Sometime even teacher can not tell what grade a piece is. How to find it?

Why does it matter?

Either you are able to learn to play something or you are not.

But sometimes its a bit weird if you've been able to play something for ages and then it turns up on the grade 8 exam thing or something and you had no idea...

ditto what does it matter

It's only judgement. As you've said, your teacher can't always tell. But he or she could have a guess at roughly what grade it is.

You can tell whether its "nearer" grade 2 or grade 5, say.

It doesn't help that examining bodies can't always tell either and are not always consistent. So if they can't get it right, what chance you or me?! ! !

Otherwise it's like Sbhoa said: have a look at the piece. Do you think you could play it with the practice you can afford? Being tied to the grades is not a good idea.


PF

I think for each grade there is a broad band and pieces fall somewhere in the band - for example there are easier grade 2 pieces which are close to more difficult grade 1 pieces, and there will be more difficult grade 2 pieces which fall near the boundary with grade 3. Which is probably why sometimes you will see a piece in one grade exam which appeared in the grade lower/higher in a previous exam some time back.

grade books arent necessarily right though, in another thread a while ago people found that a grade 6 piece for ABRSM might be the same as a grade 5 piece for Guildhall, so you cant really say which..

Yes, it really was extremely short sighted and thoughtless of Bach, Beethoven, Schubert etc not to write a suggested AB grade at the end of their compostions. They should have guessed that a few hundred years later some people would think that this is the most important thing to know about their masterpieces. Most inconvenient - especially as the boards can't even agree

I have posed this question before and got no answers, but I will try again.....

Does anyone know what the basic requirements are for each grade...
What I mean is what particular skills are needed? Things like, maybe, what range of keys, notes, time signatures; what sort of interaction between hands...
Is it possible to roughly define this?

People always seem to think that each grade is a single line of difficulty with pieces lying exactly on the grade 6 line or on the grade 5 line and then there's a huge "forbidden gap" in pieces that are not there. In reality different pieces are different difficulties to different people and if one buys a book of grade 5 pieces then one can expect a few that are grade 4 standard and a few that are grade 6 standard and anywhere inbetween. In reality the AB grade 5 exam books will contain pieces that are grade 4.5 and pieces that are grade 5.5 and some even that are grade 6 or really only grade 4.... It's true that one could probably pass grade 5 whilst selecting only grade 4.5 pieces or easier from the three lists...

Pieces are of continuous difficulty so there is no magic step from a grade 4 piece to a grade 5 piece; and unless you're playing from Spectrum or similar the composer certainly wasn't thinking at the time, oh I'll change that bit so this piece is grade 4 standard instead of grade 5 (I did enjoy Helen's post ), it's somewhere in the middle and the grades are a rough guide: not a strict category into which the pieces have to fit; otherwise how would anyone gradually progress through grades; it's a hill not a staircase!

It does annoy me when people say board X is harder than board Y because a certain piece was on their grade 6 and the other's grade 7: it's just that different people consider different things difficult, and if the piece is a grade higher it will have to be played better. I'm sure that there will be some pieces on board Y's syllabus that are harder than a lot of the pieces on board X's syllabus.


Sbhoa: I doubt that there is one, the syllabus makers have to judge every piece individually and make shortlists etc. In a way the pieces chosen then define the scope for that year and they hope that matches the pieces for the previous year.

Don't rely on grades for pieces. My piano teacher looked at someone for grade 7 once and said 'this is too easy! it should be for grade 5'.
The exam board makes mistakes. Its their opinion.

In some ways it is the grade of the pianist that is more relevant. What can you do? If you at Grade 7 are given a Grade 5 piece that you will find technically easy, then it may still be a valid piece for you to play, demonstrating your musicianship.

For example the Chopin in Grade V piano does not take long to learn - but the sonorous left hand melody almost right throughout requires careful control, as does the strumming harmony in the treble. Examiners should expect excellent musicianship from anyone who attempts this piece for without it, it would be irrelevant music.

But my piano teacher did take that into consideration. She's a concert pianist so she has to evaluate the technicality of a piece as well as how long it takes to learn. She sits with me and goes through tedious exercises to make sure I get the simplist things right.

An example of some comparison she made was that, concerning the grade 8 list c part, she said that the Arabesque by Debussy was easier to learn then the Intermezzo by Schumann. She was saying that it was because you had to make sure the right hand was more audible for the Intermezzo then the left hand and that the Intermezzo was faster considering all the notes that needed to be played compared to the Arabesque.

I'm not very good at keeping a constant pulse, but I'm doing the Beethoven piece, Presto Alla Tedesca from list B, and although I can not play it correctly, I can see that it is not as hard to learn as other pieces of music in the same list because the theme is similar and just by practicising one section, you should be able to replicate this constant repetition, just with different notes.

Besides, who decides the skills needed to be learnt at each Grade? Some people could go through the whole eight grades, not once learning how to play a triple and duple counter rhythm becasue they simply don't choose this piece. Is thsi really a grade 8 pianist? Is this really teh skills they should lack at this stage?

I think the bottom line is that if anyone says that a piece is too easy for them they haven't understood it. The main difficulties of most pieces are how well they're played; not how technically hard it is to learn the notes: a robot can do that. If one thinks a piece is to easy it's because one has not reached the level that one can understand it yet and it's too hard, even concert pianists are sometimes asked to record 'easy' repertoire but they play it so much better than everyone else, that's what being good is - how well you play the piece; not how hard the piece you choose to play is.