Advice to Adult Piano Students.

Sunday, December 19, 1999

Let's suppose you're an adult and have been playing the piano for two years or less and really practicing regularly and making progress. Maybe you think you are now at an early intermediate level, having just completed the first book of Alfred's Basic Adult piano course. Maybe you thought the Alfred was full of boring songs. Maybe you're out there presently collecting as many editions of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, etc. that you can find since classical has become your favorite music. You're on the verge of discovering something incredibly great that has been largely hidden under the rubble of the far cruder artifacts of the present culture for so long that some wondered if it could even survive. There are even some, I have met them, who hoped that it wouldn't survive; people who have little respect for Bach or Beethoven and view having to read a complicated piece of music notation as too horribly confining to be worth their bother.

Well anyway, if this were you, I'd say you were probably still a beginner. I have been at playing the piano for at least forty years and I'm just now getting to be really advanced. But your technical progress in piano playing will depend on a number of factors including your basic abilities, manual dexterity, especially your hearing and whatever natural abilities you might have to put some conscious awareness and analysis behind what you hear.

Training this faculty will definitely make you smarter, I don't care what any of the detractors say. If you are able to dissect with your ears and your mind trained behind them, the form of a piece of music, it won't be long before you can tackle many more complex issues and problems with comparative ease. This is one of the best reasons I can think of for getting involved with music, classical music in particular, and playing an instrument, the piano in particular.

If you are learning Fur Elise, but struggling with the second section, and how many adult students out there learn this one? Everyone. And there is always some struggle over the middle section. Most teachers do not emphasize the awareness of form in music enough. You may well look upon a piece that you can play from memory as conquered. However without sufficient practice, we can stumble over the simplest passages.

When learning a piece, take it slow, build up your speed with time. When one is learning a new piece of music or even one we think we've heard so often that we feel just how it should go, it is always best to read a piece so slowly that we know where we want our fingers to be at every moment. If we make a mistake and allow it to remain, it is just that much more difficult to get rid of later as our memories are quick to remember the wrong notes as well as the right ones. The old adage, "do it right the first time" applies to pianism better than to most things. Read a piece slow enough to get the right notes with the right fingering the first time. It is a very good idea to do the same with left hand and right hand alone too. Then put them together. With some music you can't do this, but with most of it, you can.

As for the middle section of Fur Elise, start by playing it at a crawl many times before you are sure enough of where all the notes are to play it faster. Also, the faster you make it go, try to play lighter, emphasizing the melody only slightly above the accompaniment. The eventual speed of this section should not sound faster than the original theme by very much.

Some of you may have reached a stage where you require a new teacher or think you can make it on your own. You can't or more likely you won't. After a while having a piano teacher is like having a physical therapist for learning to be a competent pianist is taking on development of a serious physical skill.

I would suggest that you have your last teacher recommend a teacher if possible. Even if you think you can get along without one, you probably could still benefit from having one. Even professional concert pianists have teachers. At that point they become similar to professional sports trainers. This is what I would look for in a piano teacher; a pianist who is willing to teach. Pianism is a master skill. If you would learn anything that will make a difference to you, you must find someone whose skill as a pianist has won your admiration. They are thus a fit teacher.

Once you have found such a teacher, you should schedule a series of one hour lessons held every other week. For one thing half hour lessons are for real amateurs (the teachers), or for kids. Real adults need the time of an average therapy session; 45 minutes to 1 hour. Also it makes sense in many of our stressed out schedules, to plan our lessons one every two weeks. You should expect to pay more for a real teacher too, $50 an hour in some places or more.

Now, how does this work over the long run? First of all a real teacher will work with you, set some goals; pieces to be mastered, in a certain order and over a certain time frame. A good teacher will demand progress or they'll find another student or will simply drop you. The teacher will work out the mechanics of building your technique based on your abilities. There will be at least one public performance a year required of you and it will, in most instances, merely be an affair attended by their other piano students and their families.

If your practice sessions run from 30 minutes to an hour twice a day, every day, you are doing good, it's just fine. One half hour a day minimum is good. The better at it you get and the better piano you have, the more time you'll crave for it. Some who set out from the beginning to be good pianists start off with finger drills (Schmidt or others) and scales. Ever heard of Bach's rule? I'm not sure if was JS or CPE but it was one of them. Anyway it's "third finger on e flat, fourth finger on b flat, all scales, both hands." Try it. You might discover that there are easier ways to get to the basic mechanics.

There are any number of piano theory series out there and volumes of piano studies intended to build dexterity, increase agility and velocity, etc. They involve chord inversions, harmonic progressions, playing things upside down and backwards.

But a good bit of the piano literature has plenty of drill like material in it already. The Chopin Etudes are "studies", after all. But, there are others less complicated and demanding than Chopin's, that when played well, can even be endured by concert audiences. Czerny wrote quite a few of these. There are other composers too, usually not the most famous ones who wrote excellent piano studies, many suitable for concert performance. A teacher would prescribe some of these. As you learned more of these, the better everything would work for you including your sight reading.

Then comes the repertoire; the "what can you play?" of pianism, like Bach's minuet or Fur Elise or a simplified version of the Moonlight Sonata, ooh stay away from those "simplified" versions. It's quite enough effort to learn anything without having to learn something twice. If you get good enough you'll want a whack at the real Moonlight Sonata soon enough.

I am one of those who really doesn't like the use of "simplified versions" of anything. It's the same with "lite" stuff and me; lite food, conversation, drinks, etc. etc. Why pass up real Beethoven for Beethoven lite?

There's plenty of reasonably interesting simple "unsimplified" music out there, in which to build a beginning pianist's repertoire, which is what being a pianist implies. We are all building repertoires. You can view the one I'm currently building. I have a total repertoire that includes far more music than this. Most pianists do. We have current projects, we have old repertoire, some of it once learned and performed is thankfully forgotten. Most is retained in there somewhere and a brief run-through the music and we have it back in current repertoire.

To really grow as a pianist and make the most out of it does not have to involve much stress and can be minimally frustrating. I've tried to suggest some things that would both reduce the stress and have enough goal orientation to get you somewhere with pianism in as little as six month's time with the right teacher.

I have suggested somewhat broadly what a piano teacher might expect, but have said little about structuring your own practice sessions at home. One thing you don't want to do is make your time at the piano too much like time in a job. The less preparation for it the better. This is just another reason I prefer acoustic pianos to electric keyboards; electric keyboards have an on/off switch.

When you can sit down and play through four or five pieces of music at the level of Fur Elise or better, you will have begun to experience what it's like to be a pianist. Some of your practice sessions should be made up of "dry runs" through some repertoire. Other practice sessions should be more concerned with study, either exercises or reading through new music. If you know you will have two time slots of 30 minutes a day for these sessions, you can decide to have one of each.

I also think it makes sense to keep a diary of your progress as a pianist. You might just record the date you can first play a piece from memory, that is when it's conquered, the name of the piece and its composer and that's all. Your goal is to make a repertoire for yourself of pieces that you are able to play from memory at your piano, at anyone else's, anywhere.

But you want your relationship with the piano and music to be spontaneous too. You want to be able to go to the piano anytime and play something, anything you want.