John Thompson Fifth Grade Technique

I just bought this book. Here's what I think of it.


Table of Contents

Bach
Beethoven
Brahms
Chopin
Daquin
Franck
Grieg
Handel
Haydn
Hummel
Liadow
Liszt, MacDowell, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Moszkowski, Paderewski, Rachmaninoff, Rubinstein, Schubert, Schumann, Weber.

Lemme just say that the lone appearance of the word "scherzo" petrifies me.

I played the first bar of the excerpt from Bach's Allemande today (July 25, 2015). It is to be played "legato throughout with utmost smoothness." I think all the pieces have been placed in order of difficulty in the text, despite the alphabetized table of contents, because the excerpts from Chopin's etudes and ballades are all toward the end. Day two, and I've basically just been playing those few notes over and over without moving on to another bar. I'm going to treat it like an etude, and I think that means getting the notes so ingrained in my fingers that I'll be able to speed it up to a... well, to a fifth grade level. I figure I have time, since I'm not actually in the fifth grade yet.

Update (April 16, 2016): I started previewing the excerpt from Schubert's Impromptu (Op. 90, No. 2) a couple weeks ago (around April 1, 2016 or a few days before.) The C Minor scale is familiar from having played CPE Bach's Solfeggietto and Haydn's Menuetto (in E^♭ Major, but still...), but I haven't got everything down well enough to try for speed yet. And I've kind of forgotten to practise it for the past week or two. Will get back into it soon.