Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Inventions and their order of difficulty??

My daughter just turned 13 and has been playing for a year now. She has learned lots of hymns out of the hymn book along with, minuet in G, Happy farmer, Little serenade, fur elise and some others. She heard the bach inventions and went out with her own money and bought the alfred book and cd and learned #8 in about a week. She is still smoothing it out but it sounds pretty good. She then started learning # 6 today.
My question is are the inventions in an order of difficulty should she be starting at #1 ?? Also I think she is set on learning them all but maybe she needs more variety?? I hate to stop her as she loves to practice.

No, they are numbered in order of key chromatically starting from C (C, C minor, D, D minor, etc). I have read that the order that Bach taught them to his students is as follows: 1, 4, 7, 8 10, 13, 15, 14, 12, 11, 9, 6, 5, 3, 2. That should give you a rough order of difficulty.

Ted

i don't know exact order of their difficulty, but for what i know that people usually start with 1, 4, 8 before moving onto others. i learned 3 2-part inventions: 4, 9, 13, and found them in such order: 4,13,9 (the hardest), for me.

I shouldn't spend too much time on all of them. That sounds a bit like drudgery to me. I hope she is understanding the structure and compositional niceties of the ones she is learning.

Bach = drudgery -> non sequitur

Have you studied these? After a while the constant counterpoint and double counterpoint kinda gets on your nerves. They are not all inspired. Same for the 3 part.

What you get out of them is in direct relationship to what you put into them. There are a number of gems and a couple of stinkers. I also enjoy the Duettos from the IIIClavier Ubung.

The inventions are excellent for integrated teaching playing+composing, they introduce young students to manageable polyphonic structures and reading articulation into sparse baroque notation and are much less of a waste of time IMHO in terms of basic technique development than messrs. Hanon, Czerny et al.

Agreed, but what a mouthful!

you should hear the same sentence in Dutch!

Thank you all for the info. I Couple more questions.
1. Are there particular inventions she should learn for sure that teach specific techniques??
2. Is there a learning order for the Sinfonias?? any she should learn?
3 What other books should I steer her to next to broaden here playing... she especially likes books that have cds with the book. I was thinking Mozart sonata No 15 545 maybe? Please suggest...
Thanks

The question is - is she learning the compositional techniques?

Thanks for the replies. I believe she is learning alot. I am more concerned however that she is having fun and loves to practice 3 hours a day without any pushing from me.
Any suggestions on what to steer her to next?