Our hands are now fully independent from each other and the fingers can play faster passages with increasingly less tension. We know how to use the force and weight in our arms, as well as the mobility of our fingers in order to create diverse qualities of sounds in a piece of music. Our theoretical knowledge and aural skills help us in learning pieces with ease and extending our improvs. Therefore, we start taking informed and argumented decisions in regards to how we play a piece of music and we can closely analize the music we listen to. We have a diverse repertoire, encompassing complex pieces that we study in detail and we start learning how to manage our emotions and deliver a small recital by memory.
We collect a lot of different pieces in our repertoire and we already know which musical styles we prefer playing. We have gathered enough knowledge to start analysing our own pianistic successes and failures and we start to understand the mechanisms we need to apply in our practice in order to get what we want. We have a close knowledge of the keyboard and we start using the piano pedals, making our pieces that much more impressive. Our theoretical knowledge starts to make its way into both the diversity of our improvs and the quality of our interpretations, while our fingers become more and more agile.
We are strongly secure on managing rhythm and we gain more and more confidence in reading musical scores. Now we can explore extreme registers on the piano, play with more complex accompaniments for the left hand and our wrists become more flexible so that we can display larger contrasts in the sounds we make on the piano. We can read patterns rather than individual notes on the score, we extend our vocabulary and we can recognise the details of a written or heard piece of music with more ease. Our repertoire becomes more diverse and we could even participate in a piano competition for beginners.
We play with both hands at the same time and we tackled the first tehnical exercises – scales, arpeggios, chords – as well as the first theory notions. Our hands gain more and more independence, managing the difference between melody and accompaniment, our improvs become more interesting through the use of chords and the pieces we play become more diverse. We start using a more tehnical language when it comes to talking about music and we can play the same piece in several different ways.
We know how the instrument works and how to recognise each key, how to sit properly at the piano and even how to improvise from the first lesson. We can move our fingers with almost complete independence and we know how to use the natural weight of the arm when pressing the piano keys. We can read simple music scores, transfer the melody from one hand to another by using the correct fingering without interrupting the rhythm and we can identify and play the shape of a melody just by listening to it.
