Opinions or suggestions on my thought of quiting the lessons

[ethure]

I've been wanting to quit for a few days now, thought i'd probably come and talk abour it here so that i'd have more to tell my teacher of it if it proves to be the right decision to make.

to make it short, the whole matter is that i feel i'm never recoverying to what i originally was. i feel i'm learning without a meaning, a motivation, a desire. it is not a company who spoke for me any more. the spiritual meaning has been gone. and i'm only mechanically improving, maybe someday it'll still be a way to 'bang' out your emotions(like Sherlock with his violin), and it also can be a way for me to go places i like to be(it's afterall a  skill too isn't it)  but it felt like being buried a soul to exchange that. and it felt so bad, that's why i simply wanted to quit.

sorry if i made it difficult to understand, time is urgent for me to make a post here at this very moment. i know my knowlege and experience for piano is still quite limited that's why i feel not confidently sure about my decision and think i'd probably get some opinions here before i face my teacher.

any kind reply will be much appreciated!      
 

[outin]

I understand how you feel. I feel like quitting almost every week after the lesson. Then I sit at the piano and the things we went through on the lesson start making sense. I am not easy to teach, and I don't think I could teach myself any better.

Was I happier to play before the lessons when it didn't matter how I played? Sometimes yes, but on the other hand I knew inside that I would never be able to play some of the things I want to without technical help.

From other things in life I know that learning the basics can be a real pain and kill all your creativity, but if you stick with it, the creativity should come back and hopefully in a more productive way. With the skills you have achieved you can actually realize your ideas much better.

Only advice I can give is that when you are making the decision about quitting, make sure you do it when you are well rested and eaten. Otherwise your decision may be affected too much by your tired/depressed state.

[ethure]

Thank you so much!! It's so good to be feeling understood by someone else out there!

and what you said was mainly what my teacher is trying to impress on me -- to learn the basics is what matters for you now. she said you need to lay a good foundation before you start to do anything else on this. but i have a problem with that.

"The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity."(Glenn Gould)

i feel my 'wonder and serenity' has gone now(or to say, transferred somewhere else rather than 'the best vehicle I have to express my ideas'-Glenn Gould) and it felt so meaningless to feel the fingers moving around the keys while i feel nothing inside to think, to construct, to pratise, to express, especially knowing that the ongoing lessons are leading me somewhere -- 'better' -- yet unknown.

here's another quote from the painter Henri Theodore Rousseau who never took any drawing lessons as 'except nature, i don't have a teacher'. that might help explain why i fear of the building foundation, learning basics thing. i'm kind of fond of the 'new', 'unpionerred' status; so, like being proficiency, sometimes such a thing really scares me. how does the 'having a good foundation' have anything to do with the 'i want to play the piece this way'? surely for example, when you found a piece you love then you wanted to interpret it, then you practised to build up all things that you need to sound the piece up, like sense of rythem, fluency, pedal etc; but, when you have nothing to express, what is the point to go on learning? what if i gain some skills that i may not need at all or even will pull me away from the ideal interpretion that i wanted to achieve?  

[derschoenebahnhof]

When I quit piano lessons I was 18 and had no patience... I was almost crying when I couldn't get a specific passage right and sometimes my mom would go to the lesson in my place and she would sing with my teacher.

I will be short but I would suggest looking for a different teacher maybe? Although my teacher was a neighbor 2 houses away, I never really felt he motivated me. He just went through the pieces one after the other. Lots of Bach (which I liked), Czerny (which I liked less), but little romantic music, thus I never really learned much about dynamics, articulation, playing ppp, etc. So I would just say before you quit maybe another teacher could make a difference. Also, which music do you like best? Find some CDs you are passionate about, and request to play some of the pieces you like. In 10 years of piano lessons I only requested to play one piece I liked, everything else was chosen by my teacher (I could have requested more but never did) ... you need to feel the music within you. I wasn't, and I played like a robot, which my classmates didn't fail to mention.

