this point for a while. We put a lot of weight on people’s shoulders. Do Hanon, do scales, do repertoire “in line with your ability” from whence a load of questions about what grade pieces are I guess as people try to work out what is in line with their ability.

For myself, I have a couple of criteria around the learning of the piece and they are as follows:

do I like the piece. I’m 50. The exam system put me through hell with pieces I hated when I was about 14 or so.
how long is it? The longer the paper, the longer to learn
What key is it in? D flat minor? Eh…we won’t be winning any races here.
Are there any obvious dragons here? Like big chords and polyrhythms?

Then I do the following:

Try to sight read it through, both hands together.
Break it into parts and identify initial targets.
Work through the individual parts, hands together for preference, but hands separately where it’s not an instinctive piece of music. Unless it’s Bach. Bach, really feel you should play hands together if at all possible.
Work through the transitions between parts. I cannot emphasise how important this is.

You cannot estimate how long this is going to take in terms of weeks. You need to put into context what your life is like – as an adult, it’s often stressful in a way around practice (often a lot of people around you don’t see why you would want to do this) and there are interruptions. Let’s take me with the Gondollied above.

Yes I like it, check

Two pages, so short, check. I mean, that Sonatina by Beethoven is longer I think.

Key: G minor, not completely comfortable but generally okay,. Scales ahoy

No obvious dragons

That word “obvious” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

What was interesting about the next steps is the site read went okay. The parts went okay. They mostly went hands together, slow. And then we got to the transitions between the broken down parts/sections. Specifically, we got to this across page 1 to 2 of the piece. (see sheet music here)

when I see that the movement from the last bar on page one to the first bar on page 2 has accounted for about 60% of the effort attribute to this over the last three months, I am not exaggerating. When I did the initial read through, when I did the dragon hunt, nothing. Not a squeak. Regularly playing it, however, revealed a fingering problem which alone caused issues.

But the point is, of the piece 4 pieces I have on my schedule at the moment, this is otherwise, not difficult. Absent those three bars, we are talking about a piece that I flew through.

Is this a kind of self justification? Well obviously? Does it counter two experienced teachers? To some extent, I think there is a difference between having a go at Ballade No 1 by Chopin (uhem) and running into an unexpected barrier on a much easier piece.

In a way, I think “how long to learn this” “how long should it take” questions miss a point. I love this piece of music, even after playing it 1000 times and regularly getting stuck at the start of page 2. I’m doing grade 6 purely because I was learning this piece anyway (but found 3 other pretty pieces). But there needs to be a question around the objectives. Why do you want to do this? Do you recognise the opportunity cost? What if we meet an unexpected problem, can we work around it? What represents success here? Why is there a deadline – are you not enjoying the process?

For me, in the background, it has taken considerably less time to master the parts, and the transitions are linked with memory issues (perimenopausal woman, and brainfog and I don’t worry about things taking a little longer for that reason) and for the other two pieces, the sight read was okay, there are a couple of dragons in terms of bass chords. The last remaining example is a Bach two part invention.

I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect someone to learn these four pieces in 4-6 weeks. I also don’t think it’s reasonable to state that if pieces cannot be learned in that time frame, you shouldn’t be learning them. What I do think, however, is that we should have honest discussions about what repertoire we are working on, why, where the pitfalls are and when we would like to be ready to do it.

Ultimately, learning something is a process and if you do not enjoy the process, you will never get out the other end either way. Artificial time limits are not going to solve that.

All the questions I don’t understand

Every once in a while, someone pops into r/piano on reddit and asks, often plaintively, where can they find music to play. Where can they find songs.

I struggle with this. There is Google. There are sheet music shops. There are such easy answers to this question that I can’t quite get why people are able to operate Facebook, or, even r/piano itself, but cannot find sources of music. There will be some answers here.

Mostly, though, people are looking for low effort, free. This is my sole understanding. They don’t just want the music from the movie Amelie. They also want it to be free. Bully for that – Yann Tiersen is not dead, and it’s not going to be free until 70 years after he is dead. The average redditor will be a long time waiting. However, helpfully, it’s all in this book here, and also, I’m pretty sure that people have put transcriptions up on musenote.

I own two books by Tiersen, this one (which I love because it has a chunk of stuff off other albums which I want to learn to play as well) and Eusa which has some stunning stuff on it. For modern composers, you can’t really go wrong with him or with Olafur Arnalds. Olafur occasionally makes some of his sheet music available via his social channels, he was selling one book (one beautiful book) while touring last year. He has a couple of other books on his online shop currently out of print which I covet. Also, go see him in concert.

