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!
344 replies
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For week 1, here is the A section of Brahms 117/2. I am trying to memorize early, as I learn, so pardon the typos. For next week, I hope to make the A section smoother (and better balanced between the melody and other notes) and make significant progress in the next section.
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On hearing the phrase "Unfinished Business" I immediately thought of Beethoven Op. 109 which I started learning several years ago. I had learnt most of it but it needed a lot of work and with life stuff getting in the way, I had less time to dedicate to it and lost motivation. This was a pity as it's a piece I've always loved for its ethereal qualities and innovation. Therefore this challenge is a wonderful prompt to brush it off and get stuck in with renewed vigour!
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I would like to finish learning Liebeslied (Widmung), by Schumann (arranged for piano by Liszt). I first listened to this piece in 2021 on YouTube during the recital by the winner of the 18th Chopin Competition. The performance inspired me to learn it. I started practicing but stopped as life got busy. Now that I have more free time, I would like to go back to this beautiful piece and finally play it through all the way.
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End of week one, I can actually play all the way through at a relatively steady, albeit devastatingly slow, pace reminiscent of a slow-motion scene in a horror movie (actually, I'm thinking of Austin Powers and the steam-roller....horror-ible in a different way). This is the first time I've ever played all the way through, and normally at this stage I'm still doing sections - which I will now go back to! One goal is to improve this tempo by the end of 4-weeks, improving from devastatingly slow to merely outrageously slow. Another side goal is to have it memorized.
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Thank you for this challenge! I am working on the Waltz in E op34 by Moszkowski. I started this piece some time ago and would like to work on being able to play the whole piece with confidence. I find this waltz challenging as it is long, intense and technically demanding. I love the different sections and images that are created throughout the piece.
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Here is my "baseline video" - actually, there are six of them, but they are all very short. I did not record a baseline status of the entire movement because, as I had said initially, that's not what I practiced this week. Instead, I practiced the left hand only of the six sections that constitute the major hurdles of this movement. No one should feel compelled to listen to any of these videos; they are joyless practice recordings and mainly for my own use to document a starting point. If you do listen to them and hear odd breaks in the line of the figurations: yes, sometimes those are hesitations before finding the next note, but usually those are spots when a note would be played by the right hand.
https://vimeo.com/1191021599/a0b725a3ed?fl=ip&fe=ec
https://vimeo.com/1191022142/6bd21e129c?fl=ip&fe=ec
https://vimeo.com/1191022770/e61bafe6e0?fl=ip&fe=ec
https://vimeo.com/1191023092/c223761c78?fl=ip&fe=ec