Mastering the basic skills is essential, but I think you also need to play things you like and enjoy it.

Don't give up now! Maybe take a break, start lessons again. If you stop for a while, I don't think you will loose your skills.

CG

[CC]

There is nothing wrong with quitting piano, especially if you are the type of person who has so many other better things (in terms of personal rewards) to do.  Putting piano on a pedestal, implying that unless you become a pianist you are a nobody, is simply wrong; piano is just one of many choices.

But successful piano learning can be rewarding; witness the large proportion of achievers who started by learning piano (presidential candidate Huntsman, Carli Fiorina, Condoleezza Rice, etc,).  Unfortunately, piano success depends too much on your teacher,  and good teachers are as rare as gold today (many are on this forum).  You may not know that the old piano mantra of "practice, practice, practice" is now being replaced by 3 new words, "learn practice methods"; ie, piano pedagogy is now knowledge based, and you  start immediately practicing what YOU want to play, instead of "learning the basics" which is too often more honestly  described by "wasting your time".

These matters are discussed in detail in my book below (all free).  But there is nothing wrong with quitting; you might even want to resume later with much greater desire and joy of playing after a "holiday" or you may be happy later that you had quit and freed time to do something better.  One disadvantage of quitting is that piano  skills learned during the teen ages are almost never forgotten, and the younger you are, the quicker you learn.  This is a free world; you should feel good that you have many good choices to make in addition to piano, instead of feeling guilty that you are quitting piano because nobody knows whether quitting is good or bad for you.  One possibility is changing teachers; after reading my book below, you  may have a better idea of how to find the kind of teacher you need.

[outin]

"The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity."(Glenn Gould)

i feel my 'wonder and serenity' has gone now(or to say, transferred somewhere else rather than 'the best vehicle I have to express my ideas'-Glenn Gould) and it felt so meaningless to feel the fingers moving around the keys while i feel nothing inside to think, to construct, to pratise, to express, especially knowing that the ongoing lessons are leading me somewhere -- 'better' -- yet unknown.

here's another quote from the painter Henri Theodore Rousseau [/url] who never took any drawing lessons as 'except nature, i don't have a teacher'. that might help explain why i fear of the building foundation, learning basics thing. i'm kind of fond of the 'new', 'unpionerred' status; so, like being proficiency, sometimes such a thing really scares me. how does the 'having a good foundation' have anything to do with the 'i want to play the piece this way'? surely for example, when you found a piece you love then you wanted to interpret it, then you practised to build up all things that you need to sound the piece up, like sense of rythem, fluency, pedal etc; but, when you have nothing to express, what is the point to go on learning? what if i gain some skills that i may not need at all or even will pull me away from the ideal interpretion that i wanted to achieve?  

I know absolutely nothing about painting, but I would imagine that you can paint in whatever technique you want and create something interesting. You can paint with your fingers or brush or even just throw paint on the canvas. But the piano is a mechanical device and it needs quite a lot of control just to produce a nice sound. I believe all those creative pianists took lessons as a child so they already has the foundation before they reached an age where they actually started getting more mature and creative ideas.

I assume you are not contemplating quitting the piano, just the lessons?

So basically: If you have enough skills already to create music the way you want and you are not interested in playing certain music as correctly as possible, it might be a good idea to quit lessons and just start making your own music. Or if you don't quit, could you take some time to improvise or compose something of your own between practicing the things you are supposed to?

Changing teachers might also help if you feel the relationship is not working, but I'm not sure if it's worth paying to someone who lets you do whatever you want, because then you woud basically teach yourself, right? At least for me it is a necessity that the teacher is in charge because I am used to getting my way and never learned any self-dicipline when I was young.

[j_menz]

It bothers me somewhat that there appears to be an assumption that the only pieces anyone plays are those they are "doing" for lessons. (If I'm misunderstanding, please ignore).

Are the only books you read those you are studying for some course? Do you only dance the moves you learn in dance class?

Keep up the lessons, they will expend your choices, but start exercising those choices now!

