Is Grade 3 piano hard?

To piano teachers or other experienced pianists, I have so far found grade 3 to be the first hurdle to a student doing grades on the piano. Students who achieve distinction or merit easily for grade 1 and 2 suddenly find grade 3 difficult and sometimes merely scrape a pass.

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Posted 12 March 2013 - 14:02

QUOTE

QUOTE(carol*piano @ Mar 12 2013, 01:59 PM)

Personally, I've always found the gap between grade 3 and grade 4 the most challenging, and this a common time for pupils to give up. (Obviously, as VST says, all pupils are different, but if you've been teaching 20 odd years, you do start to notice some patterns). I think you're right in that it's note reading that starts to become a problem. It's possible to memorise grade 1, 2 and even 3 pieces, but it gets harder as you go up the grades, and there comes a point when the work required is more than the pupils are prepared to do. I'm not sure there is anything, in general, that you can do about it. A lot of pupils eventually reach a point where improvement requires more work than they are prepared to put in. For some this will be grade 1, for some grade 3, grade 5 is another common stopping point, and of course grade 8. On the whole Ii agree with this, though each pupil remains an individual and a lot depends on what outside music coincides with any particular grade. I find that the big technical battle is at Grade 2, as maggiemay says, with the hands together scales, but that the big reading battle can come at Grade 3 as carol*paino says.This last point is interesting in that I have a Grade 2 pupil preparing for her exam in June and she is a very poor reader. She went to French solfege classes which she hated and in which she did a lot of note reading totally unconnected with either voice or instrument. She is well motivated and tries to improve her reading and I found myself justifying the amount of time we were spending on this by telling her that if we didn't crack the problem she would have great difficulty with Grade 3. She asked why and I said that as pieces become more complex and longer it is much less easy to memorise them.Grade 3 can often, in the case of my pupils, come at the beginning of secondary school and I think it is very important to have a range of exam pieces that are very appealing to the ear at this stage. Since tastes differ widely I think it particularly important to offer quite contrasting choices within each list.One of the problems with teenagers is that they often don't have the ability to play pieces that are sufficiently satisfying for their new level of maturity. I certainly don't hold with dumbing down taste and opting for lots of jolly popular arrangements and so on. These have their place, but, in my opinion, not on the exam syllabus. For example, I don't intend to teach C1 The Policeman's Song - it's the kind of thing that becomes terribly hackneyed by the time one has spent enough time to bring it up to exam standard, even with a quick learner. I can't see C2 giving rise to howls of delight from any of my eleven/twelve year olds either. C3 is a better as is C4 and C6 has gone down well with my pupils.B4 appeals to many in this age group as it is descriptive and romanitc without being sloppy and B5 is nice for those who like a more classical, intellectual approach. As for sticking a couple of German Dances (be they by different compsoers) in the same Grade - well it doesn't say much for the imagination of the compilers particularly as they are both a bit boring.You will have guessed by now that I am not a great fan of the current Grade 3 list. However it is a difficult exam to skip - at least for my pupils. I don't see any of them making it from Grade 2 to Grade 4 without the intermediate prop of the Grade 3 exam.I apm increasingly drawn to conclude that only a really good grasp of reading will ever get pupils beyond Grade 3 in this day and age. Fluent readers learn quickly, get through more pieces, polish their pieces sooner and tire less easily. How we get them to be that fluent is another discussion.

forums.abrsm.org - To piano teachers, is grade 3 the biggest hurdle? - ABRSM forums

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