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Bach is always good! I'd suggest maybe trying the Anna Magdalena notebook if you're really a beginner. I don't want to sound condescending, but the two-part inventions are trickier than they might seem, more so if you want them to sound musical and polished! Bach always takes more work than it would seem. I would recommend practicing all of the scales, both major and all groups of minor scales (natural, harmonic, and melodic). Every pianist should learn the scales and fingerings for them and such. What you should focus on is a proper balance of things you need and things you want. Learn a piece or chart that you want to learn, but make you sure you balance it out with about 60% more of stuff you need. Not only does this provide goals for you (being willing to work through the stuff you need to do in order to reward yourself with stuff you like) but it also provides something to look forward to before every practice session. Practice slowly when learning your music, and even after you've "mastered" it, go slowly back over all of the sections for accuracy. Once you learn all of your theory and are technically proficient enough to play a large portion of the standard piano rep, you're more able to put the stuff you need on the back burner and actually play what you want for 90% of the time. Just so you know, this takes years of dedication. But it's easily achievable for anyone with the focus and desire. So, get at it! :) Now, I know this thread is about rep, but I felt like I should say something. :P I don't want to step on your teacher's toes, if you have one. Good rep ideas: Mozart K1-K5, or if you're looking for something a little tougher, Haydn has some wonderful piano sonatas that are technically achievable. Clementi and Kuhlau have some fun stuff as well! You might take a look at some of their sonatinas. If you want something more romantic, some of the Chopin mazurkas are do-able, though expressively, they're an enormous challenge. Stephen Heller wrote some fine piano etudes as well, you might check some of those out. Anyways, I think this is quite enough to get started with, so have at it and good luck! ;)

Some unchallenging but enjoyable stuff: Burgmuller's op. 100 Fur Elise (obviously) Satie's Gymnopedies and Gnossienes (also obviously) Schumann's Kinderscenen Shchedrin's Humoresque A bunch of Mompou stuff Alkan's Transcendental Etudes (the most obvious of them all) Just adding to your list of potential rep pieces.

As a guitar player and a huge Miles Davis fan, I can't tell if you're being serious or not.

Quality eh? I don't know, to me it all seems some kind of bizarre worship relationship where it doesn't really matter what anyone writes, but only that it be according to that one style, ensuring that whatever comes out is only just a copy which will, again, live in the shadow of the preferred warhorse. I can hardly call composing something that is explicitly void of creativity and only aims to copy. It's a good theory exercise I suppose. It's also a way to just remain comfortable and cozy, since despite whatever comparisons you can always say "like X! See?" to justify anything you did, taking away any kind of responsibility the composer may have had for the piece. In fact, that's why this bothers me so much: if composition is making decisions then this is simply a large single decision to auto-pilot as all decisions have been made for you ahead of time. And really that's not how any of the warhorses worked at all, they broke things and bent rules accordingly, they are known for their decisions and not just blatant copying. It's kind of a disservice to their creativity as composers to do only recreations, because none of them did this. In fact, all those warhorses? They wrote "new music" and were rather modern for their time, haha. The irony.

What I don't understand is why it's OK for academics - or anyone else, really - to make the kind of pronouncements you're making SSC. I hear a lot of judgments. So what if, as you say, doing what we historicists do is like only eating cheeseburgers for the rest of our lives? If the music is quality, and a lot of it is, then what difference does that make? Setting one's feet in and vowing derision, sight unseen, merely on principle, of anything that doesn't happen to fit one's own values - that sounds like the kind of thing this thread is arguing against. It seems to me that we all need to set aside our prejudices a bit more. It's true we can't judge the value of a work of art without some kind of standard to hold it against, and that's part of why we're all here; but to automatically dismiss as worthless anything that doesn't happen to match our values is short-sighted. A person like that can have all kinds of letters after his name, but that doesn't make him any less a bigot.

I agree with Cramer that the piece has form, an ABAB, sort of -- the grand staves coupled with the leggiero arpeggio section. When you say it doesn't have form, do you simply mean that it's meant to be freeform? :hmmm: I too believe the thematic material is interesting and strangely beautiful -- definitely a keeper. I enjoy the dissonance of the grandiose beginning, with the uneven meter and the soft flowing feeling of the B section. :) In fact, to be absolutely honest, I don't really feel like there's anything wrong with the piece at all -- even transition issues. There doesn't seem to be anything a convincing and experienced performer couldn't make work. However, I don't want to discourage you from trying to better yourself, of course, since that would defeat the entire point of me commenting. That's my opinion -- if you are not happy with your own piece, you must work until it is as you imagine it being :nod: Maybe you would like it better if you started subtly introducing some arpeggios as a second voice in pianissimo in measures 14-19? Just a thought. Thanks for sharing, this piece was a real pleasure to listen to :phones:

