Trinity London

This post is woefully overdue: Grouch has been on the Trinity Guildhall Grade 3 piano syllabus since 2009 (the syllabus expires at the end of this year, 2011), and YouTube has its share of student performances from around the world! Grouch is an unusual composition in the Little Peppers series in that so much of the piece is built of a single unaccompanied line (albeit shared between the hands). This means that clarity is especially important, as is tone. With the melodic material cascading from one hand to the other students will need to give particular attention to matching the sound from one hand to the next, and be warned: this is far more challenging than matching tone from one finger to the next! An additional challenge is that the melody-sharing does not always happen in the same way: the right hand plays a D at the start of bars 1 and 2, but at bar 3 the left hand plays

read more Grouch: some teaching notes from the composer