Set pieces and reviews
Exam pieces — editorial reviews
List A
List A · G major · 112 bpm
Allegro moderato (first movement from Sonatina in G, Op. 300 No. 93)
Louis Köhler
Köhler was the great Königsberg pedagogue of the mid-nineteenth century: his sonatinas are not concert works but study works, written to teach Classical-style two-hand textures with the kind of clarity that Clementi and Kuhlau had set out a generation earlier.
Read review →
List A · F major · 120 bpm
Allegro in F (from London Sketchbook, K. 15a)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
The *London Sketchbook* (K.
Read review →
List A · A minor · 132 bpm
Tarantella Twist (from Piano Grades Are Go!, Grades 2–3)
Victoria Proudler
Proudler is a British composer and educator whose *Piano Grades Are Go!* series (Editions Musica Ferrum) packages early-grade material with a deliberate energy and humour — pieces designed to be enjoyed, not just practised.
Read review →
List B
List B · F major · 76 bpm
Where Is Love? (from Oliver!, arr. Iles)
Lionel Bart
Bart's *Oliver!* (1960) is one of the great post-war British musicals; *Where Is Love?* is the first-act ballad in which the orphaned Oliver asks an empty room for the mother he never knew.
Read review →
List B · C major · 80 bpm
Douce amie (from Album pour les tout-petits, Op. 103)
Mélanie Hélène Bonis (Mel Bonis)
Bonis was a French composer who studied with César Franck at the Paris Conservatoire, was admired by Saint-Saëns, and wrote across orchestral, chamber, vocal and piano repertoire — but spent much of her career hidden behind a contracted byline (*Mel Bonis*) so that her work could be performed at all.
Read review →
List B · C major · 80 bpm
Always with Me (from Spirited Away)
Youmi Kimura & Wakako Kaku
*Always with Me* (*Itsumo Nando Demo*) is the closing-credits song of Hayao Miyazaki's *Spirited Away* (2001) — written by Wakako Kaku (lyrics) and composed and originally sung by Youmi Kimura.
Read review →
List C
List C · G major · 116 bpm
Allegretto (No. 3 from For Children, Vol. 2)
Béla Bartók
Bartók's *For Children* (Sz.
Read review →
List C · C major · 144 bpm
The Muppet Show Theme
Jim Henson & Sam Pottle
*The Muppet Show* (1976–81) opened with a fanfare-style theme written by Jim Henson and Sam Pottle — a brassy, off-beat march that has stayed in the collective ear long after the show itself stopped airing.
Read review →
List C · A minor · 72 bpm
The Quiet of the Night
Shruthi Rajasekar
Rajasekar is an Indian-American composer (Princeton; SOAS) whose music draws on Carnatic vocal tradition as much as on Western art-music idioms.
Read review →
Syllabus sections
- List Aplaceholder
- List Bplaceholder
- List Cplaceholder
- Scales
- Sight-reading
- Aural
- Theory
- Practice planplaceholder
External reading