Change or Quit Piano Instructor?

[Christine3492]

My daughter is 9 and has been taking piano lessons for almost 3 years.  She loves to play at home, usually her favorites, but also does about 1/2-1 hour of daily practice on her weekly lesson.  She has a wonderful gift for sight reading and also has great expression with her playing.

I am a self taught pianist, accompanist, and church organist.  I would put my level of playing at intermediate difficulty.  

So therein lies the problem....  I never had structured lessons from an instructor, but played for the sheer enjoyment, learning from progressively harder music, and pretty much playing from my soul.

My daughter loves to play and continually is playing ahead in her lesson and technique books, pushing herself.  Her instructor however, I think, wants to be in control of her progress, and therefore, there is a lot of butting heads about her progress.  I would hate to have my daughter get disenchanted with the piano, especially when I see such talent and enthusiasm.

I am really tempted to pull her out of lessons and either teach her myself or let her just enjoy herself at the piano.  Although I would hate to do that, because there is so much about theory and technique that I never learned.

We live in a very rural area with piano instructors few and far between.  The other instructor in the area has very few to no openings.

Thanks for any advice!

[bernhard]

This is a difficult problem.

A teacher is essential at the early stages for the following reasons:

1.      S/he will correct any bad habits and make sure that the good ones are implanted early on.

When a beginner approaches a piano for the first time, his/her movements will be clumsy and uncomfortable. This means any kind of movement: correct and incorrect ones. If the beginner by sheer luck happens to use appropriate movements consistently, s/he will eventually get used to these correct movements and develop superb technique. However, if the beginner starts with the wrong movements, soon these will become comfortable and almost impossible to replace by the correct ones, since human beings are like that: they stick with what is comfortable.

Consider a typist who types with only two fingers. S/he may be able to type at surprisingly fast speeds, but s/he will never be as fast or as accurate as a typist who uses all ten fingers. S/he may even be aware of that and decide to learn the proper way. However this means that s/he will have to give up for the time being the relative proficiency in typing s/he has acquired  and go back to a stage of complete clumsiness while learning to use ten fingers. As you can imagine the proficiency with two fingers will be a major block in the road towards ten fingers typing.

Likewise with piano playing. In the beginning, with easy pieces, such incorrect movements will be all right, the student will be able to get away with them. However, as the technical demands increase, the student will experience an insurmountable wall. S/he will be stuck and the only way out will be to go back right to the beginning and re-educate all his/her movements patterns. Needless to say, this borders on the impossibility, since the apparent proficiency s/he has already acquired with wrong movements will be very difficult to give up.

It is at the initial stages when all movements (correct and incorrect) are equally awkward and uncomfortable that it is the easiest to acquire the proper technique. This of course assumes that the teacher knows about all this (you would be amazed how few of those are around!).

2.      A teacher supplies a model for the student. Piano playing is not an intellectual subject. In fact it has much more in common with physical feats like juggling and Olympic gymnastics and dance. The way to learn such physical activities is through imitation and repetition. The teacher provides a model in this sense. Again this assumes that the teacher “knows”, and can be safely imitated.

3.      A teacher is a time-saver. Most of what is known today about piano playing has been painstakingly gathered over almost 400 years of experimentation and trial and error. It is possible to learn the piano by oneself, but it will take a very long time. And chances are one will get stuck into all sorts of problems that have already been solved. Again, the teacher is a time-saver only if s/he knows what s/he is doing.

Finding a good teacher is difficult. In fact it amazes me that people actually do find them! Everything seems to conspire against it. It seems to me that your problem boils down to trust. Do you trust the teacher? If so, you should comply with his/her methods. If not, then there is no point is following instructions from someone you do not trust.

If you decide to teach your daughter yourself I would suggest that you get well informed. It is a tremendous responsibility. Getting all the information you can will also help you to choose a future teacher or to better evaluate her present one.

I suggest you get acquainted with the following works:

Gyorgy Sandor – On playing the piano.
Seymour Fink – Mastering piano technique (Amadeus Press).
Abby Whiteside – On piano playing (Amadeus Press).

And have a look at these websites:

https://members.aol.com/cc88m/PianoBook.html
https://www.practicespot.com/

Then you can branch out by following the bibliography (and links) provided in these works.

Although these books discuss advanced technique, you must be aware of the advanced stuff if you want to lay a good foundation. If you ask an engineer to calculate the foundations of a building, he will need to know how many floors and what kind of a building it is going to be. Likewise, you must consider the final goal in order to better prepare the way.

I hope this helps.

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

[Emma]

      When I first began to play the piano, my father, who is a fine trombonist but not a pianist, taught me untill I neaded more instruction than he could give. Even though I started taking lessons from a piano teacher, I continued to learn more from my father than my teacher.
       My advice is for you to teach your daughter until you can find a teacher who will challenge and instruct her well.
       However, theory is extremely important, and there are many fine theory courses in books and on the internet.
       -Emma

[bernhard]

              However, theory is extremely important, and there are many fine theory courses in books and on the internet.
       -Emma

I partially agree. Yes, theory is important. But you do not really need a teacher for that. Theory is an intellectual subject, so any adult can figure it out from a book. You can easily teach theory to your daughter (and learn it in the process!)

The main importance of a piano teacher is to impart correct principles for acquiring technique (notice that I did not say correct technique, since at a certain stage everyone has to develop one's own peculiar technique).

Later on a teacher is important also for guiding the student in matters of musicality - suggesting ways of interpretation and how to achieve them. But this is on  a more advanced level.