What is the Average level of all piano music?

[lostinidlewonder]

If you took all the piano pieces ever written and found the average difficulty of them all, what would it be? Which piece or pieces do you think would represent the average?

[perfect_pitch]

When you mean 'all the pieces written' - do you mean from the Major classical composers (classical in the loose sense) or Jazz??? All the introductory pieces??? There are nursery Rhymes???

I mean it seems too loose - it's like asking the average of all the numbers greater than 1??? We don't know - there seems to be an almost infinite amount of music - Hindu music - West african music

Modal exercizes - Czerny studies?

IF you were to ask what the average grade of the Major Classical composers (say from 1700 - 1900) - I'd say Grade 6 or 7, mainly because a lot of composers were writing music to perform for an audience - usually with a major importance on pianistic skill.

[lostinidlewonder]

Thanks perfect_pitch for your response. Yes the question is quite vague. Perhaps it would be easier to go through the periods of music and consider what would be the average for each as a whole and the average for the subcategories within them.

Renaissance
Baroque
Classical
Romantic
Modern+Traditional/Ethnic music

How would one subcategorize all of these periods?

When considering difficulty I guess we must look at 1) Length of the piece 2) Technical requirements 3) Musical expression required. So what the average length, technical requirement and musical expression might be could come close to an answer. Perhaps we have to classify average difficulty of pieces by keeping them seperated from periods and subcategories? I guess we could go even deeper and give averages for each composer.

I know this is a tricky question but it interests me a great deal.