Well the criticism, discouragement and ridicule is somewhat deserved as well since writing style copies as a life-long goal is pretty much like saying you'll only eat cheeseburgers for the rest of your life. Sure, you and everyone is free to do whatever they want, but I wouldn't expect it to be free of criticism or ridicule. If anything, is because it's not really creative at all when all you can say is "Well X wouldn't do it this way," it's just writing what others did. All your work amounts to simply building replicas that will forever live in the shadow of the warhorses. I think that's kind of a sad life goal, but w/e I'm not these people. I've written works in all sorts of styles, but never 100% style copy since that's boring as hell, it'd be just an exercise since there's nothing from me in there. But I also think that Gianluca guy is a complete retard given my previous exchanges with him, so I think that he can't take criticism has less to do with anything academics have to say and rather with him just being an donkey.

In Gianluca's defense, I would only add that it's likely his hypersensitivity - and that of many historicists - is born of years, even decades, of discouragement and even outright ridicule at the hands of the academic community. We're making inroads, but it's been a long time coming. I quit college because my professors told me that not only could I not do what I was doing as a composer under their tutelage, but I couldn't do it EVER. Where does anyone, especially a teacher, get off saying something like that? Thankfully I've learnt how to take a little criticism, but if Gianluca can't yet, we might consider the possible reason for that.

It's comical now, especially the 'orchestration' errors in my solo piano works! I just lol'd really. I know I'm not the best composer BUT I'm grateful that I have a mind on my shoulders and am able to learn the things I'm lacking on. It's just comical really.

Oh God... if only I'd known you were going to do that, I might have saved you the trouble. Gianluca is, well, volatile. He's one of those who can't take any form of criticism. There have been a few of those here, too, who go off volcanically when anyone dares question or critique them; though I won't name any names, I'm sure you know whom I might be talking about. The only critique I ever saw fit to make of Gianluca's work was a piano quartet he wrote in a ca. 1790 Classical style; I merely pointed out that he'd written several high-Gs in, and most fortepianos didn't yet have a high-G in the time period he was emulating (one has only to look at Beethoven's first 15 sonatas and first 2 piano concerti to know this, and Gianluca prides himself on score-study). His response was was very high-strung, though he did admit he was grateful. I never made the mistake again, though.

It's funny though, I posted works on YouTube - mostly modern piano works. I commented on the work of a Gianluca Bersaneti (I think I got that right), cause I felt the work I had listened to could've been done a lot better. He seemed to hide behind embellishments and the counterpoint just wasn't that imaginative. His response was to create a second youtube account and accuse me of having a big ego, voted down all my works, and then claim I had no knowledge of counterpoint, harmony, and orchestration. Mind you, all my works on YouTube were piano works - kind of hard to mess up the orchestration on those. Using the YouTube insight to view how long he viewed my works (under 3 secs each), it was clear to me that his complaint had less to do with the actual quality of my work but instead his view that modern works (As a whole) are inferior to anything else previously. It's this kind of thing that irks me beyond end - especially considering I love all types of music! It's a shame that composers can't appreciate each other without looking at the styles they compose.

***notices the crickets chirping*** Is this little experiment of mine that bad? :musicwhistle:

Please don't think I'm gloating - I'm not - but I find it extremely interesting that the mavens of modernism here are coming off as just a little defensive. There was a time, and not so long ago, when there would have been no need for it, as modernism, avant-garde, whatever you want to call it, was secure in its supremacy, but evidently the paradigm has shifted ever-so-slightly. Who the hell uses 443Hz, and more importantly, why? Some artificial brilliance when you can't coax it out at International Pitch? Please. 440Hz has been the standard for a long time now; instruments are built nowadays to conform to this pitch. Why muck it up, forcing people to tighten their mouthpieces, reeds and strings, which only adds tension to the sound? This is one of MY pet peeves.

Something very interesting happened just a few minutes ago. After my last comment in this thread, I sat down and tried to write something modern. I can occasionally coax modern ideas, and tonight I was actually inspired. I wrote 10 measures of a Berceuse for woodwind quintet (ostensibly as a companion piece to my 'Secondi'), and it was going very well, when suddenly, the power went out - something that doesn't happen every day in Los Angeles. I hadn't saved the file yet, nor had I committed what I'd written reliably to memory; so that little idea is probably lost forever. I find the irony of this a little too palpable to ignore. Maybe God is trying to tell me something - like "keep doing what you do best, kid, and leave the rest to others. That's why I put you on this planet."