My new survey explained

[ericnolte]

(Revised on 30.VI.03, at 1445 GMT)

Hello all,

  I would hope that no one here has any reason to suppose my new survey has any nefarious motives, but maybe I can encourage more people to take part in this survey if I explain more of what I'm up to.

  How long does it take to acquire great skill as a pianist?  And does it matter at what age one begins?

  Intuition would say that it takes a very long time indeed to win virtuoso chops.  Intuition says that one has to start early, or it's a lost cause.

  I'm not sure that either of these propositions is always true.  The first idea seems more likely, that it does indeed take a long time to learn how to play extraordinarily complex music.  The second idea is more likely false.  In my experience, it is clearly false, but the social scientists are quick to shoot down this kind of personal report by dismissing it as "anecdotal....")  So how to answer these questions?  Especially in a world that is riddled with some goofy ideas and prejudices?  The purpose of my survey is to gather data in my effort to answer these questions.  Come along with me as I consider some of what guides my thinking here:

  I believe there is a nasty idea that permeates some of the world, that unless one has acquired huge skill at a very early age, one has no chance of ever becoming hugely accomplished.  Why would this be true?  I can't answer it comprehensively, but  I'm sure there are many factors.  

  For one thing, it's obvious we live in a world that tends to worship youth and dismiss age, but there are many other factors too.  If one observes the practices of most music competitions and the admissions departments of many music schools, one can see implicitly the idea that great accomplishment either arrives fully formed as it springs from the head of Zeus, or not at all.  In other words, there is often a feeling among these schools and competitions that you've either got "it" as a toddling child prodigy, or you will never have it at all.

  This is not to deny the idea that there are obvious and huge differences in such native endowments as talent, temperament, perceptiveness, and in atheletic and intellectual gifts.  Of course these differences exist.  But it is a shame for institutions to dismiss the worthy striving of seekers, merely, as it sometimes happens, because it is convenient to thin out the crowded ranks of competitors on the basis of age.

  What I am focusing on here is the lamentable tendency of many to beat up on themselves for the imagined "sin" of not having been a dazzling child prodigy, and, more to the point here, to believe that any such failure will predict the level of accomplishment to which one may ever aspire.  

  What if Mozart had not been suffused in Leopold's richly informed guidance from an early age?  Leopold was one of the most gifted and accomplished musicians of his day.  Now, Wolfgang would certainly have retained his innate gifts into adulthood, but he would not have been able to play a note.  What if Wolfgang had then stumbled across a great music teacher, and decided that he wanted to become a musician... starting at the age of, say, 20 or more?  Given a sufficiently powerful desire to learn, should one tell him not to bother?  That it's too late to do any good?  Never mind that, all other things being equal, that one may learn things more easily as a child than as an adult (I'm not convinced this is true, anyway.)  So here we have Wolfgang picking up music, beginning at the age of 20-something.  At what point might he conclude that his efforts are doomed never to rise very high?  How can he measure his progress and know he is on track?

  It's clear that there are developmental features of the human brain that make some things possible only at certain stages of growth.  Psychologists, who study how people learn things, know that there are windows of cognitive opportunity which, once closed, make some feats of learning impossible.  

  At one developmental extreme is the story of a pair of East Indian children who, at the age of maybe nine or ten, were discovered to be living in the wild among a pack of wolves, like a contemporary Romulus and Remus (it is likely that these kids were abandoned as infants, on the expectation that they would die out in the open.)   Despite years of care thereafter, these children never learned to talk.  It seems clear that linguistic ability exploits a cognitive faculty that must be stimulated during a certain developmental time frame, or else this window of opportunity closes off any chance of learning in the future.  One would guess that music ability would display similar features to language ability.  We know that it seems easier to acquire perfect pitch at a young age, so maybe other aspects of music ability behave in a similar way too.

