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tangleweeds, I so understand. But I figured out that I was not automaton enough because even being dead and automaton, I couldn't produce the desired sound. Now, I am so automaton-like that my teacher tells me that it's okay to move with the music, and actually puts her hands on my shoulders to guide me when I play arpeggios. She's just completed her second year with Orff Schulwerk and she's having me clap to FEEL rhythm rather than just try to analyze it, encouraging me to sing the melody. What works with children works for adults! I never dance because I'm self conscious of being out of rhythm, I never sing because I'm self conscious of not being able to carry a tune but now I am. Thank you! I feel like your story gave me "permission" to dance out of rhythm and to sing out of tune!

You aren't the only piano teacher in the world, and yes I do see people stating first that mastering the piano is a Challenge to be Overcome, Teaches Life Lessons, and Makes You a Better Person well before they ever get to the part where they start talking about the love of the music, playing around, and improvising. All the time.



I agree with your last comment, but you are kidding yourself if you think a child cannot be manipulated into continuing WELL into adulthood with something they hate desperately. Humans do that all the time. "If you don't love it, you won't get very far with it" just isn't always the case.

There are many things, as Susan said, that can drive an achieving child forward -- wanting to be better than a parent or sibling, wanting to prove something to someone, needing to be the best and impress the adults around them, needing an escape from divorce or death, fear of giving up, guilt ... ALL of these things can poison even a gifted person's relationship with music, and Piano Will Teach You How To Overcome Obstacles is just not the message to send in the face of them, not even the secondary message. It makes no sense to say that my studying piano taught me how to overcome obstacles or any of that rot. Losing my father young, learning of my disabilities, moving across country, coping with unrelated difficulties in my chosen field of study -- these are my life's challenges.

Piano is the ONLY expressive art that I've ever encountered this monastic Conquer the Challenge attitude. Painting, fabric arts, writing -- nowhere are these attitudes extant there even a little bit. (The only place I've ever run into this sort of attitude is the hard sciences.) If you manage to communicate this all-encompassing love of the music itself, playing, creating, sharing, and loving it, that's wonderful. But there are a lot of people who have not had that experience, which indicates that there are an awful lot of recovering rockpile-movers out there; there is a problem with how we teach piano in this world.

My brother changed his six year-old daughter's piano teacher recently because he noticed my niece had to be told to practice instead of sitting down on her own to practice. The lessons were a little too demanding and they were not at all fun. Now with the new teacher she will play/practice without being asked.

Interesting questions Morodiene. I didn't like lessons as a child to start. I really didn't. I would rarely practice. I remember many lessons with my teacher sternly accusing me of not practicing and this being a waste of time. I have to thank him for sticking with me. While my parents sort of forced lessons for the first seven years they gave me the choice later on and for some reason I stuck with it and started practicing and they almost couldn't get me away from the piano after that. Without pushing me to start I don't think I'd play today and I didn't end up hating the piano even though I hated it to start.

Is there a learn to love option because somewhere along the way that's what happened to me.

What an excellent thread!! There's so much to talk about here..

I'm another of those who started lessons fairly early.. (5 y.o.) I didn't love the piano, really, it was just something I did. My Mom took me for lessons after I plunked around on a toy piano for awhile in my toddler years. By age 16, I'd gotten to the mid intermediate level.. playing Chopin waltzes, mazurkas and Beethoven sonatas. I played well, but lacked... passion for the music, I'd say. I went to a local conservatory and did what was expected of me. But by age 16, I'd developed a love of popular music, and wanted to play that because it felt good to me.

Learning piano was never "fun".. I did like having the skills to play pretty much what I wanted to. But after 16, when my parents wouldn't pay for jazz lessons, I gave it up and didn't look back. Count me among those who wished someone had encouraged me to continue, now that my older hands are trying to learn "Clair de Lune", or beautiful jazz runs.


In my teaching practice now, I am stongly encouraged by my boss to use "Music Mind Games", which are fun for me and the students, but I bristle a bit at having to "entertain" the kids who take lessons with me. It's been a long time since I was a 5 year old beginner, but I do not remember being entertained during my lessons. Call me a goody two shoes, but I did what was expected to me. Why is it so hard for parents to teach their kids that focusing, concentration, practice and discipline are good things to learn early in life?

Another question though, is how do we, as teachers encourage our students to stick with it, so that they don't have the regrets that I and so many others do... for quitting too soon?? How do you address that?

