Estimated from our difficulty score, not taken from an exam syllabus. Checked against 333 works on the ABRSM syllabus: the exact grade is right 7 times out of 10, and within one grade 99 times out of 100.
Difficulty estimate by MusicCoach on a scale of 1 to 100.
Most works cluster between 45 and 65: a small score gap often marks a real step. The highlighted bar shows this work among those for the same instrument.
The MusicCoach difficulty measures a work's overall demands (technique, reading, stamina) on a shared 0-100 scale, consolidated from editorial and pedagogical reference points (Henle, exam syllabuses, curation) and our own analyses. It measures neither musical value nor the practice time YOU will need: two musicians of the same level can experience the same work very differently depending on their strengths (hands used to octaves, quick sight-reading…). The confidence reflects how many reference points sit behind the score and how well they agree — a lightly documented score is flagged “to validate”. For a truly personal bearing, the diagnostic and your space compare each work to YOUR estimated level, which the score alone cannot do.
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This A minor sonata has a nervous, incisive character, with abrupt rhythmic breaks and quick figures that create a springy tension rather than long, sustained melancholy. Technically you will need to address Ornaments baroque (3.1/5) by ensuring the clarity and evenness of small embellishments so they sit naturally in the line, and Knowledge of forms (3.6/5) by making the binary structure and repeats intelligible — concretely shaping and differentiating the A and B sections and controlling dynamics and pacing between them. From a contextual point of view it belongs to the Baroque period and is part of Scarlatti’s large output of keyboard sonatas, typically concise contrastive pieces for harpsichord or piano.