IMSLP Forums

as a member of "Huismuziek", a dutch chamber music organisation, I am faced with this problem:
we organise chambermusic days for musicians, who have no experience in chambermusic. The goal of these days: give these people a chance to discover the fun of playing chamber music.
Rather often we are faced with the complaint: this music is to difficult.
This problem has 2 sides:
1) you must carefully figure out, beforehand, the level of playing of the musicians. However, there is a standard, by which you can measure this.
2) you have to be sure about the level of difficulty of the music these musicians are going to play.
MY QUESTION:
is it possible for the IMSLP to give a rating of the level of difficulty to pieces of music (for amateurs)?

This has been asked several times before, see for instance this thread: viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3531
The short answer is that no, it's not really possible for us to give difficulty ratings at this point. It couldn't be 'easy/medium/hard' because that's too subjective, so we'd have to rely on objective analysis of specific technical challenges - which I'd guess few people would be willing to spend the time doing. In any case I don't think there's any chance we would be able to come up with any sort of comprehensive system of ratings (i.e., one that covers more than a handful of works).
Someone did start a list of easy piano trios here: http://imslp.org/wiki/List_of_Compositi ... Piano_Trio This could potentially be of some help for you, but it's debatable how easy they really are - I just had a glance at one and the piano part actually looked like intermediate-advanced student level; is that higher than the level you usually get, or is it a wide spectrum?

If the chamber music contains a violin part, a good way to gauge the whole piece's difficulty is if the violinist you have can play the 1st violin part. In most string quartets by Beethoven and before, the 1st violin part is the most difficult of the four, followed, at times by the cello line. In Haydn's Op20 and Op33 quartets, for example, almost all the good lines go to the 1st violin! As for pieces that also contain a piano, I've found that it is easier to find sufficiently skilled pianists (at least in NYC) than string players.

The opposite approach can also be helpful. If your 2nd violin or viola can't play their parts, the piece will have to be rejected. Unfortunately if this is the case, you are left with pieces that can be pretty uninteresting, which goes against your overall goal of producing enthusiastic players.

--Sixtus