Week 1: A New Hope
Starting on May 4th...
Welcome to the Unfinished Business Challenge — and the beginning of our four-week musical adventure!
Every great journey starts with a first step (and some hope!) This week is about choosing your piece: something you’ve always wanted to learn, something you started and left behind, or something unfinished that keeps calling you back.
This Week’s Mission
Choose one piece (or excerpt) to stay with throughout the challenge.
A few ideas:
- A piece you’ve always meant to finish
- Something abandoned years ago that deserves a second life
- A new piece you’ve been waiting for the right moment to begin
- A small excerpt from a larger dream piece
Big or small, all choices are welcome. What matters is that it feels like your unfinished business.
This Week, Share:
- What piece did you choose?
- Why this piece?
- Is there a musical challenge or goal you hope to work through this month?
If you’d like, post a recording of where you’re starting from — even a rough first read. We’d love to hear it.
Over the next four weeks we’ll build momentum together!
60 replies
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I had been hoping (no pun intended) for one of these Unfinished Business Challenges to come along sometime soon; they always are timely and most welcome. I’ll sign up with Alexander Scriabin, Sonata No. 3 F# minor Op. 23, IV. movement (Presto con fuoco) on which I have been working hard for a long time, but only ever intermittently, and for which I really could use this extra push to get it - and with it, finally, the whole sonata - over the finish line and ready for performance.
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I will either finish one of the many Chopin Mazurkas that I started a long time ago, or relearn his Nocturne in B-flat Minor (which I didn't realize I had forgotten until very recently).
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I would like to play Chopin Ballade 2 op 38 for this challenge. It's the one Chopin ballade I have not yet performed on Tonebase, so it will also mark a finishing of the set (Though I plan to revisit them all in not too long).
Where I'm at with this piece is that I learned the notes to it about a year ago, but it was far far away from a performance level. So the job is pretty clear - bring back the notes, and get it to speed.
Let's hope the force will guide me through the ballade, though I may have to use the dark side for some of these passages.
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I would like to learn the Bach-Brahms Chaconne for the left hand. It's not exactly "unfinished business" (well, in a way, every piece is).
Over the past few weeks, I've been playing excerpts from it, at first purely as a left-hand exercise. But very quickly I became captivated by the piece: the incredible music, the many possibilities it offers for developing aspects of left-hand technique (often overlooked), the wide range of expression it demands...
So, I've decided to embrace the challenge -which is always motivating- and study it properly. My goal is to learn and play at least 16 variations (half of the piece). Perhaps that's too ambitious; I'm not sure... But, I know I'm going to enjoy it!
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This is already a ridiculously exciting programme so far. We're on fire, friends!
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I think I'll re-visit BWV 999 (Bach's Little Prelude in c minor). I started it last fall, then life became complicated and I didn't have the mental reserves to make any progress with the piece (like so much, perhaps all, of Bach there is a great deal of intellectual energy required when playing it), so it stalled and I decided to put it to the side and come back to it later. It is now later! My goal for the month is to put all the pieces together and play it all the way through with focus and energy.