When admitting new students to your studios.. do you tell the parents and kids that it takes a few years of study before they start playing "good" music? That they must have all the fundamentals down first? I bet if we did, we'd not get as many students. So.. in the spirit of "marketing piano lessons", how do we "hook" the students??


BevP

It seems to me that you have had horrible experiences, which is unfortunate, but it also seems to me that you are using this thread and in general the site to lash out at people. Your "all the time" statement makes it seem as though it is more common for people to suffer through years of painful, boring, mind-killing piano lessons than to find any joy in playing. You DO learn a lot of lessons by mastering something as difficult as the piano. For instance, most children are given the responsibility, for the first time, of working through the week—mostly on their own—to get something ready for the next week. The kind of cramming, grade-passing, score-achieving goals that so often work in school just don't work for piano. Kids DO learn a lot about how to study, how to use time effectively, how to set smaller goals and achieve them, how to build a skill over a long time.

Now, having said that, I am not personally in favor of making people do anything for the "because it is good for you and you will thank me later in life" reasoning that I so often heard myself. To this day I don't feel like thanking any adult who rammed something down my throat that I didn't want to learn, that I had no interest in. However, there are cases in which I started out with little interest, had to do something because it was required, and developed a love for it within the first couple years. I have also started to learn something, passionately interested in it and excited about the future, only to end up disliking or even hating it. People do change how they feel about things.

I'm finding out that your statement is true by reading comments of other people. Frankly, it astounds me. Apparently a lot of people are much more interested in what other people think they "should do" than I am. The last time I did anything I disliked or hated was in high school and college, and that was for the simple matter that certain courses were required. I could not find any way to skip them without rocking the boat so seriously that I would not have graduated, first from high school, later from college. But I swore the whole time. I absolutely LOATHED most of my college basic studies courses and in fact did not finish up with a particularly impressive grade point average because of resisting those courses. I actually got in a verbal fight with an English professor who taught a required course full of books that I simply detested. It was one of those "appreciation" courses, full of dark, depressing and boring books that I could not force myself to read. I wrote my midterm exam about how much I hated his course, and why.

He was so disconnected from reality that he didn't understand why anyone would not love his course. I told him that I'd kill to get him in MY music appreciation course, where I'd ram Wagner, Mahler, Hindemith, Weber and Cage down his throat with the same mentality: "It's good for you. Listen to it."

No, but I think that those who do love "it", on average, will get much further than those who don't.

Hatred is a decision to actively distance yourself from and/or create barriers between yourself and something or someone else. Hatred is almost never constructive for human beings. Children should be taught this from a young age.

I dislike shaving, but I do not hate it. To hate shaving would have no function for me other than to decrease my happiness. I already spend enough of my life shaving. Why would I want to spend even more time being miserable about it?

I don't doubt that many students dislike many aspects of learning to play the piano.

How much more rewarding it would be for all concerned to understand these specific and concrete dislikes and to deal with them appropriately rather than to take a mindless, emotional decision to "hate". After dealing with the dislikes an informed decision can be taken to stop lessons, pause lessons, change lessons, enrich lessons, change tempo, etc. etc.

Minors depend on their parents to take important decisions for them until they have reached the age and stage of development to be able to make appropriate decisions for themselves. Taking decisions for children without taking into account their perceptions and addressing their feedback would seem to be unwise. After all, the only way learning takes place efficiently and effectively is when there is internal motivation. Tapping into and helping to form that internal motivation is the most important thing a parent or teacher can do.

Most of the rest of your post I agree with. This I most definitely do not.

As an adult, or as a very wise younger person, you may make decisions about how you want to go about changing hate. But I don't think hatred starts as a decision of any kind. I think it is a visceral response.

I had a cruel chemistry teacher in high school. I hated her. Perhaps even then I realized that hating her was pointless, that it would not do me any good. Certainly figuring out a way to distance myself from that feeling would have helped, but I do not agree that I chose to create barriers. I was in the presence of a very nasty adult, and I did not know how to deal with that.

If a kid is getting beaten up daily by a bully, I think it's quite a natural response for that child to hate the bully.

And if a child is made to take lessons and practice daily, I don't think that hating the piano is something he/she can control if the whole experience is really unpleasant.

In theory I agree with you, but if we were successful in teaching most children this lesson, it would be a very different world. For most people it takes a lifetime to even scratch the surface of mastering such a difficult lesson.