[outin]

It bothers me somewhat that there appears to be an assumption that the only pieces anyone plays are those they are "doing" for lessons. (If I'm misunderstanding, please ignore).

I hope no-one thinks that, but you must consider that a student who is not very far in the studies and is not studying music for a career, usually has limited practice time. So learning new pieces other than those you learn for your lesson simply may be too much and there may not be much past repertoire to get back to.

In this thread I think the issue is not so much what pieces one must play but HOW they must be played if I am not wrong...

[tekime]

Nobody can tell you what the right thing is but your own heart.

Personally, I play for fun. I'm teaching myself. I'll probably always suck, have awful technique, learn all kinds of bad habits, take spectacularly longer to learn simple things than if I had a teacher, and so on.... but I just don't care. I love doing it my own way and I love the challenge of taking a piece that is completely beyond my ability and just pushing through it. I've had to put a few pieces aside because they were just too far beyond my technical skills, and I'm sure that years of monotonous exercises and drills would remedy that... but I still don't care. A chicken could read sheet music better than I can, but I'm slowly starting to get it.

But that's just how I am personally... I also work for myself, learned more on my own than I ever did in school, heck I even cut my own hair for nearly my whole life. That said, who knows if you need or want a teacher... only you know. The first piece I learned was Fur Elise, and it took me forever. There were times I wanted to throw my keyboard out the window, times I thought I would never, ever, ever play it well. Then one day I played the entire piece through and it was the most incredible experience of my life. For the first time I felt like my heart had a voice. But at times it was just simple work - trudging through the sheet music, practicing the notes over and over - but it was absolutely and unequivocally worth it. Perhaps, my friend, you just haven't had enough of those moments recently. All that hard work should be offset by the reward of progress, and if your teacher just has you doing mind numbing drills and never exploring pieces that you actually enjoy, you're going to get sick and tired of it right?

I guess I'm just blathering on about my own experience but it seems to me if you're just going through the motions week after week and there is no enjoyment, there is absolutely no reason to keep doing it. But it might be worth expressing this clearly to your teacher, maybe even select a piece that you really love to listen to and say "THIS IS WHAT I WANT TO LEARN!". Who knows what will happen... but don't let the tired monotony of practice destroy the beauty of the art for you my friend.

[keypeg]

I think there are these in-between times.  To start off, we have a romantic idea about music, a certain passion.  We can't play well yet, but we imagine it because the music we hear and have in our heads create a lot of feeling.  Or we actually are playing, but we don't know enough yet to hear the rough edges.

Then we start to learn and it's exciting because it's new.  And then finally there is this stage where the doldrums set in.  Thing is that a lot of things we do to get there are not inspiring: they are tedious.  There's also this little gem that we start hearing our weaknesses while before we were in blissful ignorance.  Fact is that this is when we start improving (to everyone else's ear except our own).

The problem is in our initial expectation that it should always be inspiring, and inspiration drives us forward.  Learning an art can have a tedious and boring side.  If we can accept that as normal, slog through those periods or take small breaks, and if we know that we emerge on the other side, I think that helps a lot.  And maybe take some breaks by playing things that are below your present level so you can put your heart in them and catch just how far you have come.

[outin]

Keypeg said it so well. Most things in life are like that.
When you know very little or your abilities are limited you think you know/can enough, but the more you learn the more aware you become of your limitations and also the amount of work to actually get to the level of perfection (which of course you never will
That's when it's easy to get discouraged and just quit.

[oxy60]

There is a question of methodology here about the roll of teacher.

I see a teacher as a resource to whom you go to help solve a problem.

Every teacher I had wanted to dictate my repertoire. Never was I asked what I wanted to play.

Pick out a piece you want to play, listen to recordings of it, decide how you want to interpret it and try to get that result. If you run into trouble then schedule a lesson on that problem.

You need to take control of your artistic life!

[johnmar78]

Enthure, I think you still like to play the piano, because you are posting your questions here.
The the fire is not dead yet.

Have you got a partner. If so ask your partner.