Bart Dunn's Fantasia is a concise piece exploring light, decorative keyboard textures. Its distinctiveness arises from its economy of material and clear structural transparency.
At Henle 3 this is a late-beginner piece — comfortable hands-together playing is assumed, and musical shaping starts to matter. The main demands: precise articulation — the difference between crisp and blurred is the piece; chord voicing — bringing out one note inside a handful of others; and continuous sixteenth-note figuration that must ripple, not chatter.
Ensure clean execution of sixteenth-note patterns while maintaining a light, non-percussive touch.
Comparable difficulty and character — good candidates for what to learn next.
A level or two down with the same spirit — ideal if this piece is still out of reach.
Where this piece's skills lead: slightly harder works making similar technical demands.
Fantasia is rated Henle level 3 of 9 — late beginner repertoire, roughly ABRSM grades 4–5.
You should be comfortable at Henle level 3 — meaning you can already play level 2–3 pieces cleanly. Learning it one level early is possible as a stretch piece, but more than that usually leads to months of frustration.
A typical performance of Fantasia lasts about 2 minutes.
Fantasia is available as free public-domain sheet music on IMSLP — the score is linked directly from this page.
Pieces at a comparable difficulty and character include The Entertainer by Scott Joplin, Waltz No. 2 by Dmitri Shostakovich, Etude in C-Major by Jean-Baptiste Duvernoy — see the full similar-pieces list on this page.