Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Teachers Forum Asian repetoire pieces through classical training

My teacher asks me to start thinking about my repertoire pieces. Well, I'm really interested in a piece like this:
Moonlight over Spring River Eventually, I'd like to make my own piano arrangements of ancient Chinese music pieces like this and build a repertoire upon those pieces.

But I have some questions:
(1) Would such a choice appeal to western audience's ears which are pretty much tuned to scales built upon 4th/5th rather than 3rd/4th? (I wish more classical piano teachers would teach pentatonic scales to their students)
(2) What do you consider as the difficulty level of this piece?
(3) Can you think of any step-stone pieces that I could use to make the learning of this one easier? My teacher likes Debussy a lot, but his work appears no easier than this one!
(4) Is it possible to build an Asian repertoire through purely classical training? Or should I consider switching to jazz piano study sometime in the future?

Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

Not sure how many Chinese-music specialists there are on this board.

I would go "straight to the source" and ask someone (preferring someone who grew up in China) who plays Chinese music on the piano all the time.

Ideally, but where to find such people? Lang Lang did some work there, but I don't like his style. I feel a lot of subtlety in Asian music has been lost in his "passionate" play, or maybe that's the way he figures out to cater to western audience... feels like Chinese restaurants in America. :-)

Go to concerts where Chinese music is being played well?

I am certainly not a specialist of Chinese music, further, guessing the difficulty level of music is always a challenge, but there are clues throughout, and I'm guessing this is solidly advanced music. Jane MacGrath has a rating scale for students which runs from 1 to 10, with a 10 being works like Brahms Rhapsody, #2. I'm pretty sure that this is at least a 10.

This is really an interesting piece. Is sheet music available for it? Who is the composer?

I find that piece much more beautiful than jazz.. which my ears are not in tune with at all.

It is an admirable goal to have and for me, it would be nice to hear new and different pieces rather than the same old repertoire.

You might find this site useful.

A good place to start with Asian-inspired piano is Tan Dun's "8 memories in watercolor." They are short, and not too difficult. There is quite a variation, with a few pieces based on Chinese folk tunes, some Debussy-sounding tunes, and some very modern-sounding pieces. I've really enjoyed learning them.