Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum "40 Pieces A Year Club" for 2015

Anne, that was lovely to hear. It must feel good to be able to learn an intermediate piece in three days and keep it as a warm up! Someday perhaps.

Seriously, forty pieces isn't forty added to my repertoire, it's forty pieces learnt during the year, some kept, some put on hold, some disposed of and some discarded unfinished and unloved. They still count if I got at least one page up to an acceptable level.

The idea for me is less to count the pieces but more to spend time on enough new pieces to keep my reading up and change repertoire pieces often enough for variety and motivation. I seldom, if ever, spend more than four consecutive weeks on one piece and never more than two on one section. I find after the initial learning stage it takes time to assimilate before a piece improves much and continually working on it is just stultifying. If I've been working hard or long on a piece I'll forget very little from putting it aside for up to a year or two.

I work on four to six pieces a day, from two minutes to twenty minutes each.

The newer they are to me the longer the time spent on them. Brahms 117/2 I could barely squeeze eight bars into twenty minutes. Repertoire refresh from long term memory can be just one or two careful plays through Mon-Wed and recital tempo for Thu-Fri. Longer pieces are spread over several weeks in discrete sections, Mozart K. 397 and Grieg Notturno were both split into halves and took two weeks each. ABF Recital pieces take around twenty minutes each in the initial stages, five to ten minutes when they start coming together and back to twenty minutes for recording prep.

One of the pieces will be a 'piece of the week' that may stretch to a week per page. This week I extended my piece to two as they're only a sparse page each. I'll be wrapping up Solfeggietto later as a four week study, four times the main theme all done in the first week then a week for each of the three episodes. I spent three weeks on an easy one-page waltz because I liked it so much I added it to my repertoire but most of these pieces won't be recorded and some will never be played again (like Dussek and Diabelli sonatinas). I use them in lieu of sight-reading, a chore I abhor, and I found my sight-reading improved markedly after a few short months of just regularly reading new material.

There will be four ABF Recital pieces in the Grade 6 to 8 category, usually a few themed recital pieces and a couple of stonkers that'll never be played publically (like the Chopin Ballad, Liszt Benediction de Dieu, or Beethoven Op. 10/3) and that stretch over years.

I agree - it was lovely, and SOME DAY I will be able to do that too.

I've decided the next pieces I'm going to go after. Keeping with Purcell I'm tackling Suite in G Major all four pieces I've started Prelude this morning just the first 3 of 10 bars. Then it'll go Almand, Corant then Minuet. Tell you one thing about looking at all four of these he loved overlapping notes and his embellishments (ornaments).

Going to spend Sunday recording Ecossaise in G, Menuett K2 and Musette. I'm pretty sure Ecossaise and Musette are going to have a lot of mistakes in them even when I do slow them down significantly I always have the same issues.

How much is significantly?

Hmm, that seems very, very fast!

Here are two pieces from Masterwork Classics, Level 1-2. I am counting these two as a combined one piece (half a piece each). That puts me at five for the challenge. I am putting the videos up for completeness; my production crew is still working out the kinks. I am amazed at how you lose the dynamics of the piece through the rendering process, and then Youtube's compression process. I am warning you now, they are not that exciting!

scorpio, did you say that you recorded two pieces? I could only hear one - Melodic Tune. I like that one. I learned it too, but I learned it last year, so I can't count it, even though I would have to re-learn it now to play it well. It's amazing how much I have forgotten. It looks like I had gotten up to Andantino in the Baroque-Classic, and 3 pieces in the Romantic-Contemporary, before I stopped playing for a while.

Well I had my lesson today. I have told my piano teacher about the 40 piece a year challenge. My teacher said the Chopin Nocturne in C minor posthumous could be added to my list so I am now up to 6. I will continue to work on it as that will be one of my my recital piece in May. I have no idea how to record and post so I am leaving it to my teacher to decide when I have passed the easier pieces. It is amazing how long it is taking me with some of the easier pieces. There is a Gurlitt piece, The Bright sky, that is from Melodious Masterpieces, book 1 that I have been working on for 2 week and completely messed it up at my lesson today. I definitely need to be able to learn new music faster so I think this challenge will be good for me.I am am really enjoying listening to those of you who do post and have heard some new music that I would like to play.
Judy

Hee hee. Um slower than a snails pace perhaps :p

Aw Scorpio those are two nice little pieces there played beautifully.

