Some students do not recognize the work and effort it takes to achieve certain skills. They may like music and piano, but get discouraged at the thought of practising long hours. Show them the value of persistence, and how difficult tasks can be accomplished. Show them how to practice efficiently and how to set and achieve goals. Encourage goal oriented practice rather than time based practice.
Admittedly, I was never consistent with my own piano practice as a younger person. A handful of my current students though, all beginners, do not practice nearly as much as I want them to. It bothers me, as their parents pay me, and also it is simply a waste of time. Parents sometimes make excuses for their children not being prepared. Former students were incentivized with stickers, praise, etc. Teachers, any ideas?
Use lesson time to have the student practice the assigned material. Show the student how to practice during the lesson. If student has some talent and shows some interest, he/she will be able to improve with just 30 minutes of practice a week during the lesson IF you are able to give a quality lesson. The quality of the lesson is determined by the student assuming you give good instruction (which I assume to be the case). If the student does not practice at home AND you are unable to have a quality lesson with him - you will need to explain to parents that you are unable to help him at this time. You can’t get blood from a stone as they say. EDIT: You will need to be patient. 30 minutes times 50 lessons a year add to 25 hours a year practice. 25 hours practice is what you might expect to be accomplished in 2 months from a student practicing at home.
I like this. It was not until I'd been playing the piano for many years that a teacher even addressed the issue of how to practice (beyond simple obvious stuff like "play it slowly at first"). To have a teacher show you how to practice during your first year or two of lessons would be great, and I'll bet that for a kid 30 minutes of teacher guided practice would be more productive than several hours of unsupervised practice at home.
Previous teachers may have just said to keep reading more. Learning how to strategize, plan, and put in place specific techniques around sight reading was so enlightening, and had an enormous impact on my practice workflow.
This is something I'm still looking to improve upon. What are those ideas, if I may ask?
The specific form of sight reading activity I am discussing below refers to playing an unfamiliar piece of music at sight. It is to be differentiated to playing or performing previously studied music with a score.
The one thing I noticed in your performances is you never have music in front of you. In the case of the Chopin prelude that you did play very well, you had a small memory problem at 1 spot that took away from making the piece totally enjoyable to the listener. Would be nice if you had the music in front of you when you played to prevent this from happening. If you don't have good reading skills, having the music in front of you may not help.
Here are my reading suggestions:1) Fitzwilliam Virginal Book: The nearly 300 airs, variations, fantasies, toccatas, pavanes, galliards, allemandes, and courantes in these two volumes include some of the finest examples of Elizabethan and Jacobean music. 2 volumes on Amazon2) Bach 4 part chorales3) Muzio Clementi piano sonatas - get as many as you can of his 110 or so that he wrote
Also, when you learn a new piece, start by reading thru the piece dozens of times before starting to memorize or breaking down into sections. You can start by fingering the piece first if you like or you can map out the fingering later after reading thru the piece many times. Your choice.
What I would like to mention here is the following other scenario – performing previously studied music with a score. I’m just trying to be helpful here.
Ranjit – when you posted a performance here of Chopin fantaisie impromptu maybe a year or 2 ago, you did so playing from memory without music. I recall that the tough, rapid A section was played with good flow, although a little rough around the edges. The easy, lyrical B section and especially the coda totally fell apart due to memory problems. Why didn’t you have the music on your piano when you played and posted this? You should have been able to play this beautifully if the music was available to you. I just want to make sure that your reading ability is good enough to aid you in a performance. If you had used music to play thru the B section and coda of the Chopin fantaisie impromptu, would it have sounded polished? If YES, my advice is to read from music while performing for people until you have memorized the piece solidly. If NO, you need to work on your reading skills! I would say that in general, pianists that can play the A section of the fantaisie impromptu well would be able to sight read the easier B section without any problems.
In this specific case, sight reading would refer to a method of conveying the essence of a piece, it's most salient characteristics, without the opportunity for previous in-depth study.
The above skimming procedure is often given 30 to 60 seconds on an exam, so that should give you an idea of how much time is reasonable to devote to it, even if you are not playing for exams.
