Well that's it: I feel for the first time that I can post on this thread as a legitimate diploma student, seeing as how, as of this morning, I am now something I have vaguely aspired to be for most of my life and have actively worked at becoming for the last year -

A POST GRADE 8 PIANIST!!

(Actually this will happen in about 3 weeks time when the results come out, but I know I've passed, the only question is how well).

In my youth I naively thought that grade 8 was the height of achievement for a musician. I was remotely aware that there was a huge repertoire to be mapped beyond it but in cartographic terms this was a strange land that was marked on the musical map "Here be Monsters". Well, I've now approached this strange and foreign land, and I appear to be through passport control and customs, waiting for the bus to take me into town. There I expect to find that the monsters are less fearsome than I had imagined.

I am looking forward to it!

Good luck with the town bus, there are few round here !
But after your first Dip there will be a city bus, and more, even fiercer monsters lurking !
When you can play Balakirevs 'Islamey' there will be no more left !

When I can play that Satan will go to work in a snowmobile. I really think that at that level you have to like a piece to learn it, and therein lies the problem with this work for me. Liszt's Paganini studies? Maybe - I like them. Islamey? Never!

How do you know?

Quite. I wish I had that kind of confidence!
I've turned up for the diploma appointment and strutted my stuff but I'm not ordering the champagne until the result plops on the doormat.

Enjoy your battles with the dragons. The gloves are off now.

Mel

Well, here is the bad news. On the mountain of pianistic difficulty, Islamei is about halfway up, where it is still quite crowded

Congratulations!

Really, can you play it Tom ???

"play" is the wrong word - "struggle through" is more accurate. But that is more than I can do (or expect to do for a long time to come) with Godwsky's variations on the Chopin etudes (a couple of levels tougher) or anything I've seen by Sorabji (to name just two).

Fortunately there is enough great music lower down the mountain to keep us all happy for several lifetimes.

I've never seen it as a scary place to be, more a welcome chance to look at branching out further - opening a door to ever more interesting repertoire. As well of course as coming to the realisation that one is not really that much closer to being an amazingly competent player of one's instrument, there's still so much to learn....

Hard to answer that without sounding too arrogant, but . . . My teacher didn't enter me until she thought there was a chance I might get a distinction. Things didn't all go perfectly, far from it, though at their best I can play each of the three pieces and every scale note perfect. I made at least one fluff in each piece and there were 2 scales that threw me as they weren't even on the syllabus (one of which I made a complete mess of). However, I didn't stop at the fluffs, or even disturb the rhythm too much, so I will have at least passed each of those sections. To compensate for worse than expected pieces and scales, the sight reading & aural tests went better than expected. I would have had to have had a complete disaster somewhere to fail. I didn't have any disasters, ergo I've passed. It's "how well" that I can't predict, though I would guess I missed out on the distinction.

I have always known, usually before I leave the room, roughly how well I've done in any exam I've ever taken. I think that if you've done the necessary work, you know the marking scheme and have done some mocks so that you have an idea of what sort of performance/answer will get what sort of mark, you ought to have some idea of how you've done when you leave the room. I don't think it's a matter of confidence - more a matter of dispassionate assessment.


Quite: I have come to realize that Grade 8 piano will qualify me as a pianist the same way A levels qualified me as a doctor: It's the entry requirement, not the exit exam!

And even my MRCGP and your FRCS (presumably?) won't necessarily mean we know it all....I'm still learning after twenty years of medicine; today I revisited a piece I'd learned for ATCL, an exam I took two years ago - and even though I've not done another exam as yet, nor have I played this piece so very often in between times, so the technical side is a bit rusty, what I can do musically with it now is so much better . Sadly that means it could still improve a lot more.....

Can I just ask, why do you seem to have such an 'obsession' with getting to diploma level?

Probably just because he's a man and if it's there he has to achieve it

I wonder what the gender split is on Diplomas?

No obsession (I think) or at least not with diploma as such: Just a desire to be a better pianist and I admit I may be slightly obsessional about that. My reason for wanting to play again after a 35 year gap was the realization that I really DO want to be able to play some of the things that are accepted concert repertoire, specifically the Chopin Etudes and Ballades, the Liszt Paganini Studies (especially La Campanella) and Schumanns Etudes Symphonique, not stick with the 35 year old grade 5 getting rustier with age as I was 18 months ago and that if not now then when?

That level of virtuosity may still be beyond me, it may not, but the surest way of ensuring that I don't reach that standard is not to try. Given that I am trying, There are many roads to virtuosity. There are structures out there that waymark the road if one chooses to use them and one such is the ABRSM exam structure: One doesn't have to use it, but it's convenient and easy and I find targets helpful so, probably, having done grade 8 the Diploma is the next target (and after that LRSM and maybe even FRSM) . . .

. . . except that I'm not sure I want to dive straight in. I think it might be fun (and productive - there are still big gaps in my technique) to have a really good workout around the repertoire options before settling on a specific program.

...

