Did you ever have to play the recorder in elementary school, or did you sing along with your friends at a karaoke session? Maybe your parents enrolled you in music lessons, or you formed your own band in high school. Regardless of their experience with music, it’s hard to find somebody who doesn’t find listening to or playing music fun.
But what if you didn’t play music just for fun? What if years of playing piano boiled down to your composure in a 30-minute recital in front of hundreds of people?
Welcome to the world of piano competitions.
Piano competitions are not the only way for a blooming pianist to launch their virtuoso career; yet, young talents flock to competitions around the world every month to demonstrate their prowess at the keyboard. Historically, musicians haven’t always agreed about piano competitions being a necessary rite of passage - the acclaimed Bela Bartok was believed to have stated that “Competitions are for horses, not for artists”.
At the same time, competitions such as the prestigious International Chopin Competition in Warsaw attract upwards of 600 applicants in 2025 alone.
Photos from the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw
In major classical piano competitions, prospective candidates must pass an online screening round, where they are judged by a preliminary panel. Once they pass onto the live rounds, the competition is usually open to the public, and the jury is swapped to a different panel. There are typically at least three rounds (preliminary, semifinal, and final), although the number of rounds is left to the discretion of the competition board. From the finalists, the most stunning performers are honored with medals, which competitions often tout alongside a hefty cash prize and exclusive recording contract.
What would it take for you to win one of these competitions? Is it enough to just practice for a few hours each for a few years? Probably not. 18-year-old Yunchan Lim, the winner of the 2022 Cliburn International Piano Competition, was practicing around eight hours a day once he became a teenager, and had no room for hobbies. He gives further insight:
"I made up my mind that I will live my life only for the sake of music, and I decided that I will give up everything for music … I want my music to become deeper, and if that desire reaches the audience, I’m satisfied..."
Perhaps the jury always searches for a performer like Lim - a soulful, mature player who embraces touching artistry and technical perfection. But articulating exactly why Lim’s playing, and that of other Cliburn winners, is so deeply cherished remains elusive – and subjective. We wondered if there were more objective variables that affected the final rankings in a competition.
The Data
To gain a better understanding of the story behind a competition, a gathering of some of the world’s best young talent, we decided to analyze trends in geography, gender, repertoire difficulty, and repertoire selection, and piece together their context. Are medalists simply the best players? Or… are there other factors involved?
We analyzed data from the websites of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition (1985-2022), the International Tchaikovsky Competition, (2015-2023), the Sydney International Piano Competition (2016-2021), and the Olga Kern International Piano Competition (2022). While we would have liked to analyze data from many other prestigious competitions, we suffered from some limitations. Either the websites did not archive data, or the competitions themselves were so strict in repertoire selection that it did not make sense to apply some of our metrics to those competitions.
Some Notes on Notes
The only problem is… the difficulty of a piece is also highly subjective. Numbers can’t explain the historical context and individual choices that are factored into every individual’s interpretation, or the creative liberties that make each individual performance unique. But at the end of the day, we know that Yunchan Lim didn’t choose his winning program on a whim; he was strategic about his repertoire choices. After all, playing more is harder than playing less. Faster notes are not as easy as slow ones, and large jumps are harder to hit accurately than small ones. It becomes clear that some pieces have a higher level of showmanship than others.
There are other nuances, too. Romantic era pieces can contain incredibly difficult passages. Music from later periods such as the Impressionistic and Contemporary eras contain more complex rhythms and forms. They also employ more difficult techniques,
expanded use of the sustain pedal
Debussy: Arabesque No.1
and trills
Demonstration!
In action!
trills with thirds
Chopin: Barcarolle in F-sharp Major, Op. 60
double octaves
Liszt: Etude in G-sharp Minor, “La Campanella”
and just generally more “virtuosic” passages that are generally extremely fast and require coordination:
Scriabin Sonata No. 5
So, naturally, we wondered whether competitors were choosing from roughly the same “difficulty level” of repertoire, and more importantly, whether it made any meaningful difference to the jury. But while there are some pieces that have gained notoriety for their technical difficulty, such as Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit, and Balakirev’s Islamey: Oriental Fantasy, ideas about a piece’s relatively difficulty are often based on a couple of gnarly passages or a general experience. It isn’t based on any solid evidence–and thus, we wanted to see what the numbers said.
Methodology
But how do you go from sheet music to data? After compiling a list of all the pieces played in our sample of competitors, we outsourced the first step to the public–that is to say, we searched musescore.com, an online score-sharing platform, to find digital versions of the sheet music in a manageable file format. These files hold important data points such as notes, timing, dynamics, instruments, and more. Think of them like a digital version of sheet music which allows the software to play back the music.
Time to work around a few problems, namely, how we were limited by the number of pieces people had recreated on Musescore, as, for obscure pieces, people weren’t particularly interested in transcribing all the notes onto the online software. We settled on analyzing pieces from the top-prize winners (1st, 2nd, and 3rd places), because we hypothesized that marginal differences between final placements could only be objectively explained by repertoire choice. Moreover, we eliminated the chamber music and concerto rounds because the piece selections became quite dull and repetitive. As a result, our sample size for the difficulty metric was cut down to only 66 unique pieces (from the original sample of 1160 pieces).
Music21
We moved on to analyzing the music scores to create a difficulty metric. MuseScore is a software primarily for music editing and composition, so it didn’t have built-in functionality for this purpose. Instead, we used music21, an open-source Python module created by music professors at MIT. With this library, we created functions to gather the following data on each piece:
- Number of notes, chords, and measures
- Mean distance and time between chords
- Key signature
- Time signature changes
- Trills
- Average tempo
- Number of each type of note (32nd, 16th, 8th, quarter, dotted quarter, half, dotted half, whole)
- Duration (in seconds)
Repertoire Difficulty
With music21, we analyzed the pieces to determine if there was some relationship between the length of a piece (which we judged based on the duration provided by Musescore, and not a particular performance of the piece) and how many notes it contained. As expected, there was a generally positive correlation. Pieces with a higher note count tended to have longer durations. However, there was noticeable variation: some pieces achieved high note densities in relatively short timeframes, such as Chopin’s Etudes. This divergence offers insight into different artistic strategies employed by competitors, ranging from compact, technically demanding works to longer, more musically challenging pieces.
