Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Diane Hidy - 10 tips for teaching piano to adults

So you are quoting an article, written by somebody - Not your own experience in teaching and observations from the same. And then your own experience as a student. I already told you mine, as well as the statement of my first teacher who by then had been teaching for about 35 years.

These kinds of statements are harmful, because expectations lead results. I am very glad that I never read any such opinions when I first started having lessons as an adult. I did not expect failure, and I did not expect to have a "disability" of age.

Again, you are quoting beliefs that are stated by some people somewhere that may or may not be true, and probably aren't.


You responded so fast - did you consider the specifics I wrote?

I've given sound reasons for my stance. I have yet to see yours.

I wrote ** IF **.

Interpretive skills are (?) the fundamentals? Can you interpret music without having the playing skills to do so?

I never said that.

Which is why the teacher should have the main choice, because she knows what she can teach from which material.

It takes skill to be able to play with good timing, to learn how to count, and then to produce legato, non-legato etc.


You should ask someone who teaches. I have talked to various teachers at length. The intellectual alone won't do it.

Is it?

The thing that bugs me is on the one hand the rejection of things that will speed up learning, and then on the other hand stating that this group of students will be slow learners. I'm not going to write more on the topic.

I don't know if you're saying the psychologists are wrong or just relating you own experience. I've no intention of arguing with your experience.

The best reference I can make at present is the chapter on memorising in Chan's Fundamentals, I know it's not a scholarly article but it is online and I can find it quickly.

We aren't discussing the hardest parts of playing for an adult. Are you saying we shouldn't learn musical knowledge first? Or that these 'right pieces' should be learnt in a particular order so that we understand how to count properly? Do all the method books use these right pieces? Do we have to learn the Lima beans thing before our musical education is off on the right footing? If we listed the first pieces of today's best pianists would we find congruity?

Putting in the time, knowing how to practise and doing it right does not depend on specific pieces. Any number of pieces can be the right pieces.

I suspect posture may come before that but key attack from the fingers comes through the use of the arm and if we don't agree on that now we never will.

But these things are red herrings that I raised as one of the differences between adults and children not something mentioned by Diane Hidy. I was just trying to show her attitude to adults in a more sympathetic light. I didn't think her article was dismissive of adults and I felt the OP was justified in posting the link.

I've been reading more of her blog and getting a better sense of her teaching principles. I've revised my view of the article. It still rubs me the wrong way a bit, but it links to what seem to me to be good things in her teaching for all students.

In one of her blog posts she says this:

This love of music, and desire to share that love, shines through in all her postings.

She is incredibly respectful of all her students. She is creative in thinkng of different ways to teach things, and doesn't blame her students for not being the perfect students. Instead, she thinks about what motivates each student, why they might be having difficulty with something and how to reach them in different ways.

She thinks about repertoire choices for all her students.

She has a dozen long term adult students in her studio, so she seems to be doing something that keeps them coming back. According to the teachers in the Teachers' Forum, this is unusual to have so many adults in a studio, persisting for the long haul.

All of her 10 tips for teaching adults have analogs in how she talks about teaching children. keystring, I think those of us adults who are willing to play Baa Baa Black Sheep are in fact quite few: even if you look at posts in the ABF, this is a rare attitude. I think that Diane Hidy's idea is that rather than try to convince a student to work with music the student really dislikes, she will find other music that the student does like and teach them the same things through that music. From her, this is not glossing over. Rather, it's respect and joy.

There's a student who has posted in the Teachers Forum that he can play the pieces he likes and finds on his own much better than he can play his Alfred's pieces, which he doesn't like very much. That to me seems to match what seems to be what Diane Hidy observes in her own students.

I think that her list could be misused. But isn't that true of almost anything someone might write about teaching? When paired with reading the rest of her blog, a more complete picture emerges.

Incidentally (or maybe not so incidentally), she is the composer of the Piano Town method books, which John van den Brooke uses.

You've dismissed my experience, keystring, without my having said what it is. Do you not remember my teaching experience from the past?

