Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Teachers Forum Definitions of beginner, intermediate and advanced ..?

Hello,

I am new to the forum and I want to ask what may be a silly question, but what are your opinions as to what makes a beginner become an intermediate player, and an intermediate player become an advanced player. It always seems blurry to me as to where the transitions lie, and very often a player that appears intermediate still struggles with beginner concepts, and sometimes a student who has played for just a few years shows good facility for advanced work, but then struggles with simple sight-reading, for example.

What are your ideas about this?

Thanks!

To me, a beginner becomes an intermediate player when he or she stops requiring constant reminders about notes, rhythms, basic technique ("balloon wrists," playing on fingertips instead of finger pads, no flying fingers, stuff like that), and basic dynamics. The beginning years are for setting a foundation--teaching students what music terminology is and teaching them to read music and play without too much hand-holding.

The intermediate years are for introducing a lot of more complex patterns and techniques. I know some people do scales in the beginner years, but usually I'm doing Dozen a Day then and moving into scales in the intermediate years. Music starts sounding like music, and I introduce Burgmueller, early Kabalevsky, Mozart, Bach, the simplest sonatinas, etc. Intermediate students may still make sight-reading and counting errors from time to time, but they are usually localized (like, "Let's talk about the counting in measure 12" instead of, "Remember, this song is in 3/4, not 4/4."). I'm teaching about arpeggios, phrasing, playing faster, simple trills, more complex rhythms.

I consider the line between intermediate and advanced to be the point at which students start on Chopin, Bach Inventions (beyond the easiest few), Rachmoninov, Mendelssohn (though some of his are late intermediate), and Liszt (probably some others I've forgotten). These students need little to no help with notes, rhythms, and other "basics," so the reason for having a teacher at this point is to aid with interpretation and mastery of difficult passages and techniques and to "feed" the student repertoire in an organized, wise order.

Would others agree with my assessment?

Well, if you want to be more specific, some exams have levels, so...

Beginner: Prep, 1, 2, 3

Intermediate: 4, 5, 6, 7

Advanced: 8, 9, 10 and beyond

Otherwise, it's all subjective.

Once they can play hands together and sound musical, I don't consider them beginners anymore. I try to avoid using the word "intermediate" but that probably describes most of my students most of the time. For me, the bridge into advanced music is Bach partita movements and the easiest Beethoven sonatas.
An advanced student can potentially learn anything in the repertoire, in that they have the skills to make sense of it and a technique well-developed enough that they won't hurt themselves, but it's a matter of how long it will take to learn and how good it will sound when learned. (I wouldn't give Chopin etudes right after the easiest Beethoven sonatas.) In some respects, becoming an advanced student is just the beginning of one's learning.

Indeed.

Chopin is a marker for advanced? Many an early book uses the easier Chopin "posthumous" works (Applause, for instance). Bach inventions as advanced? I'm sure some would disagree. The boundary between beginner and intermediate is equally murky. Why is this a concept to worry about? The term shouldn't be allowed to have much power.

Thanks for all your replies. Coming from an exam-heavy piano education background, there was always an elitist segregation between those who were advanced players and those who were not, and no matter how far you seemed to have progressed in studying the piano, there was always a feeling of never having reached the advanced stage - it always seemed to be 'just around the next corner'.

I think one indicator of being advanced would be to be able to sight-read a difficult piece and play it well enough for others to really want to listen and enjoy, or to be able to play an accompaniment on the spur of the moment without prior practice.

The concept has power because the definitions are everywhere - on repertoire books, on advertisements for piano lessons, on this forum etc. but, like AZNpiano said, it is always subjective.

I considered myself as no longer a beginner once I started playing original piano/keyboard pieces (i.e. from Denes Agay's Easy Classics to Moderns) - about two months into lessons and once out of beginners' method books.

But I didn't think I was 'intermediate' until I could play Mozart's Sonate facile properly, and certainly not advanced until I could play Beethoven's Pathetique - complete and properly.

And of course, commensurate sight-reading & aural skills.

