Hello,

I sat my grade 4 exam last week. I don't know the results yet. Yesterday I sat down to practice and automatically went through my scales. Then I wasn't sure what to do next. Ever since I started learning properly I have been practicing for exams. What do you do when the exam is over?

I was looking for ideas when I came across an internet site saying that if you try to play a piece too advanced for you, you will play it badly. But when you do eventually get to the right level you will play it badly because your mind will remember how you played it when you first tried it.

I wasn't sure about this. I thought it was good to everything. Every thing I play starts badly but then gets better.

What do you think?

I don't agree, I think that if you have a good teacher, s/he will help you correct the problems when you do learn it "for real" because that has been my experience.

I don't think it is a problem to learn things that are too advanced with the following caveats:

- some advanced pieces require the knowledge of certain techniques; if we don't know those, we might do actual physical damage when trying to learn them. For example a pianist trying to play something too fast and getting tendinitis (mea culpa)

- we mustn't get discouraged and say "I can't play this, therefore I am rubbish and should quit". Might have to be content with learning, say, only two bars a day.

I'm always trying stuff that's beyond my experience. If I like it enough I ask my teacher for pointers. If not I'll try something else. I'd say if anything it's improved my playing as I make more effort.

I have a huge list of things I want to play. Sometimes, I just noodle around playing whatever tune's in my head.

Exam boards, over the years, will put up the same piece but examine it for different levels, presumably expecting different nuances from performers depending on the grade being examined. That alone shows that pieces will often have different layers of difficulty you can find in them. When I first started getting recorder lessons, one thing I asked my teacher to show me was double tonguing: the piece he chose to use to teach me this is a sonata by Castello. At the time I was about grade 6 or perhaps 7 at a stretch - the piece he used is set for LRSM. I learned double tonguing, and as the piece is lovely, also had a very enjoyable time reworking it at intervals over the next few years, finding more and more in it, and being able to express more and more through it as I improved as a player. I could make a passing attempt at the notes before, and if I were to sit down and polish it up again now, I'd probably be able to make a fair enough shot at it to perform it in public. If anything, the process has been to stimulate and boost my playing, over the years - I'd have been very intimidated if I'd realised what level it's pitched at by exam boards, at the time I first started learning it, but I didn't know then. Once I found out, I already could do it well enough to feel rather good about it .

To answer this question - I tend to go back over 'own choice' pieces that I've done in the past (ie non-tutor-book ones) until my next lesson - having been learning for nearly 9 years I now have a reasonable stock of these, some of which I can sightread with almost no difficulty and some of which take a bit more practice to remind me of them.

This works for me as I don't often play these pieces in 'normal' practice sessions, so it's nice to get the chance to play things I haven't played for a while and that don't take nearly as much brain power as the stuff I've been doing for the last x months. In fact a couple of years ago I took an exam towards the end of the autumn term at uni and thus had about 2 weeks at uni plus a couple of days when I got back before I next had a lesson - uninterrupted easy Christmas carols was a very welcome change from exam stuff!!!

There has only been once that I can remember when I didn't do this - my Grade 2 happened to be on a Tuesday (lesson day) and despite having just taken an exam I didn't want to miss a lesson(!) so I went to my lesson as normal - we didn't do anything particularly taxing in that lesson but it was still new stuff so I didn't do any sessions of old stuff that time round.

If all you have been doing since you started learning is practice for exams then you probably have a lot to catch up on.

At grade 4 there is a huge wealth of songs you can learn, or attempt to learn. As for being ambitious, why not?

I'm practising for grade 5 but I've already had a go at la campanella and mephisto, albeit they were very short go's. You can never play something perfect first time around. But as long as you practice mindfully you will get there eventually.

Besides when you do learn a piece that is one or two grades above what you think you are, the accomplishment is that much sweeter.



As for right after exams, there is no harm in practising your exam pieces, I tend to practice them until I move on to the next grade as they have the most significance in terms of where I am officially.

However I also tend to find a tune that I can take my time on and just relax with. My grade 2 was Comptine d'un autre ete. Right now it's the theme from the beginning scene of up.

It can be helpful to practice pieces that are too difficult to some extent, but you need to be careful not to overpractice or practice them incorrectly in a way that might damage your hands. Not saying you have done this, but I can easily imagine an overenthusiastic grade 4 pianist injuring themselves on pieces like Mephisto or Campanella, considering that I was one of those pianists not too many years ago! In my case (being young and immature) there were also several occasions where I "thought" I was playing a too-difficult piece well and was satisfied with myself because my listening skills weren't developed enough to hear the flaws, but I was actually butchering it...

Hello,

Thank you everyone for your replies. I had a nice practice with my flute where I did some sight reading and had a go at a couple of things on flutetunes.com. I have a folder of tunes I collected and in the back I have some tunes I would like to be able to play one day. Every now and again I try. Last time was over a year ago and I ended up just staring at it. Today I found I could read all the notes and had a go at playing it!

admittedly the examples I gave were extreme and I have never taken it past a few bars. (I can't play more then the first 9 seconds of mephisto before the stretch is too big)

Whilst I have the understanding that these injuries take a bit of time to develop, and therefore you can experiment with a song that is way above your grade, I also understand that if you become a bit too enthusiastic for a prolonged period of time, you can wake up the next morning with an injury.

So yes, be ambitious, but if you aim really high, take it very slowly. And pay attention to learning and practising the techniques before you start out.

As for butchering pieces... I think most people are probably guilty of that in the early years of music practise... And it takes a while before you learn the proper way to interpret a piece.

either way, I tend to hold the viewpoint that the majority of pieces you learn are just stepping stones towards the ones you really want to play. You can skip a few stones on the way, but make sure you don't lose your footing when you do (I don't want to take this metaphor too far).

I love the tune from Up! I don't know how you play it without crying though... It must be hard to get all the right emotion into it when you are playing. Do you imagine the scenes from the film while you are playing?

It's a pretty emotional tune when you get it right. I'm not that good yet though . But you can really feel it in the chords towards the end.

Although I do definitely remember some scenes of up when playing!