[Menvi-discuss] Grade 8 exam pieces

Sat Jun 3 21:58:16 EDT 2023

Yes I agree, Ruby, let us know what the specific pieces you are looking for are and we can try to find them.

I have just been on ABC and downloaded a bunch more repertoire books.  My plan over time is to catalogue the individual pieces within all of these so that when someone needs an individual piece we will know if it is tucked away in a book.

Unfortunately it doesn’t look like CNIB did a good cataloguing job of the RCM materials.  There are a lot of books just labelled as RCM examination with no idea what grade or whether they are even piano, voice, etc.  I will check our local library here in case they did any better when they received them from ABC.  Otherwise it would be a case of downloading them all and opening and reading.  I’m still a pretty slow Braille reader so not feeling very excited about this, but I might be somewhere quicker with notepad and screen reader, my askii interpretation is improving, lol.

But I did notice hundreds of individual pieces of titles I recognised as exam pieces on ABC, so will be happy to do a search once we know those titles.

Jeanie

From: Menvi-discuss On Behalf Of Ella Yu via Menvi-discuss
Sent: Sunday, June 4, 2023 11:04 AM
To: This is for discussing music and braille literacy <menvi-discuss at menvi.org>
Cc: Ella Yu <ellaxyu at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Menvi-discuss] Grade 8 exam pieces

Hi all, RCM goes up to level 10 and then there's a grad level, just for reference. Sadly, finding the actual repertoire books in braille is very difficult, and is made worse by the new CNIB library thing which seems to have removed a lot of older braille music titles. I think the best course of action is to figure out which pieces you need, and we can try to help you source them. Finding braille music is very hard a lot of the time, and what is available is very restrictive. Having optical music recognition helps a lot, but you still need sighted assistance to get it to work.

On Sat, Jun 3, 2023 at 3:38 PM Jeanie Willis via Menvi-discuss <menvi-discuss at menvi.org <mailto:menvi-discuss at menvi.org> > wrote:

Hi Ruby,

Has your student chosen her pieces yet?  Can you tell us what they are and
we can see if we can find a brf or even xml in another exam book or sheet
music.

Have you contacted ABRSM special needs and asked them for these specific
pieces to be urgently transcribed?  Did you get a response?  You could also
try contacting the publishers as listed in the print book directly and see
if there is any way they can release the xml or similar file to you to
convert to Braille.  I sometimes find that making an e-mail a CC to several
different departments or people within an organisation makes it harder for
them to all ignore, so keep trying.

I think you should give up trying to find a way to convert the music from
pdf or scanned image as this is just not going to be good enough for you as
a teacher.  Even if you got all the notes, which is unlikely you will be
missing essential articulation, fingering and many other things.  An
existing brf or xml will be much closer.

If we can help you find a brf or xml do you have a way set up to edit the
Braille?  My suggestion is that you could either pay a transcriber to
compare the brf that isn't the original ABRSM and edit it to add any small
details that are different.  This should be much less expensive than
transcribing from scratch.  Or, you could go through with your student
either a few bars at a time or through a topic such as all the dynamics in a
piece, or the pedal marks, or the articulation and get them to read out what
it does so you can check and edit them.  This is a little time consuming,
but also might help your student to become much more familiar with the
pieces.

The only other option is to pay to have them transcribed if you can.  I do
understand how frustrating this all is.  I have been very frustrated myself
this past year with just how little is available and I think over time it is
easy to become desensitised to the hugegaping cavern between what is
available to a teacher in print and what in Braille which is so crazily
restrictive.  It is also impossible to even add up all the extra hours spent
to get to the same starting point of having the music ready to begin
teaching.  But, I guess we love what we do and so somehow we find a way!

If someone can tell me whether the RCM exams are the same Grade level I can
download the past ones from ABC and check through those also.

Jeanie 

-----Original Message-----
From: Menvi-discuss On Behalf Of ruby alphonse via Menvi-discuss
Sent: Sunday, June 4, 2023 6:24 AM
To: This is for discussing music and braille literacy
<menvi-discuss at menvi.org <mailto:menvi-discuss at menvi.org> >
Cc: ruby alphonse <rubyalphonse at gmail.com <mailto:rubyalphonse at gmail.com> >
Subject: [Menvi-discuss] Grade 8 exam pieces

Hello list members, please can anyone tell me where to get braille
transcribed I need very urgently grade 8  2023-2024 syllabus a braille copy
to teach a student, there isn't BRF file available on the website of ABRSM
specific needs. This student wants to prepare from now on to do the exams
next year, so I cannot use the previous syllabus, so please anyone knows
where I can get hard copy of this Grade 8  ABRSM
2023-2024 syllabus. or BRF file, I can get them embossed here. Any help is
appreciated deeply.

Thank you all in advance,

Ruby.

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