I quoted Diane to show why she might be more sympathetic to adults rather than dismissive and not to give my own opinion. Her opinion is a common one. Learning ability and learning physical skills are not synonymous. Adults have the advantage in the former, children in the latter. I'll be happy to be proved wrong - I don't put much stake in it - but it can't be used as a means to attack Diane. It's not an unorthodox view and it's not given to attack adults or deprecate them in any way.

Playing the piano is a technique. You can learn it at any age without disadvantage. Age is not a disability but it does change how we go about learning.

You repeatedly say this. I reject it out of hand. The piece, the music, comes first. Skill will be acquired in the process. The fundamental skills will be reinforced again whenever we learn a new piece.

We approach the instrument to make music not to get the skills to be able to play one day in the future.

This is it again! It's not what the teacher can teach that's important but the music, the piece itself!

Each piece is a case study in how music is written, how it's learnt and how it's played. The main choice doesn't have to be the only one and for adults there can and should be a more mutual consent.

I asked whether your opinions came from teaching experience, and you responded by quoting psychologists (who don't teach piano), and Chan (who doesn't teach piano). I can't quite remember your background. You taught adult beginners and child beginners, developing their skills as would be done?

PianoStudent88 - Thank you for going through the trouble. That was the missing link. As I wrote a couple of posts up, we have an impression but none of us has studied with this teacher, and it's the overall attitude that we don't have.

And here I disagree. That is not what I need as a student, nor want. That is the very attitude that got me in trouble first time round, because I didn't know how to state what Bennevis' friend made clear to his teacher. I lost a lot of years through that. No thanks. Never again.

There are different ways to approach teaching piano.

One teacher or student might prefer to choose pieces, and then work on the skills to play the entire piece with all the musical details in.

Another teacher or student might prefer to choose a piece or étude and use it to develop a particular skill, or a few skills, and then put it away for awhile, perhaps to be returned to some months later to learn some more skills.

The following is not fully apropos for the situation of beginner students, because I'm a transfer student with a bunch of piano skills already. But I think it illustrates some ideas about the different approaches:

My new teacher picks pieces (from a pool of pieces she suggests and pieces I've expressed an interest in) with an eye to what skills the piece will require me to develop in order to play the whole piece: the first approach. But she doesn't choose pieces just willy nilly, regardless of difficulty. Rather, she seems to have a basket of skills she wants to teach me, and she chooses pieces that will introduce a few skills from the basket, but not too many skills at once. She also chooses some pieces that will take me a long time to work on, and some pieces that will take less time.

There were a few skills that were the subject of particular remediation when I started, and I got the sense she wanted to be sure I had those skills first. The current basket doesn't seem to have a particular order in which the skills should be learned.

She believes that the interpretation of music arises from having specific techniques to achieve different interpretive effects. The goal with the pieces is interpretation, but we get there by focusing on technique. Of course the kinds of techniques she gives me in the service of certain interpretations she requests are leading me to grow in musical sense, not solely in technique.

Despite my teacher using the first approach, I like aspects of the second approach. For example I've been working on scales to improve my ability to keep a steady tempo (among many other reasons I also have for playing scales). I like this; it means when I get to a piece and need to play a steady tempo, I'm ready to do it. Similarly I've been practicing arpeggios -- simply because I'm a dutiful student and they've been assigned. But I'm thrilled to discover that the next piece I'll be learning has arpeggios: I already have a leg up on being able to play this piece.

Other students would hate this; they hate exercises, and scales and arpeggios would have no useful meaning to them until they encountered them in a piece and were motivated to study them right then to learn the piece, but not before.

I think Diane Hidy's approach would be to find the balance that works for each student. Other teachers might choose differently and require the same exercises of everyone because they see them as irreplaceably foundational. One hopes that students and teachers with compatible styles can find each other.

It's difficult because if you're new to learning an instrument, or even if you've been doing it for awhile, you may not have the language to express what's not working for you in a particular approach.