I am very lucky to have a good sheet music shop near to where I live, linked to the fact that there is a music conservatory very near it. They clearly cover a giant chunk of the classical repertoire – and I will come to that in more detail in a moment – but they also have a significant amount of film music, games soundtrack music and especially music by Japanese composers (Howls Moving Castle has a bit to answer for). They will order anything you want. I will be honest – there is nothing more pleasant (or expensive) as browsing a sheet music shop. It’s worth supporting them.

For classical music, there are several routes to heaven. There is your local music shop.

However, if you are tied for cash or not prioritising the spending of your cash on sheet music, and you are into classical music and you have either an iPad or a printer, you are quids in. There is the IMSLP library (which you can also support with cold hard cash because they are not Facebook or even remotely trendy to techbros). This has a vast array of scans of sheet music for out of copyright and often, out of print classical music. This, by some distance, is the country mile cheapest way to get music. It is an incredibly precious project and also, if you subscribe to them, you have access to a library of streaming music. This is kind of handy.

On the online front, there are a couple of options. Several publishing houses have their own apps or shopfronts for online sheet sales – Henle is one and I use their app and like it. Schott I think also do online sales. Some of the online shops like Stretta (I live in Europe) and probably SheetMusicPlus will sell downloadable PDFs. NKODA has a subscription model. I can’t comment on it too much other than yes, it has a lot of music, especially music that is out of copyright, but I’m not totally onboard with the financial model and most of the music they have that I might want is either available in physical copy in my local music shop, can be ordered or can be ordered as a pdf from elsewhere. If you’re into modern pop and other more recent compositions it’s probably a better option.

For jazz, I can’t help you. I do know again that there are transcriptions of Keith Jarrett’s Cologne concert knocking around (great piece of music. You should give it a listen).

Most other stuff, I arrange for myself. Then people ask me for the sheet music which is challenging since I pretty much play it by ear, and it changes all the time.

Some much for that one. Moving onwards

I have been learning music for 3 months, and I can play Fantaisie Impromptu. What should I play next?

I have very real problems with this. I have particular problems with someone claiming that they started playing in January and here’s them playing Rachmaninoff prelude in C sharp minor and to put my cards on the table, I don’t believe them. It’s not possible to learn to read sheets adequately to play Rachmaninoff in that time, and when you scratch a little between the lines, very often, they didn’t learn to read sheets, they followed a key tutorial on Youtube.

I feel stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea here. Basically, I feel if you can play Fantaisie Impromptu competently, you have enough knowledge to know what you want to play next, or have enough interest in the piano to have some idea of the repertoire. There is, if you are interested, plenty of ways to find similarly scaled difficulty (go look the piece up on Henle’s catalogue, find out what they graded it as and look at other pieces of the same level) (if they have truly learned to read music, this will be a piece of case).

If you can’t, I kind of wish you wouldn’t post it on r/piano that you can. There are adults going through hell preparing Grade I exam pieces after 2 years of work and lying about what you have achieved, or how long it took you to achieve it, is completely demoralising, and also, it’s a bit amoral. But you do you on that front.

In the meantime, I am tempted to answer Islamey by Balakirev (it’s less painful than Rachmaninoff at first appearance) or Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Refer to the answer on sheet music above after that.

What piano should I buy?

Questions of this nature come with completely unreasonable budgets, usually. My personal view is this. There are several input questions:

How much money do I have, really?
How much space do I have, really?
No, go back and answer those two questions HONESTLY
What kind of music can I play now?
What kind of music do I want to play in the future?
Do you want to play daily?
Do you have neighbours who work nights?
Do you live in an apartment?

I could also ask, do you collect pianos? And Have you gone to the Piano World Forum.

Typically, if you have 200K and the space, I would say by a Steinway D. Try to play more than Twinkle Twinkle Little Star on it unless you’re going to do a set of variations that exceed Mozart’s efforts. For the rest of us in a different reality, I would suggest, you want to spend enough to make it a decent piano (so free looking for a good home is a risk) but not so much that you have anxiety attacks the next time the electricity bill comes in.

I bought a brand new Kawaii CA59 as I a) knew I wanted to buy a Kawai if I bought a digital from many tests, b) had a little bit of space for it in my office (by the time it arrived, I didn’t any more but I had space in my living room instead) c) some classical, lots of folk and pop d) more classical, lots of folk and pop e) yes but life innit f) no idea and would prefer not to find out the hard way by being yelled out and g) yes so headphones will be handy.

I will do a post on my life in pianos later.

What grade is this?

There is an ongoing debate about the value of ranked piano teaching systems. Places that don’t have them think they are batshit crazy. Places that grew up with them are like “meh, that’s just how we roll”. Mostly they are ex-British colonies and the UK itself. I did piano grades as a teenager and as you’ll see here, I’m planning to do them again but more interesting than what I did age 15.