OK. I agree that there are visceral emotional reactions going on with both children and adults that are labeled as hate. However, to hold on to and extend and dwell on these is usually also a decision, whether or not it is a rational decision.

You mention a stimulus eliciting an unthinking, emotional response. Acting on impulse thus.
I believe that even children can be taught impulse control and to build more time to decide to act between stimulus and response.
I believe that this is particularly important where these impulses can be dangerous to the child and their environment.

Were you able to discuss your feelings towards the chemistry teacher with an older sibling, your parents or another adult?
Was it possible that you were jumping to conclusions that she was cruel and that she might simply have been exhibiting behavior that was ambiguous but which you interpreted as being cruel behavior (and that she also had other behaviors that were not cruel)? Rather than distance yourself from the feeling, why not try to understand where the feeling is coming from? If you did not know how to deal with it yourself, what barriers existed to prevent you from asking for help from others?

I agree with you that if a child is forced to take lessons and practice daily and the whole experience is really unpleasant that a child will (decide to) hate piano. That is also the point I am making: we need to dig deeper to understand what specifically is being experienced as unpleasant and see if there is anything that can be changed so that it not only is pleasant but desirable -- or to realize that not every child must do this activity and stop it.

Yes, some of my best playing was in creating "orchestra voices" in the music, a clarinet, a flute, violins, drums and supplying what felt like and sounded like the recognizable "timbres" of those instruments. The piano arrangements of symphonies and ballets are some of the pieces that allow this. Imagination creates the possibility and then it's just working with keyboard sound and the touch required to "imitate" the instrument voices. This is of course, going on as in melody, while the other fingers are playing piano accompaniment to the "solo" instrument.

The piano is definitely capable of orchestra sounds if the pianist has the capacity to be the human instument capable of producing those sounds through touch and technique.

I think each person finds their likes and dislikes over the course of piano lessons....and in my opinion, what they are talking about are the things in their inner world that bring them too much challenge, too much difficulty, too many feelings of inadequacy and feeling at a disadvantage to the music. It's a long uphill climb to make all the progress one needs to become accurate and independent in music making. That inner voice can be grumbling, impatient, critical and unforgiving. Or, it can take pleasure in the many things it is finding that need work with the goal of being able to master each and every task. It's attitude directed toward purpose that helps us keep working. It's attitude that begins to recognize that we aren't as perfect as we thought, this isn't as easy as we thought, and darn if it's not almost beyond our grasp no matter how hard we are working. If we expect that an adult already knows these things from their all around education, there is going to be an unpleasant surprise that says music making is a different set all together. Natural talents are not enough, you need to reinforce it with acquired skill. Just because you love music and can sing tunes with enthusiasm does not mean piano lessons are a walk in the park.

We spend part of the time "lessoning" to the music content, and part of the time "lessoning" about our real inner selves. Tolerances and intolerances abound.

Piano lessons can be joyful or they can be despair. What I would call the difference would be the student's ability to be authentic and realistic in what is a continually changing sitation. Piano is either bringing out the best or bringing out the beast each time we sit and play it. It's what we think and do at the that allows for the "best" or the "beast" to appear.

The piano itself is inanimate without the human. The music on the page is inanimate without the human. This is why I think all the emotions and encounters are certainly of the pianist's making.

I'll try to get to the other later, but first this:

NO ONE got anywhere with this woman. This was around 1964, and at that time teachers had a lot more power. (I think often they have much too little power now.)

Was she a totally cruel person, in every area? I doubt it. But I was about 15, and every person I knew that had to take her class talked about how mean she was.

Hold on. This was in 1964. I don't hate the woman now! That is not the point. In fact, I imagine she was probably quite lonely.

The whole weight of the school system which at that time gave almost total power to teachers and almost none to students. It was a different world.

I agree with you. As a teacher I have control over my actions. I continually ask questions: "What do you enjoy the most? How do you like this piece? How did this new idea about practicing work? Do you feel like you are getting more out of your practice time? Does that make practice more fun?"

But I'm a rebel, as I've said repeatedly, a maverick. I expect freedom. I expect to be allowed to make my own choices. "Do it because I'm telling you, and you'll be glad later…" absolutely does not work for me, and it never has, so I'm not going to use that logic with students. This gives me an immediate connection with students who are independent, even the young ones. I EXPECT to be challenged. And I expect myself to have reasonable answers for the challenging questions.