  I don't doubt that unless one has some exposure to music early on, it may be very difficult to learn as an adult.  But my experience (again, anecdotal) says that I have been able to teach adults in a week what it frequently takes a child a year or more to learn.  Of course many adults quit because they are afflicted with one of the plagues of our culture: the petulant demant for instant gratification.  Now here's an ironic truth about why some other adults quit: notwithstanding that much of our culture is obsessed by instant gratification, there really are high standards revealed in our world, and great accomplishment can be seen daily.  It's easy for some people to feel bad about themselves when they discover that they don't sound like Rubinstein or Horowitz after a month of study, and they quit because they would rather die than sound bad....    This brings me to self-defeating attitudes and at least one antidote to this problem.

  A self-defeating attitude says, "Why bother?"  An unfortunate attitude asks, "Oh, dear me, can I do it?"  A better attitude would ask, not IF one is capable of achieving something, but rather, "HOW IS IT DONE?"  The latter question serves to keep us focused on the reality of the moment (without losing sight of the context of past and future, of course), and allows us to work productively on solving the problems in our way.  Is this clear?  Don't remain mired in the doleful question, "CAN I reach my goal?"  Instead, stay with the more illuminating question, "HOW do I reach my goal?"

  Now, I believe one thing that might help people to find a realistic measure of their progress at the piano is a question I asked myself some years ago.  I felt I needed to bolster myself when I first began to work seriously at the piano.  In truth, I was basically sort of an adult beginner.  There I was, still working on baby music as a 30-something year old man.   I wondered, when do I give up this lunatic notion that I can ever learn to play harder pieces by Chopin, Bach, Beethoven, et al?  At what point should one throw in the towel and say this is a dotty ambition that can never be realized?

  My answer to this question remains a theory, but I have a growing body of evidence by which to test this theory against reality.   For one thing, I myself have learned to play some very difficult music indeed with at least some degree of supple expressiveness.   But once again here's that bugaboo of the social scientists, the dreaded problem of anecdotal evidence.  My survey is to gather more data in this effort to come up with a reasonable answer.   An analogy will help me explain the context here:

  Observe that airline pilots measure their experience by the number of hours they've spent aloft.  My theory is that so too should pianists think somewhat along these lines.  To the pilot, age matters very little, it is hours aloft that count.  On one hand, one cannot become a pilot while suffering from the crippling arthritis and dementia of old age, and on the other hand, one must be old and big enough to understand the physics of flight and to reach all the flight controls.  Between these extremes of age, what counts is the hours one has spent in the air. Of course, it matters very much how one has spent those hours, whether one has acquired experience of sophisticated aircraft, or has spent one's time tooling around only in little airplanes that never do more than sniffing around down low and slow.  And it certainly matters whether one has any talent, but the key question is to know if pilots have enough experience to be trusted in charge of other people's lives.  Do these pilots know what they're doing?  And a good first idea about this matter of trust is the question, "How many hours do they have aloft?"  With the greatest talent in the world, with the most sophisticated equipment at hand, it comes to nothing if the pilots have only 100 hours of flying time in their logbooks.  It simply takes a lot of flying time to acquire broad enough experience to know what to do in the face of all the terrible problems that can happen in an airplane.  One has to fly long enough to see the full range of nasty weather associated with all the seasons and climates of the world, and to experience many actual problems with equipment breakdowns, and so forth.

  Similarly, pianists, even little Wolfurl or Nannerl, perched on Papa Mozart's knee, have to work at the Black Beast a certain number of hours before they can expect to acquire great chops at the keyboard.

  So how many hours does it take?   The purpose of my survey is ask how many hours can one expect it to take, in this quest to win virtuoso skills?  

  For starters, it might be useful to ask how long it has actually taken real people to do it.  Thus my survey attempts to learn how many hours it has taken for those who have actually made this journey into the general neighborhood of Parnassas.

  I suspect we'll find that it has actually taken many thousands of hours at the piano, no matter how great one's native endowments.  I am certain too that there will be a wide range according to the huge range of talent and biological variation, but surely there is a "set range," as the psychologists like to call it, outside of which it simply proves impossible to achieve certain levels of performance.

  I suspect too, that we may be able to conclude that we have no right to beat up on ourselves for not being able to play this or that piece, unless one has logged at least a certain number of hours "aloft," just like airline pilots measuring their experience.

