Students: Do you ever feel fully prepared for your lessons?

[bernadette60614]

And, if you do, how do you achieve that?

Before every lesson I always feel that I should have my pieces at a performance level?

[visitor]

no never. I always feel like I didn't accomplish enough for the lesson

[dogperson]

Of course I do not ever feel completely prepared and wish I could have more done. But I do not understand your last sentence that you feel like pieces need to be at performance level. I do not view my lesson as a performance but as an opportunity to ask questions and explore problems

Therefore I start all my lessons with the problem sections/measures and my questions of the week. When we complete this, I may or may not play through the piece  to see if there are other issues I did not identify....... that totally depends on time. My lessons are an hour and a half per week and there is always plenty to be done.

[outin]

And, if you do, how do you achieve that?

Of course not...I need to work to pay for the lessons.
Ask me again after I quit my day job...

[keypeg]

And, if you do, how do you achieve that?

Before every lesson I always feel that I should have my pieces at a performance level?

Bernadette, we crossed paths recently in another thread, and to some extent we've had some similar history.  At the end of my first stint, going into the second with my present teacher (and switching to piano) I looked deeply into what lessons are actually about.  You have a misperception, and it is probably at least in part due to your past experiences.

Lessons are (in my view) for the purpose of acquiring skills.  With any teacher I engage, I want to make sure that we are both clear on that point.  There are even teachers who would like to focus on skills, but are afraid to do so fully, because their students may not have that concept.  A lesser form of lessons focuses on pieces, and you might have a teacher where every week you "perform" for the teacher - she says "X could sound better - listen to me play it.  In Y you keep missing the F# /you're not bringing the dynamics [but I won't ever think I should teach you how]." etc.  And so we get the idea that we're performing for the teacher.

With a decent teacher / the kind I like to work with - the skills are the project, my growth is the project, the piece is not the project.  There is almost a delight in finding weaknesses, because this tells the teacher "Here's what we need to tackle next."  That also becomes your project as a student and you practise.  You are not performing; you're cooperating on this project.  It is a totally different mindset.

That said (and this goes with (I think Bob's?) - answer to another question of yours.  Say a teacher wants you to get a handle on playing dynamics differently in the RH than the left, for voicing.  The teacher gives you a specific way of practising this.  Then the teacher wants to see signs that you practised the thing he focused on with you, in the manner that he showed you.  Say he wants you to play one hand loud, one hand soft, beat by beat, gradually bringing the timing together (I was given this some years ago), then when he hears you play the next time, he will hear whether you did that.  It also tells him whether his idea worked with you.  If you come in playing "beautifully", trying to show him the wonderful performance you cobbled together, but you did not try what he told you to try, he will be disappointed.

As dogperson said, your teacher may also want to know about problems you are having.  This one is tricky, because:
a) the teacher may want to hear you play, for him to recognize problems
b) the problem you are having may be due to something different than you think. As an example, some difficulties I had with my hands "kinking" were due to where I was sitting, and where I balanced my gravity.  Had I insisted on fixing the hands, rather than letting my teacher tell me, "Do this.  Now do that." while observing, it would not have worked well.

All of this to say that "performing well", or playing a piece as perfectly as possible, isn't actually in there for the kind of teacher I like working with.  (Does any of this make sense?)

[dogperson]

@keypeg
When I identify problems with my teacher during the lesson, neither one of us make any assumptions about the root cause or the ‘instant’ solution.  And of course she watches and hears me playing a section or the measure.  For instance, If an ornament is not sounding lite and smooth, The resolution might be fingering, hand position or arm position or even body alignment.  I don’t find anything tricky about this at all: My teacher  observes and listens to the problems.   I just tell her what I have observed myself when I practice and we work through it

[dogperson]

duplicate post

[keypeg]

@keypeg
When I identify problems with my teacher during the lesson, neither one of us make any assumptions about the root cause or the ‘instant’ solution.  And of course she watches and hears me playing a section or the measure.  For instance, If an ornament is not sounding lite and smooth, The resolution might be fingering, hand position or arm position or even body alignment.  I don’t find anything tricky about this at all: My teacher  observes and listens to the problems.   I just tell her what I have observed myself when I practice and we work through it

Sorry dogperson, I did not mean for it to sound as if I was advising you. I sort of took off on the idea.
Among my own experiences: It might happen that I come in saying "I'm having a problem with such-and-such" and I'm imagining we'll work on the problem that I saw, directly.  My teacher may ask me to do things that seem to have nothing at all to do with the problem I presented.  In early times I'd initially feel perturbed.  But when it was all done, what happened was that he had caught an entirely different problem --- maybe one that was much more important than what I had highlighted --- and by going along with the ride a whole bunch of things got improved.  In fact, whatever I was worried about suddenly became secondary or didn't matter at all.