Well, obviously, you've made up your mind what kind of teacher I am, even though you haven't a clue what I teach. I'm sorry you had a painful childhood. I played no part in it, I assure you. It doesn't sound as though continuing this discussion would prove useful, so I am opting out of responding to what you've said.

Quick thought on the original question: how many people really hate piano...

Pianoworld may not be the best place to ask that! I imagine piano-hating folks are mightly repelled by our piano-obsessed antics here :p !




Gary, that just rocks! I've met people that teach, but HATE questions! (Luckily, my teacher tells me he *loves* when his students ask questions... good for me, because I apparently have plenty! )

It's FUN! When I am asked questions, it gives me a chance to show what I know! My biggest problem is that I can get so side-tracked, I feel as if I am "cheating" by "going into my own world".

This is a good point. And even for very young younsters I think we may underestimate the power of peer pressure and group consensus that is working against piano teachers.

There might be a very small group of nerdy boy students for whom being on the football team is not cool, but there is almost certainly a huge group in some schools, or almost a general consensus depending on the local culture, that piano is definitely not cool. There may already be a bias against it. Take that together with it being one of the few activities where kids are really asked to do something difficult and be accountable for their actions these days, exercising a significant degree of personal discipline and it is pretty obvious why there is resistance. Fighting against this resistance is futile. I believe we can only use that energy judo-style to help them turn it around themselves.

The kids I know who are 7 or 8 and are passionate about their piano practice all come from families where one or both parents are musicians and/or are attending Montessori schools. One kid who has just been admitted at age 8 into the youth program of the Conservatory of Amsterdam only was allowed to start lessons after he asked for them. Of course, without being in a musical family he would have never had the exposure to classical music to want to demand lessons for himself. I think that internal motivation can be built be exposing kids at an early age to the beauty of classical music and I am dismayed to see how music (exposure) programs are being dropped left and right from public school systems.

That was a slightly strange reaction to my chemistry teacher story.

I didn't dislike chemistry. I was fascinated by it. The point is that this horrible, nasty human being was unable to kill my interest in it. I hated her for two reasons: actually I disliked her for making chemistry the only thing in her universe, as if anyone who was not immensely gifted in that area was not worth her time. The hate was for her bullying. She made me come to her office and write on the blackboard, "I will not argue with the teacher." If I had had Carrie's powers, that witch would have burned. And I am NOT kidding. I had never felt such an intense hate for another human being.

Well, let's take a look where a lot of that comes from. Some piano teachers approach piano as if it is the most important thing in the world, and there is no room in their "universe" for other things.

I come from a family that has always been very interested in sports, and I see no conflict whatsoever between being very good at a popular sport and playing an instrument like piano well. Why not both?

I'm against making people do things, so for all the kids (especially boys) who want no part of sports, I'm on their side. Because I think playing a sport should be for the pure joy of it, never something that is forced on someone.

But I do think that for boys who are open to all sorts of experiences, being at least good at at least one sport is a huge plus. (And I suspect this may turn out to be just as true for many if not most girls.)

I have a seven year-old baseball player. I've talked about him before, in this forum. His dad is the coach, the kid is good in karate, leads his team in just about everything, and his coordination is superb. His dad has been in on the lessons from day one and gets everything. Perfect situation for me. So far this boy loves playing piano. He gets up and goes to the instrument on his own, for fun.

My job is not to screw that up. I'm not only going to teach him "fun stuff" for the single reason of impressing his friends, but I'm darn sure going to make sure that he has a few things in his "bag of tricks" that will do that job. It's not about the instrument. It's about the mindset. ANY performer has to please his audience, and that was as true for Horowitz as it was for Liberace. But a small kid needs four or five things that sound "cool" to other kids his age. He knows "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" because he loves baseball, and he wanted to learn it. I gave him a little malagueña that I wrote because of the catchy sound, a couple blues tunes because those go over well, and I'll add to that ANYTHING that he can play, that is not too hard for him, of ANY style, that will impress his friends.

None of that will stop me from covering anything much more traditional. I fit in scales, finger exercises, all the rest, but the key point is that if he has things that make him feel good about playing, things that his friends like, not only will he never have to face the "piano is not cool, you're a nerd" problem, it is likely that I will get at least one of his friends as a student.

