Monday, February 18, 2008

More Difficult Than I Expected

Word Music and Lillenas Music use a different scale to define the different difficulty levels of their music for solo piano. Word uses the terms Easy, Intermediate, Medium Advanced and Advanced. Lillenas uses the terms Easy, Moderately Easy, Moderate, Moderately Advanced and Advanced. My best guess is that Lillenas’ Moderate would be split between Word’s Intermediate and Medium Advanced, but most of it would fall within the Intermediate category.


I was looking at their websites the other day and I was attempting to determine the difference between Word’s Medium Advanced and Lillenas’ Moderately Advanced. I clicked on one book that Lillenas has and below the product information was one of these statements that say something like “If you like this then you might like this.” I followed the link to another book by the same arranger. For this product, there were audio files to listen to. I clicked on one and thought “that’s pretty, but it’s a little more difficult than I was expecting for Moderately Advanced.” It wasn’t until later that I realized that this product is classified as Advanced, unlike the product I looked at prior to it. That is one of the problems with recommending one product based on interest in another.


Sadly, my skill level isn’t high enough to play at the advanced level. My sister is the talented one in our family and she can play at that level. I learned some time ago that anything I could learn to play in a month she can probably play sight unseen. When I was younger, I wanted to be able to play a well as my sister. I have since lowered my goal. Now, if I could just say that I played well then I think I would be happy.