How to Gauge if a Piece is within your level or not?

Determining if a piece is within your level or not is not an easy task and also saying if music A is easier or harden than B can be misleading. For example, there are easier pieces, but with octaves. For someone with big hands this is easy, for someone with smaller hands it would be more advanced, because it will require more training.

Usually, teachers have a pretty good feeling of what a student is capable of doing and also knows a good repertoire tested and used for students for different levels.

If you are studying without a teacher, it is also a difficult task to say your level by the pieces you are playing. The reason is (1) we don’t know if you play them well for someone at an adequate level to be learning them (if you play 90% of it well, but goes terribly bad in an harder passage of it, it is a sign that it is above your level, since usually the level of a piece is given by its harder section) (2) it is always possible to learn well a piece a level above yours, but it will take just much more time (so, one advice in choosing a repertoire is choosing most things at your level and also below and maybe once in a while one that is just in the next level).

With all the disclaimers above, if you go to the website of Henle (it is a famous sheet music publisher), they give levels to musics in their catalogue. As I said, level is not set in stone, it is just someone giving grades that would not be judged the same for everyone.

To me there is a conflicting message when you say you are quite a beginner and on the other hand looking the pieces you say you play (pardon me if I’m wrong). Usually, someone playing those pieces would already have developed a so so sense of what is within their range.

What I recommend doing to gauge your level is: look at the level of your pieces at Henle, start with the one with the lowest grade of them. Check other pieces in the same level, do you feel you can play them? If it is clearly too easy, check the next grade. If it is too hard, look a level below. When you feel it is within your level, check the pieces a level below to make a reality test, do you feel very comfortable playing them? (Like, in 1h training them, would you make something that already looks like music with something below your level? Do you think with your daily practice routine, the pieces one level lower than yours, would you take them to a good level very quickly as to get a bunch of them done too fast so you change repertoire too fast? This fast is very subjective, I work with repertoire for one semester, so to me easier pieces could be done in 2-3 months of normal training, the ones at my level would take about 4 to 6 (and sometimes more, because I may take more time to solve technical problems for a specific piece, one example of the imperfection of level gauging - but a necessary part of your learning cycle to evolve) months to be taken to a recital. [please notice that this is just an example, it is within my personal goals, the amount of practice I can have, etc. May be unrealistic or too slow depending on the person].

I hope this helps.