Lately maybe always but i just noticed alot of easy pieces being brought up. how in the heck to you guys define easy? something that can be worked up in a week? as easy to me means i can sit down play it through get all the notes right the first time and have the song/piece down in 30mins or less with proper technique, dynamics, and of course rhythm and notes, anything more its no longer an easy piece and requires some real work on it. in the alfreds book 2 thread i read alot of book 2 being easy, but if it were so easy, shouldnt everyone be done with it in no time at all?? or people drop pieces because they are too easy, if a piece is easy and you enjoy the music why would you drop it? just a few thoughts running through my mind, as to me whether a piece is easy or hard there is always something to learn. and if it crosses that 30mins for the easy music for me then its no longer easy. ah, just rambling my thoughts. how do you define an easy piece??

For me..an easy piece has one note to play in both the treble and bass clefs. The tempo is Largo and the time signature is 4/4, no pedal required and is all within one octave.

Now...that's easy. Oh, the whole piece is about 10 measures long.. :p

If it requires any thought, whatsoever, it is not easy.

Kathleen

For me easy means about ten hours of practice will get it reasonably playable, though of course not memorized. Recently I worked on Mozart's Fantasy, and I would define that as pretty easy. There are a lot of picky rests and held notes in it, so it takes detail work to get it right, but the notes themselves are not too hard.

I'm also working on Chopin's Waltz Opus 34, #2 now, and I would put that at slightly harder than the Mozart but still in the pretty easy category, though it's going to require some memorization to play it well (too many jumps not to look at my hands).

Except Christmas carols and the pieces I work on for sightreading practice, and I don't know of anything that would take me 30 minutes or less. Maybe I'm a slow learner!

Nancy

I personally don't enjoy it as musch as other stuff, I drop it because I rather like to play something with nicer melody. the songs in alfreds arent that great

i define easy if it's a song with nice melody and i can play it reasonable in 10 -/+ hours. songs from alfred will take me a little less longer perhaps 1 1/2 hour but thats super easy and not challenging.

easy is anything I've already learned, everything else is hard.

Anything below your current level.

Sid, I agree with you!! There is very little that is easy for me!

I found alfred's book 2 easy as well so far. I felt like I was going backwards or not moving at all.

I find easy as being able to get it down in one practice session which would be between 15 and 45 minutes of working on that piece alone.

Not everybody fits the same mold, everyone learns at different paces. I think classifying a piece is more subjective than objective.

I can go to guild requirement book level early intermediate and find some pieces challenging, but then I can go to a level 3 piece and find it extremely easy.

For me, easy means it still has some HS sections and not too many notes in either clef on leger lines (though I'm getting better at those since someone on the forum pointed out the 'C' rule.)

Most of the time I try not to play "easy" pieces now because they just don't move me forward, and most of them don't sound rich enough to satisfy me now that I'm beginning to tackle more HT stuff. But occasionally when I'm really frustrated with my HT piece I pick up an easy one I can learn in about half an hour to give myself a confidence boost.

Donna

Apropos easy versus difficult, the Austrian pianist Louis Kentner maintained that there were no difficult pieces: "A piece is either easy or impossible - the bridge between the two is practice." I think about that sometimes when I am getting frustrated with a difficult (I mean impossible) passage.

Ted

I find repetitivley hitting middle C in 4/4 time to be easy.....everything else is extremely difficult.

To me, an "easy" piece is something I could learn and polish in about a month's time. (I will spend about 2-3 months on a "medium" difficulty piece and >3 months on a "hard" piece.)

Being able to sight-read it accurately on the first try and work it up in a single practice session would be "very easy."

thanks for your insights guys/gals!! i also asked my teacher about it. everywhere i was looking at i was seeing easy easy easy. i even bought the easy wizard of oz book--and to me its not so easy!!! argh!! another words i have to put in more than 30mins a song. i thought i would bring it home and play everything in the book in one night because it said easy and must admit was a little discouraged when i couldnt. i could play them slowly, but not to speed, argh!!!thanks again!!!