After all, competitors aren’t going to realistically play all of the Chopin Etudes in a single round and expect to deliver a spectacular performance. Furthermore, the jury expects competitors to display their ability to craft a compelling narrative. Therefore, it is not beneficial to cram a program of 2-minute pieces - while these are quite impressive displays of showmanship, they do not provide the best fodder for storytelling.
In addition, we decided to check if there was some correlation between a competitor’s final placement (1st, 2nd, or 3rd), and how many notes they played. While the silver medalists demonstrated a slightly higher median and a wider range, there is no clear or consistent trend indicating that a higher or lower final ranking is associated with a higher or lower number of notes. More importantly, the presence of outliers in all groups suggests considerable variability within each ranking. We performed the same analysis on the duration of their pieces and found similar inconclusive evidence.
Repertoire Selection
Next, we looked at the information on all of the pieces played. Though there were thousands of pieces, there were decidedly not thousands of different composers, and many duplicate pieces even after removing the “specialized” rounds.
Despite having a near endless selection of choices, why do people end up choosing the same composers over and over again? Part of it is a numbers game – Chopin wrote over 150 pieces for the piano, spanning mazurkas, études, nocturnes, waltzes, and more. There’s also the matter of popularity. Some composers turn out more “masterpieces” than others. Think Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody, Stravinsky’s Petrushka, or Beethoven’s “Appassionata”. Familiarity and fondness can be both a personal motivator or a hope to appease a judge. And finally, some competitions require certain repertoire to be included in competitors’ programs, like the eponymous Tchaikovsky Competition.
Most pieces came from the Romantic era, spanning from the early 1800s to 1900s. Composers in this era pushed beyond the rigid structure of Classical and Baroque music to evoke strong feelings. Part of a great performance lies in the depth of musical expression, so it makes sense that competitors would choose more emotionally complex repertoire to showcase their range. On top of that, Romantic composers included incredibly technically demanding effects in their music, which are great for showing one’s virtuosity.
Sometimes, players need to listen not only to themselves, but to others as well–concertos feature a solo pianist playing with an orchestra (or accompanist). These are often longer and more “showboat” pieces to highlight the soloist and also require a high degree of synchronization and familiarity to carry out–imagine not only memorizing what you have to play for dozens of minutes of music, but also what the orchestra is doing, where you have to come in, and maintaining an ideal balance with them.
Sometimes, the orchestra is easier to follow. There’s a clear indication of when to come in and when to hand it off to the rest of the players:
And sometimes precise coordination is needed. Here, the pianist must do a call-and-response with the trumpet fanfare:
And here, the pianist must make difficult leaps, but can’t falter a bit so as not to lose the orchestra.
When looking at the repertoire in general (factoring out concerti and chamber music pieces), the most popular pieces tend to be long, difficult works that force the performer to be technically proficient and a master of storytelling. Apart from Chopin’s “Winter Wind” etude, all of the most popular pieces among the medalists fit this trope.
Rachmaninoff’s challenging Sonata No. 2 in B-flat Minor, Op. 36 was a popular choice among the competition pool in general, but extremely popular among the medalists. Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit and Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor were also popular picks among all competitors, but apparently not medal-clinchers. Are they just so difficult that even the greatest young talents can’t quite deliver the best performances of them?
Geography
But enough talk about repertoire. Let’s discuss the candidates themselves.
In general, most competitors hailed from Russia, China, and the United States. This makes sense, as these countries are home to many of the best music institutions in the world (Moscow Conservatory in Russia, Shanghai Conservatory in China, Curtis Institute of Music in the U.S.), and a good chunk of the most driven music students in the world.
Moreover, there does seem to be some correlation between the country in which the competition is located and the most popular nationality of competitors at that competition. For example, there are quite a few Australian pianists at the Sydney competitions, although there are relatively few Australian pianists performing in the worldwide scene of piano competitions.
Gender
The vast majority of competitors across all competitions are male. But is that because men play better or the jury picks men more often? When looking specifically at the Sydney 2016, Sydney 2021, Kern 2022, Tchaikovsky 2015, Tchaikovsky 2019, and Tchaikovsky 2023, the percentage of women competitors ranged from a mere 8% to 36%. However, this imbalance primarily stems from the relatively low number of female applicants to piano competitions in general - for instance, only 31% of applicants to the Leeds International Piano Competition are female. This suggests that juries aren’t necessarily simply biased towards picking male competitors over female competitors.
What's Next
Some of the factors we discussed can’t be controlled, such as geography and gender. Other factors, such as repertoire selection and overall proficiency at the instrument are so similar between top performers that differences between ratings at top competitions can be quite negligible.
More importantly, losing a competition doesn’t mean your career as a pianist is over! Ivo Pogorelich was famously jousted from the 1980 Chopin Competition for his unorthodox playing, but Martha Argerich’s resignation from the jury transformed him into a star.
The path to international success is certainly not for everyone. Even with strong technique, repertoire, and resources to study with the world’s leading piano pedagogues, there is no real formula for success. We can’t tell you how to become the next Yunchan Lim - but we can tell you how to become the next YOU. The beauty of music is that everyone has something unique to contribute.
And in our hearts… this is what will get you that golden medal:
One of the authors of this article, Melody Qian, several years ago.