James Bastien Easy Piano Classics

Getting Started with Bastien's Classic Arrangements

I picked up the James Bastien Easy Piano Classics volume a few years ago when a student of mine was finishing up the intermediate Bastien method books. She wanted something that felt like real music but didn't require four-hand coordination or advanced hand positions. This book fit the bill. It contains simplified arrangements of well-known classical pieces—Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin stuff—and the arrangement level sits somewhere between late beginner and early intermediate. The page layouts are clean, the fingerings are generally sensible, and the original melodies come through even though the notes have been stripped down. Here's the thing most people miss about this book. The arrangements aren't actually simplified because the pieces are hard. They're simplified because the harmonic language of the originals gets dense really fast. A lot of these pieces use chord tones and passing notes that a beginner just can't play cleanly. Bastien keeps the melody intact and reduces the accompaniment to single notes or simple two-note intervals. That means your student isn't learning something watered-down. They're learning the actual tune with minimal harmonic distraction. That's different from playing a "fake version" where the melody gets rearranged to fit easier notes.

James Bastien Easy Piano Classics

The table of contents runs about thirty pieces. You've got Minuet in G, Ode to Joy, Twinkle Twinkle variations, Für Elise, The Entertainer, Flight of the Bumblebee (the easiest arrangement you'll ever see), and a handful of others. The difficulty is pretty consistent throughout. Maybe a couple pieces at the very front are easier than the rest, and the last few might bump up slightly, but it's mostly a steady climb. If someone can comfortably play Hanon exercises and read both clefs without stopping, they can tackle most of this book. I ran into a specific problem with the Bach minuet arrangement that took me a while to figure out. The left hand has the melody in the middle section, and the fingering marked in the edition uses 5-4-3-2 on the ascending scale passage. When I had my student try it, her hand kept rolling forward and she couldn't keep her thumb under. Standard problem. The workaround was to have her practice just that hands-together passage at half tempo with metronome clicks on beats one and three only. Not beats one and two. Just the. It forced her hand to land and reset instead of drifting. After about eight minutes of that, the fingering clicked. I've used this same metronome trick on half a dozen other pieces in the book where the hand crossover felt awkward. There's a practical limitation worth noting. This book assumes your student has already gone through the Bastien method curriculum or something equivalent. The pieces use standard position playing and basic chord shapes. If someone is completely new to reading music, jumping straight into this will frustrate them. The arrangements don't hold your hand. There's no play-along audio, no video tutorial linked to each piece. You either know how to read and practice piano, or you're looking at a page full of notes and wondering where to start.

Another thing that catches people off guard. The page numbering in some printings doesn't match the track listing if you're looking at a digital version. I ordered a PDF copy once and spent twenty minutes trying to find Twinkle Twinkle because the file said it was on page fourteen but the actual book had it on page seventeen. The content is the same. Just check the piece titles, not the page numbers, when cross-referencing editions. If you're trying to use this as a self-study book, it will work fine for the easier pieces. Für Elise, the simpler Bach pieces, a lot of the folk tune arrangements. But the pieces with independent voice movement or subtle phrasing marks—those benefit from someone who can point out that the right hand melody should sing a little louder than the left. Without that guidance, students tend to play everything at the same volume and the music loses its shape. Not a problem with the book itself. Just the reality of solo practice. The physical copy runs about forty-five pages. The PDF is the same content in a different format. Pricing varies by vendor but you're generally looking at twenty to thirty dollars for the print edition depending on whether you buy from a music store or Amazon. The Bastien publications are widely available and stay in print, so you shouldn't have trouble finding a copy.

If your student finishes through this book and still wants more classical repertoire at a similar difficulty level, the next step is usually the Bastien Adult Piano Course intermediate volumes or the Alfred Basic Piano Library library of the Greatest Composers series. Those go a few steps further without jumping into full sonatina territory. Worth keeping in mind if this book feels too easy too quickly.