Yeah, I found the same problem when I brought home some "easy" piano. I felt pretty dumb when I had a hard time playing it.

I think "easy piano" needs redefining - "easy" for whom? Mostly it seems to me that it would be easy for someone who's well into the intermediate level, but not for anyone who's still struggling to move from mid to late elementary (like me ).

Donna

Easy is a relative term. It can be defined but only from the perspective of the person defining it.

Bach would probably define his music as easy. I don't!!

This is one of the best music quotes I have ever heard. I think I'll steal it for my signature line.

"Easy" is easy to define in relative terms. But when you're classifying sheet music, you have to think of it in absolute terms. In such a case I would call something easy if it: (a) didn't have tricky rhythms; (b) didn't have a key signature with more than two sharps or flats; (c) didn't have lots of big chords or anything requiring big stretches or jumps; (d) few or no trills or ornamentations. Being set in nice big typeface helps, too.

I'm a sort-of beginner, but I don't like practicing on the "easy" pieces. They just don't motivate me, and I don't know what they are supposed to sound like.

So, I work on hard pieces that I love, Chopin Nocturnes and Polonaises. I'm actually making decent progress on the Nocturne 55no1. With the Polonaise I am just working on parts of it. Someday I hope to be able to play the whole thing, but for now I am happy to do bits of it.

The point is that I find working on parts of hard pieces is just as good exercise as doing Hanon, scales etc. In fact, I have found that I am much better at doing scales (HT) than I was just a month ago, even though I haven't been practicing scales.

This is similar to learning sports. When I was young I took power-skating lessons, but didn't progress too much. Then I took part in intra-mural ice hockey, and my skating became much better, because I was forced to do more difficult things, and the basics sort of came along for the ride. Same with tennis. When I played with people of my own skill level I didn't progress, but playing people that would initially crush me 6-0, 6-0, I got better quickly.

So to you beginners out there - dare to be better!

The 'easy' in the title of those compilation books usually means arranged, or not advanced; in other words it's on a scale of beginner, easy, intermediate, advanced. So easy is about level 3 of most methods. I wish they wouldn't use the term -- beginning students get really frustrated when they go out and buy an 'easy' book of their favorite popular music and then realize they won't really be able to play it for at least a year or more.

When I see sheet music promoted as "easy," I think the publisher really means it is at the late-beginning to early-intermediate level.

Sometimes publishers have two different editions of the same piece - a simplified "easy" version, and the original "advanced" version.

The first piece of music I learned when I restarted piano was a simplified arrangement of the adagio theme from the Moonlight Sonata. This "easy" version:
- was transposed from C# minor (4 sharps) to D minor (1 flat)
- cut out the middle section entirely
- eliminated doubling of octaves

Surprisingly, the essence of the piece was intact. But after I breezed through that arrangement in 2-3 weeks, my teacher brought me the original version of the adagio movement. That was much more of a challenge.

Knabe26, yes that is what my teacher also said. i looked up the book i am going through and it says NOT FOR A BEGINNER!!! for intermediate to early intermediate is how it was rated, because there are ALOT of jumps. which means with a little bit of practice, i can get it:) i just wanted something to pick up and play, at least i got something i can practice:)

To me the simplest piece can be difficult. If you are just playing notes on a page and you can recognize them rather quickly, then I guess that's easy...However, If you add in all the dynamics of music to that "easy" piece, then it becomes difficult. Being able to play a piece the way the composer intended it to be played, can be a difficult task. I am working on a Chopin piece for many months now. I thought it was "easy" but it turned out to be quite difficult. When you consider all the elements of the piece, paying attention to the "details" of the piece, it becomes difficult. Getting all the details accurately placed in the piece takes time and that's the difference between easy and difficult. It can take a rather short time to play a piece you think is easy, by simply playing the notes on the page but adding the details to the piece for me makes that easy piece become diffiult. I am just now beginning to understand what it means to practice, by taking measures and analyzing their details and working them into the piece. What a sense of accomplishment when the easy piece sounds rather complex when you play it the way it was intended.