This is such a fast advance--am I reading this wrong? How do you advance so quickly?

Which exam are you talking about?

We do CM here in California. I just spoke to a colleague of mine who complained how hard it is to get her kids to continue with piano past Level 4. I didn't want to break it to her, but my kids don't start testing until Level 5. It's a big waste of my time and energy if the exam kids are not that into it, and I'd rather pick my battles.

And, no, passing an advanced level does not mean the student is "advanced." Far from it. It's a certification for having passed a test. Nothing more, nothing less. Like what I wrote in another thread, you can get a B.A. with a 2.0 average, or you can get the same degree with a 4.0 summa cum laude. The degree is the same, but the difference between the two students is vast.

Do you mean from beginner's primers (John Thompson) to original piano music by great composers in the Agay book?

There are very easy pieces in there - I'm talking Wolfie's childhood keyboard pieces and educational music for children by Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Kabalevsky et al. They consist of single RH melody line and single LH bass line with a chord or two - in other words, pre-Grade 1 ABRSM standard. I didn't do the Grade 1 exam until a year into lessons, and after that it was one grade a year. That's hardly fast progress by any standard.

BTW, K545 is ABRSM Grade 4/5 and the Pathetique is Grade 8 (the highest, after which it's diplomas).

It seems I'm now in the intermediate level because my lesson book tells me so...

Seriously though, I studied these breakpoints across many grading systems and methods over the past three years and although there is no universal distinction, most of what has been said above seems about right.

For my teacher, these skills among others must be learned before progressing beyond the beginner stage: hand independence, proper phrasing, dynamics, tempo control (somewhat), a firm understanding of key and time signatures to name a few. In the Faber books, inversions, ragged time splits across the two hands, and key signatures with on or two sharps and flats are also requirements.

As far as Chopin is concerned, well that is a bit frustrating for me. Other great composers (Beethoven, Mozart, Schumann, etc.) have "easy" pieces that an early intermediate student can learn with reasonable effort. The easiest Chopin piece I can find is level 3 ("Wiosna") which I'm going to take a crack at once I finish up Faber Level 4 at the end of this year.

I would slightly disagree with this for the following reason. Piano studies like other types of learning should have markers to demonstrate progress. We have have 1st grade, 2nd grade, etc.

A year or so ago when I started a new repertoire book that had "early Intermediate" on the cover that was a real rush for me, a sense of accomplishment. The boundary between these various achievement levels is not all that important, and never can be strictly defined.

Whatever the source, when you feel you have crossed that boundary that is quite significant IMHO.

Elitists will always be elitists.
Just play.

As an adult student I can see some merit in grades. I'm not concerned so much about accomplishment but more about estimating whether a piece is reachable. I play some pieces for fun aside from what my teacher assigns and based on the pieces that my teacher is assigning I can roughly estimate my current abilities and see whether I should even bother. Grading is useful as tool for guiding your study but shouldn't be an end in itself.

I did the Trinity College exams. I liked the syllabuses because they give students a feeling for the history of music, and the repertoire is mostly unusual and varied and mostly fun to play. It is the exam process that seemed to kill what small confidence students have. But maybe that was just me. Anyway, thinking one is never quite at the advanced stage is a good motivator for hard hard work, and being not quite top-notch means there's a wealth of learning still to come, which is always jolly!

Thanks for all your replies! I really didn't think anyone would answer!

If you did Trinity, I'd have thought that you would think in grade terms rather than whether you're intermediate or advanced, as I myself (and all my fellow music students) did, all through my student years.

Personally, I never thought of myself as 'advanced' until I'd developed a comprehensive technique and commensurate musical skills that would enable me to sight-read Haydn & Mozart sonatas easily, and tackle almost any piano piece that's ever been composed.

Then when would you say a student is truly "advanced"?

Being able to play advanced music well: artistically and beautifully.

In some parts of the world, this exam thing is beyond an obsession. It is a facade.

I thought passing the a CM/RCM level 10 exam means one can play some of the advanced music at least somehow artistically and beautifully, is that not? What are the loopholes?