Review: The Mermaid Challenge

A gentle dive into creativity for intermediate students by Barbara Arens

If you’ve been reading this site for a while you’ll know that I’m a big fan of Barbara Arens. She’s unique in our contemporary piano culture for combining her rigorous classical training with an infectious sense of fun and a passion for creativity.

Back in the autumn I wrote about Barbara’s entertaining creative book The Vampire Challenge: Count Dracula’s Piano Book, saying it was “great fun, accompanied by with plenty of absurd black humour from Dracula, and would make an ideal autumn project for an early intermediate student.”

Now I want to draw your attention to The Mermaid Challenge: 12 Piano Pieces requiring collaborative effort! Written with her typically appealing style, blending contemporary appeal with classical underpinnings, it’s Barbara at her best.

A gentle guide to creativity

Pursuing a similar concept to The Vampire Challenge, this book is designed to encourage intermediate students to play with freedom and imagination. Each piece comes with some kind of creative activity, so for example they might:

• choose which register to play the piece in

• pick the dynamics

• improvise a Coda based on a G major arpeggio

• choose how fast to play, or where to accel. or rit.

• pick a title for the piece

• choose whether to end with a major or minor chord

• add their own accompaniment while following a lead sheet (for which she includes clear instructions)

This is such a gentle way to allow a cautious student to explore creativity, I really love it. It’s inclusive, and that’s really to be welcomed!

It’s also a great book for teachers who don’t feel confident at teaching improvisation, because Barbara includes such engaging and helpful instructions that you grow in confidence while reading them.

In that sense, it’s reminiscent of Alison Mathew’s wonderful Doodles books, which are ostensibly sight-reading books, but give cautious students (and teachers!) plenty of opportunities to experiment.

Doodles by Alison Mathews

There is one much freer compositional activity, which is suitable for more confident creatives. There’s a really fun piece called “Purple Octopus”, which is written to be played without thumbs (i.e. with 8 fingers — get the joke?) and on the next page, Barbara has included 2 pages of staff paper and the instructions:

I have the feeling that you might think my Purple Octopus piece sounds a little bit weird! So: how about writing your own? It’s really kind of fun using only eight fingers - but you could have your piece use no index fingers, or no pinkies… Feel free to “steal” anything you do like from my piece!"

This model-based compositional approach is such a valuable method for teaching creativity, so bravo to Barbara for including it!

Check it out

You can browse quite a lot of the book over on Amazon by clicking the “Read Sample” button below the cover image.

Barbara performs all pieces from the collection in a YouTube playlist, linked below:

Conclusion

This is a great book to work through with an intermediate student, especially if they’re cautiously curious about getting creative.

The Mermaid Challenge is self-published, so you’re supporting the composer directly when you buy it. It’s available at Amazon.