Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner whats harder, starting piano early or late in life?

I'm just curious, because many people that I know say that it is much harder to pick up the piano the older you get. I mean, it will be if you don't know how to read sheet music, but then again you are more aware of what you are actually reading and playing, and your level of comprehension is much higher than a younger person.

But, if you start young you will have much time to learn and progress. And, if you are a natural at it, then you're almost destined for greatness.

So, whats more difficult?

It all depends on what your goals are - if you want to be a top tier sololist, then you HAVE to start young because there are certain musical aspects that adults just cannot develop - such as technique and sense of pitch, etc, but if you want to be able to play for pleasure , then you can actually learn faster as an adult becuase you are able to understand instuctions, have more discipline, etc

There are always exceptions. You can start later and become a top-notch pianist.

Generally, those we see on the concert stage began playing the piano when they were relatively young.

When we're young, our brains develop rapidly. Therefore, if we practice from an early age, then music and piano technique will develop at the same time our brains are rapidly developing, and we'll learn a lot better and faster.

JMO
If you had an adult who has never had music theory or played another instrument matched up against a young child; it would probably be easier for the child to learn to play the piano.
But there is always an exception to this. Jmo.

I majored in Elementary Ed. and in school I was taught about the theory of "Language Acquisition Device (LAD)". The LAD is that part of the brain that facilitates the learning language. Because of the LAD children have an easier time learning other languages also (ie. becoming bi or multi lingual). I suspect the LAD would also help a child pick up the language of music (sight reading).

Now adults with more exposure to music through playing other instruments, singing in formal groups, and other music experiences can make up for not having that LAD working for them as well as it does for children. I think as we age and stop using the LAD as much it goes the way of unused muscles. The adage "use it or lose it" applies with the LAD I suspect.

I started when I was 13.

Scriabin started when he was 12.

I was going to say this was a TERRIFIC post up until I read that pun....*groan*.

But I agree with you 100% on the Language Acquisition Device. The same principle is talked about in psychology: children have amazing capacity to learn language, including the language of music, at an early age, but if you don't use it by a certain age (I believe it's 7 or 8, right?), you lose your ability to learn languages quickly...and it is nearly impossible to sound like a native speaker (or, in the musical analogy, become a concert pianist).

There was a thread not all that long ago that spoke to these issues, entitled something like "early age practise critical for success." My memory is that there were a lot of gloomy acknowledgments that this is the case.

adults and children are quite different in learning anything. a child learns to play piano through playing itself, and doesn't have to understand why is this or that; while an adult learns to play piano through understanding first: why or how i do this or that and if this happens or this passage looks like this then what i need to do is this or that, etc. i guess that's how i learn to play later in life (since i never had a chance to learn it when i was kid), although i did know some music basics and played around with some other instruments (not seriously) for some short time. the only difficulty with ones who started really late, say 60 or 70 or above, is not mental but physical, which could either slow down someone's learning progress or simply prevent someone from playing decent. other than that, as long as no career goal with piano is involved, adults definitely have more advantage over learning.

I love to make puns....
can't stop myself. <GRIN>

I'd have to look in my old text books to find out the ages where LAD is a crucial part of a child's picking up languages quickly.

My text books are under a lot of dust, maybe an internet search on the topic would be quicker (and probably more up to date then my old books).

The theory of LAD was taught in the psychology of learning course I had to take as part of the Early Ed. Curriculum back then.

It is amazing to see the Sesame Street shows these days and how much they have added different languages into their programs. When they started out it was mostly English and a little Spanish. But when I was channel surfing one day I noticed the show introducing French words.

Now an anecdote: my neighbor is from mainland China. Her children refused to learn Chinese as they wanted to be like their peers. Guess what happened when they went to the university; they had to take 3 years of Chinese and struggled with it. It would have been so easy for them to grow up bilingual like their parents had become but they chose early on not to listen to the Chinese conversations or learn/speak the words (the parents learned English as adults).

Peer pressure affected their motivation to be fluent in their parents native language. It is sad they both had felt they needed to reject that part of themselves so early on. Kids want to fit in, not be different. Also kind of expensive as college credits for second language classes aren't that cheap. But at least they had good tutoring <g>.

The daughter did eventually go to China and Hong Kong as part of a college course.

An instance of the LAD in action. I acquired a few words of Yiddish from a landlady as a toddler. I've never forgotten those. I studied French as a teenager and minored in it in college. I've learned a certain amount of Russian as an adult and have a very close friend and coworker from Ekaterinburg whom I hear nattering away in Russian to her husband on the phone several times a day. I have a much easier time remembering the very rusty French that I learned in high school, than the Russian phrase my friend taught me last week, even though I've heard it often and recently, and haven't used the French in years. It's like my brain was able to take a "deeper stamp" as a teenager when I learned the French. The little bit of Yiddish I heard as a toddler was totally internalized.