  But I can't answer these questions without a wealth of data, and so I am offering this survey for your participation.

  It would help if I were a trained social scientist, to design a decent survey, but I think this rough first draft may serve to get a decent answer to some of these questions.

  Thank you for your participation in this survey.

  And, not incidentally, I will gratefully welcome any suggestions for how I might do this work better.

Sincerely yours,
Eric Nolte

[manablight]

I am really surprised no on ever replied to this post, it was very well written and could prove very useful to community.

[m1469]

I am slightly surprised that you would feel the way that you do about this thread, yet not give an actual reply to the initial post  .

Anyway, yes, it's pretty interesting.

The problem is that this "survey" is not very clear.  What are people supposed to answer, exactly ?  How many hours it has taken to become a virtuoso ?  How in the world does somebody answer that ?  Even if it were possible to answer, some terms (like "virtuosity") would need to be defined... and I have already tried that here :

 https://www.pianostreet.com/smf/index.php/topic,25825.msg292876.html#msg292876



.

[eric nolte]

Hello all,

It's Eric Nolte again--I wrote the post that starts this thread.  It's been... wow... four and a half years since I wrote this bid for answers from accomplished pianists!  I have some new ideas and experience during this time!

I realize now that what I REALLY want is not so much answers to this survey (fascinating though I'm sure it will be to hear the stories of people who have successfully struggled to become very accomplished pianists) but rather the personal experience of becoming such a pianist myself!  I just want to be able to make glorious music at the piano, and to be able to play fabulously well myself!  Now, maybe because I got such a late start at studying the piano seriously, I am also inclined to a feeling of compassion and support for those who are also wrestling with the pianist's problems as adult learners.  I enjoy teaching, and I am still interested in sharing any knowledge that proves useful in helping us to become accomplished pianists.

Now, in the four years since I wrote this first post, I've decided that what really matters in achieving great skill at music is how intelligently we work, and whether we work at it consistently every day or two.  Devoting consistent, mindful hours at the instrument is what will bring us forward into the radiant light of wonderful accomplishment!   The sheer number of hours put in at the keyboard actually counts for nothing, if that time is not spent in mindful attention to solving the problems we encounter.  For example, it will get us nothing merely to practice a piece by playing it through from start to finish, again and again, without long, repetitious attention to the hard parts, or playing slowly, or practicing with hands separate for the hard bits.  Mindlessly running laps through a piece from top to bottom amounts to nothing more than practicing our mistakes, and even 20,000 hours of such work will accomplish nothing but forging unbreakable links in the performance of terrible music.

Along these lines, nothing has proven more helpful to me than the wisdom, yes real wisdom, that I have encountered in the writings of Philip Johnston.  Look up his books, _The Practice Revolution_ and the _Practiceopedia_.  Johnston's style of writing is engaging, lively, and laugh-out-loud funny.  It also embodies just about the most useful wisdom that I have ever read on music.  His approach to acquiring great skill at music is general enough to apply to any instrument, but he is a pianist himself, and I believe that any readers of this forum will profit enormously from studying Johnston's work.

Another work that marshals great wisdom and offers enormous help for those of us who are struggling specifically with the pianist's problems, is _Fundamentals of Piano Practice, by Chuan C. Chang.   In this book, available on line for free (and for a small price in a hard copy)  the author distills the wisdom of some of the greatest pianists and  teachers, and offers us a readable and practical manual for building our skills.  The sections discussing the difference between the "thumb under" and the "thumb over" method of playing scales and arpeggios is alone worth ten times its weight in gold.  While there are occasional minor errors, like typos, I highly recommend this book!

As for my "survey," this is hardly good social science, in the form I put it above!  Yes, it is not a series of multiple choice questions, scientifically arranged to extract quantifiable data on specific issues.  But what I am still seeking is a little more informal.  What I am really interested in is hearing from anyone who has achieved great powers as a pianist and musician, and is willing to share with us any advice and wisdom on how we too can make our way up that road to Parnassus!