When sight reading and playing through the music, aim to read ahead and keep your eyes moving forward. The point where your eyes are gathering information should be ahead of the sounds you are making. This does mean you will be keeping track of at least two different spots in the music at any given time, ears at one point, eyes at another point. Once you read a portion of the score move on - the score will not change no matter how long you stare at it. Don't waste time rereading repeated figures, read the first, count the number of iterations, then move on. Keep the eyes moving, even if you feel you have a break or easy section in the music. Avoid fixating your eyes on a specific spot, the difficulty of a passage won't change no matter how intensely you stare at it, keep your eyes moving. Work on identifying blocks of familiar material: a scale, chord, pattern, rhythm, etc. Read the block as a single unit not as individual notes. For example: if you recognize the A major scale, what you need are: starting note, direction, ending note, rhythmic value. You already know that it is an A major scale, no need to read every note of it.
So, on this point: I have an unconventional background. I only started learning pieces from the score two years ago, and had to develop my sight reading from scratch back then starting with "easy exercises in C" type stuff. https://michaelkravchuk.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/354-Reading-Exercises-in-C-Position-Full-Score.pdfAt the same time, I had largely taught myself prior to that. The video you may have seen of me playing the Fantaisie Impromptu is after less than 6 months of piano lessons (and about the same amount of time after starting to learn to sight read). Before that, I was not serious about classical music and would primarily play my own arrangements and improvisations. Post that video, I started completely from scratch (Alfred level 1 type stuff and five finger position exercises) and attempted to rework my technique which until that point was largely self-taught. It's a long and complicated story to explain, so I'll leave it at that.My teacher also insists on reading from the score, which I can do for simple (< grade 4) pieces. But I see no way to get my sight reading level to catch up to my playing level for several years.
This explains everything. Not being able to read music from a score to match your playing level leaves you at a big disadvantage. You will need to rely on your memory which will require significant extra work. This will be especially true when you start playing Beethoven sonatas for example. I’ve heard many students mess up the recapitulation of a sonata by ending in the wrong key, for example. Playing Schoenberg will be out of the question, I’m guessing. Being able to use a score to aid in your performance is a great benefit. I understand that many university recitals or competitions do not allow use of music. But still, you are at a great disadvantage.
Do read from Bach 4-part chorales now. They are important and within your ability, I believe.
I would work to get a collection of 500+ pieces with an emphasis on Baroque and classical styles but includes Romantic and Modern. The pieces would ideally be at maybe grade levels 3,4,5 and would be ones that you never heard before. Read thru each piece 2 times. It should be at a level where it can be played slowly with mistakes but the music flows fairly well without constant stops and stutters. Read thru all 500 then repeat, THEN REPEAT AGAIN. Here is the trick – how do you acquire such a collection? Maybe get a piano-street membership and use their level rating to help you pick. Pick works you never heard before. Getting this collection may take a while – but it will well be worth your time!!
I find them difficult. I can play them maybe at 30 bpm or so but it takes me time to understand each harmony, which makes me wonder if they are still useful or beyond my ability.Having such a collection of works readily at hand is a great idea.
Bach chorales are great music. I find them difficult mainly because it's hard to figure out which hand to use to play the tenor voice (at least when trying to read at full tempo), and it often has to switch between hands. Getting good at that is probably a prerequisite for being a good church keyboardist, but it's a very specific problem that does not come up all that much in many kinds of music - you could read through lots of Mozart and Haydn, and even modern editions of Bach fugues without having the same amount of jumping between hands as occurs in the tenor parts of lots of the chorales. It's a skill that definitely gets better with practice, but it isn't the thing I'd pick to work on first, among all the skills needed for sight reading.
Bach chorales are great music. I find them difficult mainly because it's hard to figure out which hand to use to play the tenor voice (at least when trying to read at full tempo), and it often has to switch between hands.
I'm a little bit more evil than that. I use them to help students focus on voicing. Sometimes I'll pull out a Bach Chorale and ask them to accent the Tenor line, or the Bass line or the Alto line.
Topic: Students are not practicing 