Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner The virtues/drawbacks of "easy" music

As with many lifelong piano students, I've spent my life pushing the envelope of what I could achieve always working on pieces that are just a bit beyond what I can easily learn. Lately, however, I've become aware of number of common pieces that I never bothered to study or learn because I felt that I was "beyond them". Here's some of them:

Solfeggietto - CPE Bach
Sonata in C K545 - Mozart
Op 49 #2 Beethoven
"Girl with the Flaxen Hair" - Debussy
"Raindrop Prelude" - Chopin
"Tramereai" - Schumann


Sure, I've sight read them every once in a while, but I never bothered to memorize or truly get them under my fingers. Last month, I decided to remedy that.

I started with the CPE Bach, which fell under my fingers rather quickly once I got the pattern down. There were a few sticking points, but they were easily ironed out. After about 2 weeks it is part of my "repertoire".

I then moved on to K545, which was a bit trickier than I expected, but not too tough. It is so open and spare, that it is very difficult to get clean and even (the dotted 8th trill in the second subject was a challenge as well. ) The middle movement is, frankly, rather boring to me and could almost be played up to speed on first reading. I just don't know if I could maintain interest to give a decent "performance" of this movement. The final movement, however, is bright and fun and looks like, once I get to it, that It will be a joy to work on.

I've decided to make this a project of mine- becoming conversant in a range of piano pieces that are studied by early students and getting them "down".

Has anyone else done this- that is, gone back and "filled in the gaps"? Am I sacrificing progress in other realms by "regressing" in this way?

No, but being closer to the level of pianist where these pieces are not "beyond" the skill level, it probably makes quite a bit of sense to do so.

I cannot go back to solfeggietto, however. I blew an audition to a youth orchestra with that piece. I think if it were sitting in front of me, I would instantly be 11 years old again and watching a keyboard get blurrier and blurrier due to tears welling up.

The 40 year old me says that's a bad idea.

Brad,

In addition to being "easy", the pieces you listed are also very popular, perhaps quite over-played. For every piece you mention, there are scores by the same composer, equally technically easy, and not as cliched. Why not spend time exploring those?

A couple comments on individual pieces:

I think the Mozart is technically quite *hard*, especially at a good speed.

I think the Debussy is musically/tone-wise quite *hard* as well. If you really give it the attention it deserves, it's an extremely demanding, exacting piece. The same goes for the Schumann and, perhaps to a lesser extent, the Chopin. Do not underestimate the musical complexity of these pieces!

The Beethoven you can skip, as far as I'm concerned. Absolutely trivial in my opinion. (Op.49/1, however, is great. So are the op.33 bagatelles, many of which aren't hard technically.)

Have fun!

-J

My summer project is to work on Bach's 2-part inventions. The goal is to memorize them first, work out my own fingerings, work out the technical difficulties, overcome the technical difficulties first and make decisions what to do musically.

I normally 'read' through pieces before doing any of the above so I'm trying to break myself of these bad habits.

I agree that really the pieces are working on are not 'easy'. I think any Mozart is very difficult to play well because the texture is so exposed.

What you are doing is good for your progress as much as working on advanced pieces. To play that kind of repertoire well takes sound musicianship. There is the famous video of Horowitz performing Schumann's Traumerei in Moscow which brought grown men to tears.

Thanks for the suggestion, beet. I, of course, realize that the pieces I listed were overplayed. I found it kind of strange, however, that a piece could be so common and I would have not at least studied it at some point.

Yes I do this alot and find it very handy.
It is very good to play easy things for your relaxation.
Instead of stressing your technique you can concentrate more on the musical playing.
Good luck.

There is no "easy" music if you want to play beautifully. Anyone can "push the buttons" but making music is another thing entirely.

I've played some fairly difficult music, (Chopin Ballade #3, Beethoven Opus 53), and my teacher just assigned me a simple Beethoven Bagatelle. I don't view it as a step back at all because we are focusing on technique: absolutely no unnecessary tension, sweet, even tone, perfect articulation, perfectly modulated and controlled dynamics and precise tempo. Trying to accomplish this with a very simple piece makes my brain hurt. It's hard.

I spent a whole semester in undergrad doing Debussy's "fille". Being able to get the notes down easily allowed me to focus on other things like tone color changes, tempo shifts, evenness of execution, etc. The problem is that now I want to do the same with my "hard" pieces, and can no longer just work on getting the notes down on those.

The last year of grad school, I had played the Brahms Handel Variations, some of the Iberia Suite, Beethoven Op. 101, and the 8th Prokofiev sonata.

After I graduated, I spent a couple of months learning the six Op. 36 Clementi Sonatinas. It was enormously helpful. I learned a lot about myself as a pianist - there's something humbling about looking at the opening of Clementi Op. 36#4, having the notes learned in 15 minutes, and then coming face to face with "um...so now what do I do?"

When you work on a difficult Beethoven sonata, you have months to explore your artistic options and craft your interpretation while you get the notes down, test out a few performances, and go digging for ideas in the thousands of recordings and articles that so many great performers and thinkers have made.

With Clementi, you get none of that. There is no Arrau recording of Op. 36#4. No idea what Rubinstein, or Richter, or Perahia. No idea what brilliant ideas Horowitz might have had (and there's no doubt he would've been able to do something brilliant with it.) There are plenty of books and articles on classical performance practice, but few (if any) with musical examples by Clementi, so we have to extrapolate from what they say about Mozart and Haydn.

There's little guidance to be found in a teacher. How often do those who work with budding concert artists teach Clementi? (Or even the easier Mozart rondos or Beethoven sonatinas!)

And therein lies the challenge - figuring out what to do when there is none. How to be an artist with a voice when there's no struggle. In a lot of ways, it's easy to be inspired when you have a masterwork in front of you. It can be much, much harder to provide the inspiration yourself, to bring a sense of elegance and joy to a piece that doesn't necessarily demand it.

Ultimately, I think it makes people better pianists. It's easy to set yourself a challenge and let the piece drive you. 99.99% of all Ravel performances succeed on that basis - if you can realize the markings in the score on the instrument, then you'll do pretty well.

And then there are the .01% who can do this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuZOVSL5woo

As Kreisler said in another thread, the fact that a piece is studied by many amateurs in no way decrease the pleasure it may give the pianist learning it. Many of the overplayed pieces are in that category because they are beautiful pieces.

Nor should the fact that a piece is overplayed decrease the enjoyment for any listener unless they are someone who attends numerous amateur recitals. I don't know many people who do that.

This is enormously validating to me. While in school, you spend all your time pushing, pushing the limit. As I'm newly graduated, I have my push pieces that I have to keep for what-not, but I now have the choice to play whatever I feel like. I've decided to not do anything ridiculously technical outside of etudes, like Islamey, Gaspard, etc. for a year. I was a little worried that if I don't have all the "big works" I'm going to get behind my peers in competitions. It's a concern, but I'm in this for the long haul. If I need a win piece I go back to my old recital rep, but I need to fill in the gaps of what I missed prior to that. There's a lot to be said for pure musical growth. Also, I'm teaching now, and I need to really familiarize myself with the gems that exist in the intermediate literature. If I teach the same 5 pieces to 30 students, I'll go nuts.