Easy Arrangements for the Intermediate PIanist

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Over the course of making analysis videos of the great classical canon, I realized that a part of my audience are in the situation of having more love for the music than they have the technique required to play them. They’re not professional musicians, whether established or aspiring, but keen amateurs, in the positive sense of the word. They have other professions and callings in life than being a concert pianist. They don’t have to practice several hours daily for the demands of musician work, but practice as much they want to because it’s fun and stimulating. It’s a hobby, but a hobby they are passionately in love with.

It's nothing wrong with aiming for great but difficult pieces in order to develop one’s technique further, but it can be discouraging if they are too advanced for one's current abilities. The demands of playing classical solo piano repertoire are brutal. No other instrument than keyboard requires of the musician to produce several voices simultaneously but independent of each other. And all notes still need to be carefully produced with exactly the right dynamic, articulation and expression; formed together with pedalling, phrasing and musical development; and taking into account the acoustics and the instrument, and so on. It puts immense pressure on the brain signals out to the fingers, hands, arms and feet to move with extreme precision and small margins. Oh, and by the way, thousands of notes need to be memorized because you don’t even have time to look at the score when the hands move so quickly, and it’s anyway just a hassle turning all the pages.

Looking at all this, I wanted to create a solution that would make the great classical pieces more accessible and enjoyable for the dedicated amateur pianist. The result is Simple Solutions Edition, a collection of easy arrangements specifically tailored to the intermediate pianist. They still require some work to get your hands around, because they still require both hands to play independently, but the scope of difficulty is thoughtfully reduced. I have chosen a number of pieces that presents themselves as suitable for such an arrangement, i.e. mostly pieces in a slower tempo as their main expressive idea, grouped into three volumes with slightly different profiles.

Simple Solutions Edition – where the spirit of the classical canon meets the heart of the amateur pianist.