Two different issues. And again I have to stress that sports, much more than academics, are about doing something difficult and being accountable. You can't cram hitting, throwing, shooting. You can't cram the stuff that is done in a weight room. You have to build slowly, carefully, and you have to do it right. I see more of a link between piano and individual sports, more of a link between something like band/orchestra and team sports.

Where you generally do NOT get any kind of personal discipline is in most schools, where again and again students are told what to do, when to do it, and are given the goals of passing tests and getting good grades. My high school students (girls as well as boys) agree with me 100% that school is teaching them almost nothing. I should mention that I live in South Florida, and Florida has some of the worst schools in the US. This is "W" land, where brother Jeb pushed the NCLB nonsense so that we got a double-dose of that junk. EVERY teacher I talk to does all but swear at the teaching to the tests that is going on. Teachers and parents are in agreement that education has become insane.

Which makes me wonder, even though football is one of my least favorite sports, if kids are not learning more on the field than in these blasted schools.

You are assuming that it all starts with "classical music", which doesn't even exist. There IS no classical music. It's a meaningless word. If you are talking about Classical music, then Mozart, Hadyn, and so on. But the idea that it all starts with a particular style of music is where most of musical instruction goes wrong. There are a bazillion different kinds of music, styles of music, and most are notated to some degree, so curious people have a chance to play something they like in most any area. I have said all my life that the joy of reading is about reading what YOU want to read, and that may start with Shakespeare, Sports Illustrated, or Spiderman. Or magazines about how to build things. Anything. If someone is taught how to read, that person has the freedom to explore every book ever written that is readable on his level, and that can lead to anywhere.

I started playing the piano because I heard some things I wanted to play. Most of those things seem rather silly to me now, but they were important to me then. I had no rules about what composers were good and bad, what styles of music were good or bad. So it never occurred to me that playing the piano was anything else but fun, and it also never occurred to me that I needed to give up anything else fun for the sake of piano.

All the views I'm expressing now make me feel so out of step with this forum, with the views normally expressed, that I truly feel like I don't belong here. I really don't know how else to sum this all up…

Thank you. I specialize in strange.

I am not sure that is where it comes from. I think it partly comes from piano not being seen as 'manly' enough or for girls in some circles, partly from the lack of connection with popular music as you mention.

Great post.

Fair enough. However, how many schools put as much emphasis on their music programs as do on their sports programs?? There are middle schools and high schools I have seen in the Midwest that to an outside observer appear to be only about sports with just enough academics to keep the state authorities out of their hair.


Touche. You are right. However, I do not only lament the lack of musical edcuation, but also the marginalization of classical piano studies in its traditional sense. This is due to my personal biases and due to the fact that I believe that there is a cultural heritage being passed on through 10 or 15 years of traditional piano lessons playing the mainstream literature that is valuable to retain. I have nothing against reaching children with that that they know and that turns them on today. I do have something against not organizing home life and school life to expose them to MORE so that classical music appreciation does not continue to die out in the Western world. I also believe that it is in the interest of the children but especially in the best interest of the adults who this children will become and our society as a whole.

I also believe that although we need the internal motivation of students for them to learn, that, just as coach says you have to do blocking practice and run laps to be on the football team, and just as parents say you have to eat your vegetables and stay at the table during the entire meal conversing as a family member rather than racing to the television to eat only our ice cream, that parents, coaches and piano teachers have a duty to younger music and piano students to help them make and stick to the decisions for which their personal ability to judge is not yet fully developed. They are after all dependent children.

Let me pose a question, how many guitarists have you ever heard say they hate the guitar? I've heard of NONE. Most pro guitar players have a similar story to how they started. They heard some great guitarist, was blown away by the sound of it, and couldn't wait to practice and emulate their musical heroes. They would play hours on end in the basement dreaming of becoming good. How many piano players say that?

Jimi Hendrix was a guitar god to so many people. Paul McCartney and Eric Clapton have talked fondly of his influence on them. BB King once said his guitars are like his wives, and he gives them names like "Lucille".

There isn't the structured approach to guitar lessons as there is to piano. Heck, alot of the pros can barely manage 5 chords and play the same licks over and over. Granted rock and pop music is far less challenging than classical or jazz.

Kids are attracted to the guitar because they heard some cool songs and want to learn. Shouldn't that be the way with piano? Personally I love the sound of the piano and seek out music that I enjoy. Practice is seldom a chore because it gives me much pleasure to just sit and play. And I definitely will be doing so until the day I die.