The Wind

Chee-Hwa Tan is a Malaysian-American composer and pianist (Singapore-born; teaches in the United States) whose A Child's Garden of Verses takes its inspiration from Robert Louis Stevenson's 1885 collection of children's poems. The Wind is set to Stevenson's text I saw you toss the kites on high — the keyboard version captures the gusting, restless feeling of the poem.

What the piece tests is fluency across hand positions and dynamic shaping over a short span. The right hand moves in stepwise quaver patterns that imitate gusts; there are small position shifts but no thumb-tucks. The dynamic plan rises and falls within four bars, then resets — a clear miniature arch. Hand-coordination is not difficult; the demand is on touch.

Two pitfalls. First, students play the right-hand quavers too evenly. The piece is wind, not a drill — uneven slurring (with the strong note on the slur start) sells the gust character. Second, the dynamic shaping gets ironed flat under exam pressure; players default to mp throughout. The single most useful practice strategy is to mark the dynamic peaks with a finger-press exaggeration and pull back from there.

Public-domain recordings of Stevenson's Child's Garden read aloud (LibriVox) are a cheap but useful way to internalise the poem's pace before sitting down with the score.