The older you are, the harder it is to start early in life.

That's one thing I really do hate about getting old.

Remember, the most important thing is starting. Once you've got that under your belt, you're pretty much going in a straight line.

Hi,

I believe that there are published studies that specifically address music education before and after 8 years of age.

My wife and I did an intensive research at one point regarding raising a child as multilingual or monolingual. Although we were specifically interested in "Language Aquisition" aspect, we found some studies that dealt with music as well. Turns out, children 'acquire' music the same way they acquire language.

Children use an entirely diferent part of brain to learn language (& music) than adults do. This gives them an enormous edge over adults. the edge seems to be lost around 8 years of age though.

I do not remember journal names or publication dates but I'll try to dig through old notes and post references.

pg

When I was a kid - perhaps from age of five until I was 12 - I was extremely interrested in mathematics. It was due to my father who always gave me mathematical problems to solve, and usually very difficult ones. I started school one year earlier, at age of seven, and despite that, the mathematics was way too easy for me. It was so boring, I knew those things already! During the first year, I remember very well that I only did one error in one book with hundreds of calculations. In the next book, I probably had 3-4 errors.
Anyway, the point is that at age of 12 or 13, I stopped being interrested of math. It didn't fascinate me anymore, and I stopped caring about it. Now I really suck at math. I'm the worst ever!
I guess I haven't really tried to get into math again, but the point is that it's obvious that LAD isn't really true in all cases. I also played the piano, from age of 8, composed quite a lot... I can't explain how really, but I did play pieces like Tempest, Moonlight sonata, Mozart rondos... It probably didn't sound good! But the point is that I really don't think it did anything at all for my later musical education. All of my progress at the piano has been during the last 3-4 years. And although I think that I seem to learn a bit slower lately, I would say that I'm also learning more precise now, more accurately.

Kids don't think of what they're doing. That's why they do it so fast. That's why they do it so well.

You should pick up a biography on your namesake.

It's remarkable how often we hear people assert, incorrectly, that a particular famous pianist started playing at 16 or 23 or whatever. I suppose that the idea must have a certain appeal.

Yes and no. Kids don't care. They just do what you say because they have very little life experience to bump up against your teaching. Adults carry their egos with them wherever they go, and this gets in the way of their learning. Also, adults are generally very performance-oriented products of their surroundings, and this hinders the learning process because piano playing is not a bunch of numbers you can memorize. Rather than focus on the method, adults focus on the result. Kids don't know what the result is, so the method is all they have to work with.

My Sensei's (karate instructor's) favorite saying: "If you come to my class with a cup full of tea, I cannot put any more tea into it. Before you step on my floor, you must empty your cups."

Nice quote! I agree with the rest of your post too, mine was written in a rush.

Having thought of this some more, I think that adults simply need to have something that kids don't need - engagement. Adults have to make a choice, they have to decide what they feel is important in their life. To take myself as an example, I sometimes feel that playing piano is just one of many things in life, and practicing say 6 hours a day can actually make me feel less engaged. But that's just the way I want it, and sometimes I have periods when I feel more for playing... for kids, it doesn't work the same way. I was solving mathematical problems all of the time until I became 10-11 years old and I gradually got less interrested in maths. I did other stuff. And in college, when I would chose between practicing and going to my math class... I chose to practice. Or sleep, if the lesson was early in the morning...

I have noticed that a lot of adults I know are not catching up things very fast, and their memory isn't that good... Ie I had a conversation with a friends father, whom I like very much, but then a few weeks later we had a conversation on the same topic, and he said almost exactly the same things as he had said a few weeks earlier without even remembering that we had been discussing it. My grandfather in Poland was once looking for somewhere to park his car in a small town and made a few mistakes while driving, like driving on a one-way road. A few months later (actually, last week), we were in the same city, driving around and looking for a place to park the car. He did EXACTLY the same mistakes as the last time! Or, almost. He hadn't learned a thing from the earlier visit, although we often visit the town and he knows it well.

I don't really know where I was going with that... anyway, I have some more thoughts on the subject - I'll post it later.

Hi Fnork,

I don't think you generalize about having good or bad memories. Everyone is very different in their approach to learning, we all have different learning curves and backgrounds.

Talk about a late start at 60 and I have been taking lessons for about 4 1/2-5 years, my mother was a contralton (Juilliard) and my father was an accompianist. He always said I had a good ear for music - I'm not sure whether that helps or is a pain-in-the-neck. I have no idea wether it would have been easier if I had started at 6 - children do learn faster but they imitate, and come to music with a clean slate.

