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!
47 replies
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Rachmaninoff's Sonata no.2 used to be my go-to piece. Last year I made a recording that I'm more or less satisfied with, then moved on to other pieces. I have forgotten most of it now. Needed something like this challenge to motivate me, so I will be relearning a movement of it for this challenge!
Edit: forgot to answer an important question. The biggest challenge for me is actually forget as much as I can about how I played it in the past. My technique has evolved since last year and whatever I remember from last year could get in the way of applying my current way of playing.
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So, I started Schumann Op. 12 last year, spent a few weeks on it and then life got too "lifey". Going back to learn at least one movement.
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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.