Is this piece a good representation of my skill level [Mozart Sonata K.545 - I.]

[doubleconcerto]

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-6Lcnb8O_JyuxgSuNpjJKuRqSkAhqaE6/view?usp=sharing

For context, I've been playing for over 6 years, but for 2, maybe 3 of those I was playing pieces that were way above my skill level. For the past few months, I've been trying to find my "true" skill level so that I can start moving through repertoire properly and not spending months on a single piece, among other steps I'm trying to take to do progress the "right" way.

I've been working on this piece for two weeks. Going off of the metric that a piece within your skill level should take only a couple of weeks to learn, I think pieces around this level could be reasonable to play going forward. I understand this doesn't sound "finished" but I would say it's at least "learned". If I get to this point in a piece at this level, do I take another 2 weeks to fine-tune it and be satisfied with taking one month to finish pieces, or should I move down a level to find pieces that I can fully complete in 2 weeks?

What do y'all think? Please be brutally honest!

[lelle]

Just my 2 cents. What you are asking is a bit subjective and may vary between teachers. I think others should comment as well.

I think this is a good piece for you to study. It's a bit outside your "comfortable" skill range, but not totally beyond you, but it stretches you and exposes areas for you to develop. Just some focused, mindful refining your overall scale technique, especially passing over the thumb, and getting that transferred over to this piece, would 5x how well you play it. So I think this is a piece you could benefit a lot studying for another 2 weeks, zeroing in on the parts that are not fully working for you and focusing on improving that.

Combine studying something like this, which stretches you a bit, with a few slightly easier pieces to broaden your exposure to various skills and just music in general, and I think you are working in a fairly good spot.

[pascalxus]

I think people associate taking on harder and harder pieces as a means of progress and challenging oneself.

But, there are other ways to challenge yourself.  You can do lots of moderately difficult pieces or even lots of pieces you can finish quickly.  the advantage of this, is that you build more site reading abilities and you might even make faster progress overall because your learning more situations and more contexts.  Think of this way: 3 moderately difficults pieces vs 1 super difficult piece.  If those two both take the same amount of time to master then the moderate difficult pieces will give you more breadth of knowledge and may even allow you to learn more.   

I mean, which do you think you'll learn more from reading:
1 difficult book (read 3 times or 1 time slowly)
or 3 moderate difficulty books.

[ranjit]

Ah, I've been frustrated so often by this very question. The answer, while frustrating, is that whether or not a piece is most appropriate for your current level of development is whether that piece allows you to improve close to "optimally". That is, the piece should teach you new things (not too easy), while not taking an inordinate amount of time to do so (not too hard). Often learning 3 moderately difficult pieces in sequence can increase your rate of progress faster (and might be learned quicker) than learning 1 difficult piece.

Also, in addition to technical development, there is the aspect of increasing learning efficiency. Every piece you learn up to a good standard increases your efficiency at learning new music ever so slightly. You see the patterns better, you make more sense of the musical direction, you use all kinds of things which you've understood about music to speed up your rate of learning of a new piece. You also have a much better idea of the amount of time that it might take, and can pace yourself better.

I would suggest having a teacher who can really guide you through this. What's difficult is that there are so many stages of having "learned" a piece. Even if you can play it note perfect, the technique might be producing poor sound quality, or might be tense. Musical elements would be missing at all kinds of levels. Your memorization strategy might be poor. It might not be secure enough. It might have taken you too long. I would often bring teachers pieces which I had memorized from scratch in one week, and could play correctly, and they would tell me I wasn't ready for the piece -- it would drive me nuts. But they were right.

[brogers70]

It does not sound like that piece is way beyond your abilities at all. You can definitely learn things by working on it. I'd also say that you should not underestimate the value of playing lots of easy pieces. Spending too high a proportion of your time on things that push your technique to the edge means (1) you spend a disproportionate amount of time working on how to hit the right notes rather than how to get the piece to sound beautiful and (2) you spend a lot of your time at the piano feeling like you are struggling, and down the road that can cause problems with performance anxiety. I once took a whole year and played only things that were well below my technical level. It was lots of fun, and I ended up with a much friendlier relationship with the instrument and less performance anxiety than I had when most of what I worked on was at the leading edge of my abilities. After that year I switched back towards doing things that stretched my technique, but not to the exclusion of doing easier things, too.