Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Teachers Forum grading the difficulty of a (short) musical work?

But do you really think piano playing, the physical act I mean, is that kind of monolithic generalized skill?

It certainly does not appear so from here.

To use a sports analogy: Aerobic fitness, strength, and flexibility help somewhat with all activities. But mastery of pushups helps not at all with pullups, or situps, or squats. And the specialized sports skills: throwing, catching, hitting, swinging, etc. have even less to do with each other.

If piano were like general fitness, the levels would be easy to assess analytically, and the simple timed experiment would be statistically reliable for determining the level.

You are aware of the argument over intelligence? over the relative importance of g versus Guilford's 120 cells, e.g.?

Thank you all for the ongoing discussion. I find it fascinating actually!

The problem with what I'm proposing is that it's too hard to explain in words, without giving out a design document or something similar (<-from my experience with computer games a design doc can be hugely complicated... :D).

So, I'm still stuck, but I do see that overdoing it with the grading system would be a big minus...

Still, trying to follow how the global boards are grading is a tad difficult. The link to the sheetmusicplus site offers little help: My music has nothing of what the description offers. It's simply too simplistic (the grading system) for my own use...

Geez... I'm becoming a monster!

If the project is just to use the gradings for comparison among the pieces, rather than comparison to an external source, then you can grade them using whatever you want for the scale, and your main worry would be to get the relative grading correctly.

Could you pick the easiest piece, the most difficult piece, and a piece with a level of difficulty right between those and call those grades 1, 10, and 5? Then use those as the basis for grading the other pieces?

I wouldn't over think it too much. Grading is subjective, and I don't think you will ever have everyone agree with your grading, as this thread will attest! As long as the pieces are graded relative to one another it should be fine.

Grading is ONLY for the specific project, but I think it's very important.

an example to why in this case 'traditional' grading is a problem:



The above is a problem that's waiting to be solved. It involves aleatoric material that needs explaining, to a student that is starting to get into what music is about. It takes some explaining to get through the idea of 'randomnly pick any pitch from those in the box and repeat them at random time intervals for 15 secs'.

If you, however, were to see this written in a traditional sense, with all the pitches written out as quavers, and just the word tempo rubato somewhere you would rate this at level 1. The above notation though creates several problems that make the piece much harder than it is...

How can you grade this with traditional grading systems.

(I'm not in the studio to make the example in a score).

But such an interesting and endearing monster!

aawwww...

Thank you for that!

No I don't think I would describe playing the piano as a monolothic generalized skill.


Unfortunately I don't think an analogy is helpful. Analogies are always a challenge to start with, and pushups and situps are just too distant from playing the piano to help shed light on your ideas (at least for me).


How are you wanting to apply theories of intelligence to the discussion?

Tim: I think I'll agree with musicpassion on this one... Every skill in music is related to piano performance, and any performance actually. You don't get to go in too deep but knowing your theory, your harmony, your morphology (form knowledge), your instrumentation and history of music ALL help to a better performance. Otherwise you're just a robot with instincts... :-/

Nikolas,

I have struggled with the problem of "how hard is it" for a very long time. Rather than use grades I simply made folders, the first one A, the last one probably closer to Z, and I just dump music into each folder.

Almost all my work is done on my computer, so I have complete control over everything.

What happens over time is that I find out one thing is more easily learned than I thought, so I simply move it to an easier folder. Then something else seems to belong where I put it, logically, but students have trouble with it. So I move it to a "harder" folder.

I don't think we can know how hard something is to teach until we have road-tested it. The composition you showed would be quite simple, apart from minor reading problems, if it was not marked mm = 180 AND did no involved a totally different touch for the LH. It's not even clear to me if the first note of each bar is staccato in the LH - I think not. Whenever one hand is called upon to observe rests, to play staccato, etc. while the other is legato, a bit of difficulty is added. If one hand is louder than the other, another level of difficulty. Etc.

There are two main factors as I see it:

1) What are the skills necessary to just "hit the notes"?

2) How advanced does the student need to be to play the music so that it really comes alive?

And actually a third important consideration - how long will it take to master it?