My fourth piece:

1. Bach (Short) Prelude No. 2
2. Bach Musette in D
3. Prokofiev Op. 65 No. 1-Morning
4. Prokofiev (Juvenilia)-Allegretto in A minor

https://app.box.com/s/yypy8ftocoexaoye9u5iwy8q7i2xqek3

What was hard in this last piece was trying to keep the repeated notes soft. Did not quite achieve it in the middle of the piece. This piece was written in Prokofiev's youth, which is why it is known as “Juvenilia”.

Beautiful piece Valencia. I can imagine how hard it must be to keep the notes soft. I can't get that with what I currently have *sigh* one day, one day.

Have you decided what you're going to work on next?

good work scorpio, I would have been tempted to call them one piece.

And I'm up to three - inspired by Mom3Gram to do an Irish piece ahead of St Patrick's Day:

1. Pam Wedgwood "Take it from here", from "Jazzin' About"
2. Schumann Op 68 no1 : Melody from Album for the Young
3. Raglan Road (aka The Dawning of the Day/Fainne Geal an Lae) - Irish traditional

I have them all recorded, will upload one of these days.
This last one is the best in terms of polish, and was also the quickest to learn by some distance.
This is a very simple arrangement of "Raglan Road", no credit to the arranger on the sheet music I have (it was sent to me by a friend). Initially I found it a bit annoying as the harmonisations aren't all as I would do them myself and the rhythms have been simplified (I tinkered a tiny bit with that).
I'd love to make my own arrangement of this tune, but that's not going to be today or tomorrow.

I have this entire tin whistle sheet music book. I wonder how that would translate to piano...hmmm...It's all in treble so I'd have to find something for the bass. Giving me ideas

Anita - when I first started back to piano 20 years ago I played "oom pah" with a Scottish band and the fiddles played the melody. Later the band expanded to contra dances and we played many, many Irish traditional tunes. I still played "oom pah", tho that is less Irish trad than it is Scottish. Later I added little bass note runs, and some broken chords in right hand, and block chrods, whatever fit the music. So all my music books were fiddle books, and whistle books, and mandolin books, and harp books, etc. I'll see what I can find on you tube -

Playing for dances I think my bass was a lot stronger on the beats than it needed to be, but it's a start.

Cathy

Here's some ideas - the melodies are a tad faster than I can play them :D, but the basses are fairly straight-forward rocking octaves - very cool:

Irish, in the style of Catriona Sullivan (whose videos are now all private, but she's terrific):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZE_Dniw5Gs

Cape Breton accompaniment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ppQPLx9waM

jig, harp-like:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfob6YMrwMQ

none of these are the "oom-pah" I played, tho the rocking octaves are similar for when I was playing the melodies. The melodies are often wonderful as ballads, and block chords are perfect. What's really cool is that whatever you find that fits you will turn out neat.

It's some of the most fun stuff around

Cathy

thanks for listening to my piece, Anita. Not sure quite yet what I'll do next. I'm having a lot of trouble with red dot jitters when recording. i don't know why it's plaguing me so terribly the last while. I just hope I can get my recordings for the upcoming Schumann recital. I dropped one of the pieces though I did a recording of it and skipped the repeat because of nerves so I may post that here for my 5th piece. Also there are a couple of shorter pieces by Liszt that I might give a try. Basically I'm still looking around trying to collect names of pieces that might be possible.

I haven't had a chance to listen to the latest postings on this thread so I'd best get busy!

Thanks Cathy those were awesome I really loved the last one so pretty. Once I'm done working on what I've got right now I'm going to give my whistle book a whirl to see what I can do with it.

Valencia I get red dot syndrome a lot. I can't tell you how many times I record, stop, delete then repeat. Not once have I ever recorded just one time and that was it. And I usually fall apart when I miss a note and have to start over. I don't know what it is about pressing that button that suddenly turns us into nervous wrecks. I think if we just keep at it and record those nerves will go away.

I've uploaded 2 of mine, the third is on a different computer so not done for now

Raglan Road:
https://app.box.com/s/y9u5vdsxcxqqcisn7r9l3bchd58t02u5

Schumann Op 68 no 1 Melody:
https://app.box.com/s/s4osxo1f46ncwzkyldlzlry2gud18rdo