About Prince String Lists

Since 2015, I have had a fascination with the world of string orchestra. Being a violin player myself, I have grown up listening to string music my whole life. Soon my playlists had hundreds (with one having 1000+) of pieces. I felt that these playlists were limited by their medium. By having them on Spotify or YouTube, I could not listen to more obscure or unknown pieces without switching off and finding wherever they are elsewhere online. To remedy this problem, I moved to Google Sheets, now cataloguing each piece and info about it in one convenient place, and thus the Prince String Lists were born.

Another contributing factor to my publication of these lists was the lack of enthusiasm I found online for this type of music. Other than IMSLP (which often has little to no information on many pieces), there are not many repertoire lists dedicated to string orchestra. The good ones that do exist (such as Gen Gaku) are either automated and difficult to use effectively or are lists by commercial parties hoping to profit. Even on sites where there are a great number of string orchestra resources, it can be hard to glean meaningful information without spending significant amounts of time. To remedy this, the Prince String Lists aim to have easy access to recordings or difficulty levels of pieces along with a myriad of other information (although regrettably there is little to no information on publishers/scores as some pieces are published through multiple venues; any concerns about where to find scores on the personal list can be sent to me. Due to the sizeable nature of the full list, scores there will likely be more difficult to locate).

Difficulty ratings are often solely based on my opinion (sometimes I evaluate the piece, or I take the given piece difficulty from a composer), and they can vary from “real” ratings greatly. The purpose of difficulty ratings is not to scare off potential orchestras but rather to provide an easy and relative difficulty scale for filtering repertoire or getting a general sense of a piece’s difficulty. I use the relatively “traditional” rating system of .5-6, however the .5-6 scale is entirely relative to itself. This is because there are no official difficulty rating organizations and most pieces that are rated by their composers or organizations are also entirely relative to their own ratings and are thus not easily transferable between composers/organizations (ex: “The Fire Within” being rated a 6, with “Pursued” being rated a 4 yet being similarly difficult). The issue of unstandardized difficulty ratings has been a long-time frustration of mine, and by rating them myself with my own standards, I feel I have accurately placed these pieces within reason and with respect to each other. To do this, I have listened to every work on the personal list at least 3 times and every work (with a recording) on the full list at least once. That being said, these difficulty ratings can be slightly inconsistent, especially as pieces increase with difficulty (both in musicianship and technique). It is also important to note that I am a violinist and while I try to base my ratings on the full piece, I likely misgrade the difficulty level of some lower strings' parts in a few pieces, especially when a score is not freely available. In short, these difficulty ratings should be taken with a healthy grain of salt.

Difficulty ratings are cumulative and are assessments of the whole piece; this means that some movements may be easier than the entire piece’s rating as a whole or vice versa (same goes for individual parts).

Difficulty ratings for solo instruments with orchestra are rated for the orchestra’s difficulty, the difficulty of the soloist’s part is not taken into consideration.

I am open to changing difficulty ratings based on input as I have not played the majority of these pieces, however I will prioritize drastic changes over .5 or small grade differences as those can be highly opinionated.

At the end of the day, techniques or works that are hard for one orchestra, might not be as difficult for another. I do not utilize a model or single qualification for difficulty ratings; they are all treated holistically (if not taken from the composer), and they are all relative to each other.