The majority of those responding to the blog were debating one or two out of the ten tips, not the entire blog post and not Diane Hidy. (Goodness, any teacher who takes on adult students gets viewed in a sympathetic light in my book.) And certainly no one was saying or implying that posting the link was unjustified. I, for one, am happy to see a topic generate some discussion, even when the discussion drifts off into the wild blue yonder.

It was no trouble at all; I'm enjoying reading her blog immensely. I'm learning a tremendous amount about respecting students as I read her. It reminds me of your story about the girl you were helping with language and writing (if I recall correctly.), and the kind of thought and awareness you put into figuring out how to work with her. (That's the story where the girl's mother pulled her out because you wouldn't make her do workbooks .)

Glad you mentioned that. When I was in grammar school they drilled us with awful lessons in grammar (diagram this sentence, underline the past participle). Later in grad school they taught that formal grammar does not statistically improve reading and writing skills; children who just read books and write stories develop equally. They just lack the vocabulary to discuss elements of grammar.

That analogy suggests that we couldn't hear a the musical antecedents between Ms Diane's students and Mr Albert's. But if we spoke with them the latter may have superior theoretical comprehension.

Sorry, Stubbie. I wasn't responding to the majority.

I was responding to this...
"What I dislike about the list is..."
"I was burned by exactly the attitude that is being espoused by Ms. Hidy..."
"...there is something quite condescending about the view of adult beginners in that article..."
"I seem to be picking up an overall attitude which makes me uneasy..."
"It's as if she assumes ABs have half the motivation and 1/10 the attention span of a small child..."
"Or dismissive."
"To say an adult will not practice a piece or exercise they don't like, is making a dismissive assumption."

Much of it revolved around this...
This, I think was badly written and flavoured the whole reaction. Reading her whole article I got a different attitude from her than the one in that awkward sentence.

I think she was trying to say that when and adult gets home after a hard day at the office it takes a piece they like to make them go to the piano. I feel this myself. It's not that they wilfully avoid practise, it's that some days it can be really hard to just sit down and practise. Adults, unlike children, don't have someone who can tell them to sit down and practise. They need motivation from the material.

That's what I read between the lines from Diane I'm sorry that the points I used in support became the topic. That wasn't my intention and I apologise.

I'm so pleased that my blog post generated so much exciting conversation. I certainly never expected my Lima Bean Souffle analogy to be so so thoroughly scrutinized.

Here's another post which some of you might also find interesting. It includes a short video of my students playing at a group class at the home of one of my students.

I hope you enjoy it!
http://dianehidy.com/teaching-tips/2014/3/4/flashforward-these-are-your-students

Diane, I'm impressed by the level of playing in your adult students. Seeing that they are all at least at the intermediate and some at the advanced level, that puts into perspective your tips. I left my last teacher in part because she did not provide an opportunity for the adult students to play for each other, but luckily have found a group of adults and a duet partner. And still trying to polish Graceful Ghost Rag.

Now, THAT was a thoroughly enjoyable blog post
Thank you for sharing.

Thank you for posting, Diane. As you can see, everyone here adds their own favorite ingredient to the special sauce that makes up an adult student of piano.

Very nice video. Are all of your adult students adult re-starters?

Welcome to Pianoboro, I hope you enjoy your stay. Will you explain to your adult students that they will learn to enjoy Lima Bean dishes?

I commend you for allowing your students to play from the music .

Too often, student recitals become nervy, memory-lapse-ridden affairs because the teachers insist that students play from memory (as per some in the Piano Teachers forum). Even adult students who have no aspirations of playing in Carnegie Hall, and have high-level jobs not related to music......

Thanks. I find that for some students memorizing is natural and easy. For others it is difficult and anxiety-producing. I am flexible in helping them do what's best for them. Having a set list of "must-dos" usually results in a lot of unhappy, anxious people. At my adult get-togethers and recitals, one person might play Kreisleriana from memory, and another play two pieces by Elissa Milne and use the score. I have no problem with this happening at the same event. My students seem to appreciate the opportunity to play in the way that suits them best.