I seem to have been at that post-grade 8 / diploma status for some time now ... I really must get myself properly motivated to do my diploma. New love for cello seems to be taking over!

Robodoc, I presume you'll be thinking of the performance diploma? I keep looking at the teaching syllabus.

I think Diploma is the next target, but not necessarily the next step!

I like the idea of a musical nether-lands as you put it: Whilst I know exactly what I think you mean (and it is what I expect to be doing for a while at least, up to 2 years) it does make me want to put tongue in cheek and ask "why only Dutch music?" or alternatively "Do you mean the music you're playing is like Holland: Featureless, flat and boring!"

...

no-man's land??


[... scoots quickly out of Diploma forum.... ]

I hate to revive an old thread but...




If were looking for some of the most difficult pieces here, I would say that Etude in A Flat Major Op. 1 No. 2 by Paul De Schlozer is probably up there with the toughest of them.

Can be heard here:

This is the good version to listen to - Etude in A Flat

And this is the other version (in which you can see the sheet music also - Etude in A Flat

Sorry for bringing back an old thread

What an amazing piece of music! Sadly I'll never manage to play that!

Haha ! ~ Some how you will if you be a hermit.

What - again! These have already been discussed.

In the first place they are probably not by Paul de Schlozer, but by Moritz Moszkowski. They certainly sound like many of Moszkowski's other compositions, whereas there is nothing else of note by de Schlozer to compare them with.

In the second place, they are a very, very, very long way from being the most difficult compositions for piano.

Dont be a mad Tom... then again You cant help it Im sure Horrowitz rendition of Carmen Fantasie was more complex http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qnla_5zrHAE...eos=y9Cw4YVWz24

I would hate to make Islamey my supreme goal!

Perhaps this is a contender?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBgwk98ZPuI

Gaspard de la nuit by Ravel (Third Movement)

Not that I am suggesting it is the MOST difficult (there is always Sorabji's Opus Clavicembalistica, Alkan's Concerto for Solo Piano, and any number of weird 20th Century works) but take a look at Villa-Lobos's "Rudepoema".

... it might just make you revise your ideas of pianistic difficulty. It is certainly up there with Gaspard de la Nuit.

this piece has been somewhat wrecked for me by the time in performing seminar in college where a really good pianist was playing this at her dress rehearsal, and the prof fell asleep midway through Ondine and snored through the rest of it. I had cold sweat running down my back from the effort of not laughing.

I did my Grade 8 last year and my initial impulse was to get on with some dip pieces - especially as I want to teach. There is such a lot of work for Grade 8 , especially if, like me, this is the first and only exam you have ever done! Once finished, there is a huge hole in one's piano time which demands filling. However, I have had to come to the realisation that aiming for the Dip means a LOT of improvement, especially to technique - it's not just a matter of practising the relevant rep. So I have pieces to practise, but am also working on technique with my teacher to get to the standard necessary. It's like all exams: a preparation for the next stage!

I started this thread 2 years ago when I had just taken (and, as it turned out, passed) grade 8 on the piano. Thanks to Wurlitzer it was resurrected recently and I was reminded of it, just in time for me to take grade 8 on the flute (last week). Again, I am confident I have passed and so I am now in the position of working, more or less, for a performance diploma on two instruments at once.

The phrase I used - "Here be monsters" - derives from my feeling that the journey beyond grade 8 is into territory that is, for me at least, relatively unmapped and therefore would be marked on old maps with the phrase "here be monsters". Indeed, on the piano there are some veritable warhorses out there, as witnessed by the subsequent posts along the lines of "what is the most difficult / challenging/ fast / etc. piece ever written".

I'm sure that such challenging repertoire exists on the flute but I don't have the same feeling of monsters looming as I did, and do, with the piano repertoire.

Monstrous or not, I am looking forward to it.

If anything I've ever seen qualifies as "Here Be Monsters", it's the piano book I saw in Chappell's, containing works of Xenakis!

My teacher in the early 1980's played the premieres of works by Xenakis (and also of Michael Finnissy - another creator of horrific looking scores) but then ... he could play the works of Kaikhosru Sorabji so little else would have seemed difficult.

Did John Ogden have these in his repertoire or were they merely sightreading fare to him?

Ogden tackled Opus Clavicembalisticum didn't he?

Hear Hear, Chess ;-/

Ravel seems to have a very odd effect on me, it sends me into a bit of a trance Some of his stuff is verging on hypnotic.

I did my Grade 8 last year - I came back to 'serious' piano after many years pootling about - passed, then set off on the Dip route. A year later, I am still looking at the rep and have decided to get more lessons to bring my technique up to the standard required. I have been playing a lot of the pieces over the years, but I now see how much better I need to be! I also find I have to be especially careful because a lot of the rep list does not suit a small hand, and I've no interest in injuring myself!

As to why we go on the exam trail, I think it does give a structure to our endeavours, and some reassurance that, yes, we are getting better! Also - if you are teaching, it adds a feeling, and an appearance, of authenticity, does it not?

Good luck Robodoc!