Btw, I've often had a sense that you have a good teacher, and a decent student-teacher relationship.

[brogers70]

I never think about being prepared for my lessons. All I do is practice the things I discussed with my teacher in the previous lesson and show up. I don't look on the lesson as any kind of performance; it's just a chance to see where I am and what needs attention. I also don't practice any differently the day before a lesson and the day after (I mean apart from trying to implement whatever I learned in the lesson). If I've told myself I'll do 20 minutes of sight reading everyday, I don't give that up the day before my lesson to work extra hard on something I'm planning to play for the teacher. I just try to make the progress that I make by regular practice and have the teacher help me at whatever stage I happen to be at when the lesson comes round. It works well for me.

[bernadette60614]

KeyPeg..yes, completely.

With my last teacher, the objective was to play a new piece at our quarterly musical evening (lots of wine, a convivial audience, and with the focus on entertainment more so than mastery.)

With my current teacher, we are breaking down skills...not only mechanics of playing (because I'm a pure "fingers" player), a steady pulse, voicing (we are working on a Bach 2 Bach Invention...which is a challenge).  It is very meticulous, detailed, painstaking work and we can take the full 45 minutes to get through one page.

A specific example:  I knocked out a Bach 2 Part Invention in 3 weeks with my prior teacher.  It sounded like a nice piece of music. We are now on week 4, and we're working on the motifs on page 1 of 2 and I'm going back to hands alone to get the fingering ingrained in my fingers for page 2.

But, at the end, I will have played Bach as Bach is intended to be played as opposed to played a piece by Bach (that's muddled, but I hope it makes sense.)

[keypeg]

That sounds good. Sometimes it takes 3 or 4 before we find a teacher who really teaches.  A good teacher is a rare find.  When we start, we don't know what's missing, and some of us may be spinning our wheels for years without catching in.

How about the "practice" end of things.  Because that for me was a major thing.  You have these skills to focus on and acquire, and it's broken down for you in the lesson.  Now, how does one go about practising in order to acquire the skill:
- separately
- within the piece
- when do we go "separately", when "within"?
- will we learn how to devise our own approaches over time?

If you get these things, then you have found an absolute gem.  Sometimes we get some things from one teacher, some from another, and cobble them together.

(It is an interesting topic)

[bernadette60614]

Yes (and place in here several girlish exclamation points.)

My teacher teaches during the adult summer camp of the music institute which employs her, and her focus this summer is:  How to Practice. For that she's using the following:  Practicing the Piano by Nancy O'Neill Breath.

Before embarking on this more serious study, I thought that great pianists were great talents...and that they are, but now I realize that they are prodigious workers as well.

[chopinfrederic]

Sometimes I feel quite prepared but with a good teacher he/ she will teach you a lot of things and point out what could be improved even if you feel that you've already done very well.
To achieve that practice for at least an hour each day for a minimum of five days a week.
You should practice the right way in order to improve; a good teacher usually teaches you the technique practices that you can apply and as you gain experience you will learn tricks for practicing the techniques yourself. Also, it's very important to not rush and force yourself to play the whole thing when you're not that good at playing that piece yet. Be patient and learn bit by bit and strengthen your weak parts.

[beethovenfan01]

I've found there are two sides to this question:

I am about a week away from starting with a teacher in a conservatory-like setting. He is very nice and a very good teacher, but also extremely strict and he holds his students to a high standard, every week. Before that, I have been studying with a teacher at a local college as a transition over the summer. But until June of this past year, I had another teacher who was very different.

She was much, much more patient and forgiving than the professors I have been studying with lately--a fantastic trait when it comes to teaching young students who aren't necessarily enthusiastic about music (like I was when I started). I wouldn't be where I am now if not for her, but in that last year there was a lot of missed growth needed to happen before I could enter college. Hence the teacher change in June, right after I graduated.

My old teacher let me play whatever I wanted. She gave me feedback, but didn't worry too much if a particular passage was clunky ... I guess she expected me to work out the issues on my own, but she never mentioned it and overall my playing suffered. Perhaps much of it was my fault, and towards the end I started driving harder after I got a hard wake-up call from a professor at the college I am now attending.

So then this summer I've taken several lessons with the professor at the local college. She has been very strict (she is also extremely kind), exactly what I need. But let's just say I was motivated to work hard and keep my skills up.

Now I'm entering a conservatory-like music school environment. I have to perform twice a term, and both my lessons and my performance classes are graded. You can bet I am going to be extremely well-prepared for every lesson.

There you have it, the three levels of piano lessons in a nutshell.