I just feel that those of us who started to learn late in life, no matter what the age, are doing so because it's something we've always wanted to do and it gives us pleasure to learn. One great benefit it has given me is a greater appreciation for music and the years of training it takes to perform. That, I can assure you is not my goal. I've also attended more recitals and concerts than BP - before piano. Must say that most are free, Juilliard, Mannes + TDF.

Age doesn't matter, the desire to learn and willingness to practice does. Memory varies with the individual, I've gone to night school with someone in their 80's who was sharper than some 20 year olds and vice versa. So please don't put us all in the same box.

Maybe the LAD doesn't actually go away, maybe it's just dormant for a while.

Maybe the chemicals that cause it to go dormant in a teenager lose their power later in life.

Maybe there is a Music Aquisition Device that doesn't kick-in until you hit your 50's.

Anyway I started at age 50 and now my LAD just has to do the best it can to keep up because I am going to figure this thing out.

Opus Maximus said that you have to start young, and if you start later you have no chance of becoming a concert pianist. Well, I started a year ago (when I was 15) and all I want is to become a concert pianist and perform with the best.

I constantly make stupid mistakes in pieces that I know I should have mastered, but for my harder pieces I usually play them next to perfect, so where's the logic in that?

So is everyone besically saying that I can't get there because I started too late?

I started at 16 and I feel fine...I don't believe any of the b.s that is said about starting as a child to be a concert pianist.

AsianPianist, I think everybody here wishes you the best in your career. I don't think any of us are saying that you "can't" become a concert-level pianist because you started at 15. I think we are, however, just acknowledging that it's a demanding, highly competitive field. Even if you started at age 4 we'd be saying that it's a tough road ahead. Music is a lot like professional sports or acting in that respect; many people dream of such a career but it requires years of effort, talent, and not a little luck to make a go out of it.

BUT YOU SHOULD FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS AND HEART!! There are many happy successful professional musicians who devote their lives to the piano and make a good living at it who are not concert pianists. And you may be the exception that proves the "early start is crucial" rule wrong. You won't know unless you try. I think it is also true that there are more people who regret NOT pursuing music than there are people who tried for a musical career and decided later that they shouldn't have.

p.s. But you should study hard in school and go to college anyway just to have a backup should music not work out the way you want it to. Sorry, I had to add that as a mother and professor!

Don't listen to them. They speak from experience: all of the greats that we hear about started when they were young, but that doesn't mean you can't make it, nor does it mean that there aren't, in fact, great pianists who started as teenagers.

As Monica said, if you never try, then you'll never know if you could have made it or not.


For what it's worth, I've been playing for 6 years (since I was 12), and I think I'm doing a pretty good job with Chopin 10/1, a piece which my teacher has called a pretty nasty name, and I've performed Beethoven's Appassionata, and Grieg Concerto 1st movement, and Chopin 10/12 numerous times... not that I'm even close to the professional level, but see what I've accomplished during 6 years? If I've done all that, then you can do the same or even better.

The real trouble is, by your early 30's, everyone's playing on/near the same level, whether you started at 2 or 15. It's just easier to market someone as a "child prodigy" than as a "Johnny-come-lately". I've noticed a lot that the business side of the classical community could use a little help...especially marketing (which is a large part of the reason why they lose market share to all the other genres).

Becoming a successful concert pianist at a given age is about the same as becoming successful athlete at the same age. There are very few who start at college age, and by the time you've passed that, your chances are pretty much gone.

This doesn't mean that you cannot play the piano if you start late, and it most assuredly doesn't mean that you cannot have fun playing. One should just adjust one's goals accordingly.

If the truth be known, you can probably tell who has a chance within a few months of taking up the instrument. So few people have a chance that one must be born with exceptional talent, and that will show up very quickly. Hard work alone is not enough.

I only got serious at the age of about 17. I won't be playing with the Chicago Symphony anytime soon, but I do have a career teaching and playing the piano. This month alone I'll be playing for a touring broadway show, playing in the pit for our school's musical, sitting on a panel discussion at the WPPC in Anaheim, playing a full recital with a violinist friend of mine, giving a workshop to the local piano teacher's association, and teaching a full-time load.