For example, if you remember staring limp-jawed and helpless before anything like the double thirds etude of Chopin, wondering how in the name of sweet love you would ever get this monster up to speed--and then you figured out how to play it beautifully...  let's hear how you did it!  How can we too overcome such daunting problems?  Let's hear some success stories of along these lines!

Best regards,
Eric Nolte

[richard black]

A vastly experienced pianist once pointed out to me that, as a matter of historical fact, most of the great virtuosi (strictly, virtuosi in the sense of being able to toss off yards of Liszt etc. without any apparent effort) started learning piano around the age of 5 or 6: most of the great lyrical pianists (world-class but not the sort to play fast, showy repertoire, including pianists who worked mainly as duo/chamber music players) started at the age of 7 or 8. Remarkably few pianists of note started learning any later than 8.

Similar fact for violinists. But what of wind instruments? Some of the finest players didn't start until early teens. And some famous singers were in their 20s before starting to sing at all seriously.

[danny elfboy]

Eric there are good books out there that explain how the "critical period hypothesis" is nothing but a myth without evidence.

There are only two reasons why we see a CORRELATION (not causation) between playing an instrument proficiently and starting young

1) If you're going to play at a virtuoso level, you're likely to have a very strong and visceral passion. It's pretty unlikely that such passion won't manifest itself at an early age. In other words, a passion for piano is seen at a young age and therefore is involvment in such passion.

The exception are those that felt such passion for the piano but couldn't have lesson because they were sick or poor. These indeed are the people who become late beginners and who become as proficient as the early beginners.

2) In this society young children have more time to practice while adults have less time to practice. A child may already design his/her life so that everything revolves around music. But a late beginner has already designed for himself/herself a life outside of music and adding enough music practicing and enough focus to learn is not easy.

All the rest is just pure nonsense and nothing but hypothesis that can't be proven for the life of them, except as through ridicolous correlations that don't explain anything.

If you look around on ballet forums, broadway forums, tennis forums, opera forums, second and third language forums you'll notice that there are always "late beginners" who reached the same levels of those who started earlier.

Given the same amount of time and focus there is no reason why a early beginner should learn better than a late beginner.

There is another point to make. Usually early beginner are MORE FOCUSED because they don't feel the pressure of time that late beginner feel. Early beginners are less likely to stress over comparisons, competitions, rushing. But these are nothing but attitudes and attitudes can be changed ... as a matter of fact everything about the way we act and think is influenced by society and can be changed at whatever age. 10 years old beginner don't reason all in a standard way and 30 years old beginner don't reason all in a standard way. A late beginner would benefit from adopting the attitude and mentality of an early beginner which would increase focus and optimism.

[rc]

Hello Eric,

I'm not a dazzling virtuoso, but am also working to prove to myself how far I can go.  Actually, I began piano just a little after you started this thread 4 years ago!  So I agree with everything you've said so far.  Not so much out of evidence but that I have no choice

So, I was 19 then.  I dabbled for about a year before I really began to get into it, then I became enthusiastic.  For about a year I learned on my own, taking ideas mainly from this site (Bernhard that is) and made it my focus in life.  My CD collection began to grow, my bookshelf filled with piano books, and my friends didn't know if I was still alive.  By about 2.5 years I found a teacher, at that time I was learning my first Haydn sonata and a Bach Prelude.  I think I figured out the basics quickly.

From there I backed up a bit to fill in gaps: theory, sightreading, scales/chords/arpeggios.  Theory is a breeze (Kirkpatrick wrote something along the lines of "any intelligent deaf mute could pass a theory class"), and I'm still making steady progress with sightreading and 'technique'.

There are times where I turned around to realize that I'd achieved some of my goals.  It didn't really occur to me at the time, I was too busy practicing to notice that I've learned to play pieces that I used to dream of playing   Most recently it was a Bach sinfonia, I didn't think I was ready to pull it off but actually the challenge was invigorating and I learned it fairly quickly.

So I haven't really proved anything exceptional, I still believe that with enough time and effort I can become a very good musician.  Time will tell.