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!
334 replies
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Wow, there are some really intense selections for a four week challenge! I'm looking forward to all the listening. =)
Maybe I will go big as well. I have an unresolved history with Debussy's "Mouvement" from Images Bk. 1. It has been 8 years since I worked on it. Since then we have lived together but have not spoken.
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Well, the perilous journey to the Death Star starts tomorrow, so here’s my plan for the week: Most of the final movement of Scriabin’s 3rd Sonata consists of brief melodic gestures in the right hand over widely arpeggiated figures in the left hand (see example below). It’s those left hand passages that make up 90% of the piece’s considerable difficulties. So, this week I will practice only the six sections containing those figures, and I will practice nothing but the left hand alone. Scriabin’s published goal tempo is 58 bpm for the dotted half note (= quarter note 174); I had at some point reached quarter note = 144 (dotted half note = 48) for the left hand alone with reasonable accuracy; that’s respectable, but unquestionably too slow. I am hoping to get closer to something like a performance tempo over the course of this month.
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I would like to try Rachmaninoff prelude op 32 no 5. I had some lessons on this, years ago but stopped before any real progress was made. Best wishes Simon
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I want to use this challenge to finish relearning my own composition from 1987. I have started it already and can play it somehow, but I want to bring it up on a stage-performance-level.