Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum where do i find out what "grade" a piece is?

for example--- grand valse brilliante by chopin/alla turca by mozart/minuet in g by beethoven

There is a spreadsheet floating around here somewhere that lists lots of classical pieces and their grades. I asked for it to be stickied recently, but I guess it isn't used enough to warrant the real estate.

Anyway, BB Player posted a link to it recently, http://www.pianoworld.com/Uploads/files/Graded_Pieces_Sorted_By_Difficulty.PDF

It's a very handy list once you find it.

thanks but i can't seem to find minuet in g by beethoven... and this list seems funny i dont get why

chopins "heroic" is only two levels above alla turca

Nice list, big, but not big enough of course.

Isn't there some internet database that sorts all (solo) piano pieces by (famous) composers by difficulty?
Of course, it's pretty much subjective in the end, but it should at least give some indication.
Maybe website users should be allowed to vote.
Nice idea for a website?

First you need to define what you mean by a "grade" and if you ask two different pianists you would probably get four different answers. There are also books by Jane Magrath and Maurice Hinson that can be useful, but generally speaking the only use is the relative levels between two different pieces.

Acquiesence, I'm not sure what piece you are referring to as minuet in g by beethoven. He wrote a set of twelve (WoO 7), a set of 6 (WoO 10), and a single minuet in Eb (WoO 82). (At least these are the ones I have.) I believe two of them are in G Major. If you can give a link to the score of the one you are thinking of that might help with giving some idea of the difficulty of the piece. I have Magrath's book and she lists Minuet in G WoO10 No 2 as being a level 7. (whatever level 7 means for her.)

Rich

Now and again I think about an algorithm to grade piano pieces (my AI background I guess) - a bit like a chess program "evaluation function". In reality it all depends on the individuals' strengths/weaknesses (one may be particularly good at voicing while another may be particularly good at passage work) but it seems within the realm of possibility to give some sort of sensible number by algorithm - and existing grading systems face the same problem.

A first approach might be to consider an expert souce of gradings in a limited domain - say Elenor Bailie and Chopin - and figure out a minimal set of (generic) properties (of pieces) that when combined (in some way) match (relatively speaking) her gradings (ish). Then see how it works out on another source (it could just be contrived) - say ABRSM/RCM gradings...

A goal (if possible) would be minimal/simple properties, so that it could be done 'by hand' because while implementing an algorithm would be fairly easy - getting a representation of the score that could be mined by it would not - lilypond is a possibility...

But breakfast is in 10 mins so maybe tomorrow... and it must have been done already...?

LaValse,

Sounds to me like a good thesis for a doctorate of music in computer pedagogy. Or a doctorate of computers in piano pedagogy.

Rich

Or perhaps a doctorate in "Studies of the Mentally Challenged Who Developed Their Difficulties While Trying to Grade All the Elements in Classical Piano Compositions."

Nice ring to it, I think, but maybe the title should be a little longer!

DPP, I still have some contacts in the AI world - one in music specifically - it's an obvious research subject - there must be something out there - i'll ask - unless anybody else knows...?

It should be based into a 'phylogenetic' theory of what is difficult - i.e. the path in which beginners start to develop skills, so difficult components become not so difficult, then easy and they can attempt more etc.

Then, of course, there is not one Otto Normal-Piano-Beginner. (yes, Germans did use "Otto Normalverbraucher" as the reference statistical consumer)

I find speed (flow of processing; e.g. measured in new notes read per minute) as an important bottleneck overarching every other one (polyphony, key signatures, fingering jumps). Probably could play Chopin or Rachmaninov too - at 1/10 speed ;-)

This may be an oversimplified answer, but if you look on a sheet music web site, for example, sheetmusicplus.com, it will often show the rating for each piece. Hope this is helpful.

Strange. Only been playing for 21 months and am practicing Chopin's Nocturne Op.9-1 and am quite shocked that it's a Grade 8 piece!

Although it's not what I'd consider easy, I'm now on the last page (6) of it and will probably be done entirely in a month or 2.

In contrast, Chopin's Nocturne Op.55-1 sounds and looks a *lot* tougher, especially since it's quite fast at times!! Yet, it's categorized as a grade 7 piece.

I admit to being a bit confused as to why...