The ABRSM exam; or “How I learned to mess-up music”

The day that’s been on my mind for a while has now been and gone; I’ve finally taken my first ABRSM exam and have lived to tell the tale… just.

Preparation

A day off work to do some final practice and generally relax before the 3.06pm exam started. Methodically worked through all the scales and chords a number of times, subjected myself to an entire book of sight-reading exercises, and a final few play throughs of the three pieces just to keep them fresh in my head.

As suggested on the ABRSM website I arrived at the exam centre in good time and was quite surprised that I wasn’t too nervous. A rather eccentric old chap was in the waiting room already; he was there to accompany a young singer who was late. He happily told me a few horror stories of some of his students’ exams which was nice of him and then he was gone, leaving me to sit and wait alone.

The exam

This may sound odd, but the stool at the piano in the exam room was really small. I mean so small that I felt as if I’d fall off if I moved just a little way left or right. I’ve always practised on a bench so this ended up being my biggest issue of the day for some reason!

The piano was a lovely upright, and the examiner kindly let me play a few scales to get used to it before starting the exam. Did this warm up help me much… at all! We started on C# on the right hand (easy) and followed with F# on the left which is where it all started going wrong! I don’t know what happened by my left hand decided to do it’s own thing and just started hitting random keys. Thankfully the examiner asked me if I’d like to try that one again and so I did, this time rather more successfully!

The rest of the scales and chords went by with no issues. Next up were the 3 pieces that I’ve practised in excess of what must be 5000 times these last 2 months. So of course I stuffed up the last 4 bars of the Menuet — arrgh! It was at the bit where my hands kind of go into automatic mode but this time they just went very wrong. Oh well, nothing I could do about that now. The other two pieces went much better with only an odd random note added to the Tarantella at some point.

Next up; sight-reading – I’ve been looking forward to this one! The piece was simple and elegant on the sheet, and I managed to play it through just fine in the practise time. However when it came to play it through properly I managed to hit the wrong # keys twice, but while keeping rhythm and ‘feeling’ which I’ve heard is more important!

Finally the aural part of the exam seemed to go by very quickly and I don’t think I’ve done awful on that part. As expected my singing was pretty amazing… in a bad way but there’s nothing I can do about that.

Leaving the exam room was great; a realisation that a huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders. As I walked back to the car I saw that my piano teacher wasn’t able to keep away and had come to find out how it went which was really nice. I was still in a bit of a state of shock at that point so don’t know if I made any sense when I talked through the exam.

So that’s it for now! 2 weeks or so of waiting for the result. I’m guessing I should pass but not expecting much more than that. If I fail… well might as well crack on with Grade 2 anyway!