The keys to starting late and making it are working hard and defining success broadly.

i'ma have to disagree with anyone who says that it's better that you start piano earlier, b/c i didn't have the luxury of starting early, and that's a long story i would rather not get into right now. i guess some of you are saying that it's better that you start young b/c y'all started young, [like many other pianists] so i beg to differ. well, not everyone starts [and/or gets serious] at a young age. you can't turn back the clock and redo things; the only thing i can do is compensate for lost time. everyone's circumstances are different.

i wish that i could've started younger, but it's all a matter of perfect timing, and the timing couldn't've been better, b/c a lot of the things that i've learned [on my own, mind you] it would've been impossible to comprehend if i was younger, like where the notes are located, time and key siganture, etc. there's still some bad habits i have to overcome, but i'll hire a teacher to point that out. and as for my joints, they're working just fine, thank you.

i've been playing now for 17 months, about 2 months before my 19th birthday, and i've learned a lot since that time. plus, when i was younger, a lot of the musicians that i imitate and took some of my pointers from weren't around when i was younger, so i wouldn't know as much then as i would have now. I'm still a little sore about not starting young, but i believe that everything happens for a reason.

I'd like to say thanks to everyone for all of your support and input. I really don't think that I'll go on tour before college, and I doubt that I'll make it big time anywhere else anytime soon. I just want to say that what all of you have said I've put to heart, and I will continue to pursue my goal.

I also want to add that most on this forum are some of the nicest, most generous people that I've ever talked to. Maybe it's music that has calmed our minds and made us combatable with each other.

Anyone with audio clips NEEDS to post them on the forums! I get my inspiration from people like you! Thanks

Maybe the LAD doesn't actually go away, maybe it's just dormant for a while.

This is a good question. The answer is we are not sure. LAD has been somewhat uncritically accepted here as fact. But we must not forget that LAD is not an empirical entity: it cannot be literally taken for a "device" located somewhere in the brain. It`s a theoretical construct, a proposition first put forward by the famous linguist Noam Chomsky in 1965. In simple terms, LAD means that humans are born with a system that enables them to learn language(s) (as opposed to animals). In this sense, of course, LAD does exist. Relatively little is known, however, about its nature. I`ve been working in the field of applied linguistics for over 15 years and here are some insights I would like to share:

1. Observation of children suggests that they learn languages easily because they learn faster than adults and pick up perfect accent. But is the process as effortless and painless as it seems? Isn`t it a little that we romanticise childhood? Children have no choice: they just have to learn to adjust to the world around them and, in fact, ALL that young children do is learn their mother tongue. They put ALL their intellectual effort into it.

2. To say that children use a completely different part of brain to learn language seems just preposterous. This would have to mean that humans in their lifetime evolve into another species. There is no neurological evidence to assume that humans learn language 1 in any different way than language 2. Surely enough, statistically speaking young people learn faster than old people, are better athletes, drivers etc. But this is not to say that the language aquisition process itself is different. There is no scientific basis for such distinction. And we are talking about learning language, not PHONETICS of a language. Children do learn phonetics markedly better than adults, and this ability is somehow lessened in later life. But again, it doesn`t disappear completely, it could be even supposed, as in the quote above, it remains dormant in later life.

3. It is true adults cannot sound exactly like native speakers of a language they are learning, but they can learn to sound almost so. In practical terms this would mean that, say, a spy sent to Nazi Germany during WWII, would have to be somebody who grew up in Germany, if he or she wanted to pass for a German. But outside espionage/deception contexts there seems little use of perfect pronunciation alone if not supported by rich and relevant vocabulary, general intelligence or interpersonal sills.
In other words an adult is capable of learning a foreign language well enough if he/she puts enough time and energy into it.

4. There are ample examples of people who learned a new language proficiently in their 60s or even 70s. It is true, however, that these examples are statistically rare.

<a href> http://www.classical-composers.org/html/scriabin_bio.html </a href> Look at the first paragraph and get back to me on that.

Scriabin starting playing the piano as a toddler. Like so many great pianists, he received his first instruction from a family member, in his case an aunt. Scriabin was in every sense a prodigy during his early childhood. By 12 he already played well enough to arouse envy in Zverev's studio, and he gave a public debut playing Schumann which impressed some of Moscow's finest musicians. He had impressed Anton Rubinstein well before that, and by age 10 had even constructed several functioning toy pianos.

Your link says that he began "formal studies" at 12, which I suppose is true as far as it goes, depending on your definition of "formal", but he started playing long before that, and this thread is about the benefits of starting piano early in life.

C'mon, he's your favorite composer. You can buy a biography for $10.

i would rather not hear about the benefits of starting early in life, b/c like i said before, i didn't have the luxury of starting early. it's not like they're really helpful, much less truthful, anyway. it's a theory until proven true. i've started, have developed great technique, love it to death, end of discussion. or else i'll be tempted to get depressed and compare myself to others, which i don't have time for, because life too short for that kind of nonsense.