That being said, people really do want a way to objectively place themselves in a world where there are people claiming that they can play Fantaisie Impromptu having played the piano for the very first time in St Pancras Station (the not-Yamaha) yesterday and I can understand that. There are a few sources, and to be fair to the r/piano community they tend to provide them. Henle rank the pieces they publish on a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 is relatively easy, I haven’t found 10 yet but most of Chopin and Rachmaninoff are 7 and above. If it is on an ABRSM syllabus, they will generally mention that too. There is also some other site which I haven’t bookmarked that has a lot of things too although curiously not always the Mendelssohn pieces I am looking for. And after that, there are the repertoire syllabus for ABRSM, TCM, RIAM and RCM and worth looking through them to see if the piece is there.

After that, not sure we can help. But think about what you next want to learn.

Chris Maene’s collection of historical pianos

One of the items on my to do list was to give a trip to the Museum at Pianos Maene in Brussels. You can find some information here, but in brief, Chris Maene, in addition to designing, building and selling pianos, also collects antique pianos and harpsichords. Out of a collection of about 100, 25 are on display in a museum at the premises of Maene Pianos in Brussels near Gare du Midi. I like collections of musical instruments and he has accumulated some interesting things. The museum spans almost 400 years of keyboard instruments and bearing in mind that there are three times as many instruments in storage as there are on display, I can only assume this is very much a labour of love.

The oldest instrument on display dates from 1632. If I understand the information video correctly, it’s one of just 4 linked with a leading harpsichord builder from the area and it floated in and out of documentation during the course of about 200 years.

There is a mixture of pianos on display, some grands, some vertical grands, early uprights, some square pianos. I’m not sure what I found most interesting to be honest – one of the things that startles me generally is how ornate pianos could be. Like this:

and

There was a really unusual to me Pleyel with a double keyboard

Of the grands, I rather liked this one:

This is one of the square pianos I think

And there was a player piano of an efficient construction:

The museum is well worth visiting. If you are interested in musical instruments, this and the MIM collection are worth some of your time. MIM also sells a lot of music gifts. Maene sells pianos which are somewhat less portable.

Pianos and social media

There are a few piano forums around the place, PianoWorld and Piano Street being two. And there is r/piano on Reddit. I spend a lot of time on that one because I mostly read it on my phone and the other two aren’t really that friendly on a phone browser.

The thing about the online world, is you get a lot of trollery, and you get a lot of people making odd claims. Fantaisie Impromptu by Chopin is somewhat of a lightning rod for them. I started playing piano when I was 10 years old. I was not totally focussed on it in that I had school, dancing lessons, badminton, choir. My music teacher might tell you I was her best pupil ever; I’m not sure I was her most talented, but I was definitely very, very diligent. Very diligent. I mean, I practised. I tended to get distinctions in exams apart from an accident with the RIAM syllabus one year. At no point, however, were we ever going to discuss the question of Fantaisie-Impromptu or that I might approach it. I owned the sheet music of Rach 2 from the time I was 14 but that was purely indulgent on my part.

But there are a lot of threads for people who appear to be either humble-bragging, or seeking some sort of validation. Like they want to prove something or impress people. So a lot of people are “I learned this from synthasia” or “I’ve only been playing 3 years” or god forbid “3 months” and I can play Fantaisie-Impromptu”. I tend not to believe these stories but I’m interested in the context they operate in. How hard is this, if I can play this, am I able to play the hardest of Chopin’s Etudes. I have been playing 2 years and here’s my Rachmaninoff.

Or, how long will it take me to learn Ballade No 1 by Chopin, I can play Liebestraum 3 by Liszt”. It’s interesting but realistically, if you’re asking these questions, you probably can’t actually play it properly. It’s again like, people want to impress other people or themselves. They are interested in how hard it is (and therefore how proud they should be of being able to play it). But pieces come and go, I learned Fur Elise 15 years ago and I wouldn’t say I can play it now. I have to wonder, what are they trying to prove/achieve/impress? Most of these pieces are journeys and sometimes it’s not the right time to set off on them (if you have short fingers is it ever the right time for Rach?). I don’t know how many people like practising – I like being able to play pieces which is why I keep some pop repertoire on hand to play if people ask for something – but if you don’t acknowledge the effort that goes into learning pieces but are focussing on how much you can impress people by being able to knock out some hard Liszt or Ravel but then humblebrag that you started learning before breakfast…it’s a problem. In short, I see questions about difficulty coming from people claiming the kind of skills that would allow them to answer their own questions which leads me to question the claims. There are a lot of them lately.

By the way, Daniil Trifonov released a fantastic recording of the Fantaisie-Impromptu in 2017. You should check it out if you have a moment.