Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Teachers Forum Is teaching piano viable as a sole income for an individual?

I've dreamt of teaching piano for years now. I do have a student once a week, but I'm keeping it quiet while I do my Bachelor of Music Performance. I teach that student at a school via a contracting company. I've always thought when I finished my Bachelor I could work at a supermarket or something while building up private students. But is teaching piano really viable? My family and friends really don't seem to think so. Would it be a good idea to go for a Master of Education and lean towards school teaching? That hasn't been my goal for a while, but it's sort of close.

Also, later down the track, would piano teaching be viable in a family situation (married with kids)?

You seem divided to begin with.

I'd say that teaching is very much a viable option, if you're clever about this. You'll need a combination of skills, but it certainly can happen. Many teachers here "only" teach and are very happy overall, as far as I'm concerned.

Fair that I might seem divided. Classroom teaching seems more stable and "normal", has a predictable wage, and is the kind of thing my family and friends would suggest. All through my Advanced Diploma, though (I've just started year two of the Bachelor), the vision of teaching piano has been a driving force for me.

I did both for quite a few years - teaching class music at school, and teaching some piano students after school or weekends. It gave me a chance to really give both a go and see which suited me. You probably only want to have a few students at first if you're full-time school teaching however - the latter can be rather tiring. Are you doing any pedagogy courses in your performance degree?

Next year I'll be doing an elective called "studio teaching". I'm hoping there's a good deal of pedagogy involved.

Classroom teaching pays much better, and has a societal status that studio teaching does not have. Your family and friends will better understand and approve if you go into the classroom, rather than starting a private studio.

But the headaches of a classroom - the politics of principals, school boards, fellow teachers, unions, pushy parents, insolent students - may get to you. It's more of a burnout profession than teaching piano, I believe.

My advice is to find a mentor or two in the community who are successful independent piano teachers. Ask to observe a week or two of their teaching. Offer to pay them. Maybe even take private lessons with them in piano pedagogy. They will be flattered, and most likely helpful. The might even provide you your first students.

To answer the original question: I'd say "sort of/maybe." A lot depends on the cost of housing in your community, if you want to teach from home. It would help to have assistance from family (or some other "angel") to fund your first teaching years: buying a decent piano or two is expensive, finding appropriate teaching space might be expensive, and unless you are very lucky, it will take some years to build your student numbers.

It helps to have a self-employed person's relentless drive. Coupled with a piano teacher's patience.

I'd be curious to get some more responses to Maechre's original query about the viability of piano teaching. I ponder this issue often.

I've never relied solely upon teaching, but upon wearing many hats: singing, accompanying, performing in addition to teaching. I think perhaps once a person is well-established within their community they could cut back on other things and focus on teaching and make a decent living out of it, but I know without working the side jobs and my husband's income I would not survive on teaching alone.

You can rely on piano teaching as your sole source of income, if you're good at it, and if you can attract lots of students.

I used to teach at public schools to make ends meet, but now that my studio has (finally) picked up, I'm living quite comfortably without a school job. I do supplement my income with evaluating student exams and judging competitions, and occasionally I do tutor students from other studios whose teachers can't teach theory. If I'm bored, I can always work as a substitute teacher at school (I'm credentialed). Once in a blue moon I also get an accompaniment gig, but that's getting less and less frequent because I now have quite a few students, and side jobs are not worth the trouble to accept.

But the problem with being your own boss is that you have to be able to wear many hats. Advertisement, for me, is the biggest problem for many years because I live in an area with a heavy saturation of teachers, including a large older population of teachers who are still teaching into their 80's who literally teach until they drop dead. For the longest time I had trouble getting new students.

I'm a lot more aggressive with recruiting students today than before. I can't rely on luck and word-of-mouth referrals.

Is that common? That a piano teacher can't teach theory? Is that because they don't know the theory (which shocks me) or because they can't teach it well (which I could find reasonable -- not everyone is good at teaching all things, even all things piano-related)? Is this at any level of theory, or just the higher levels?

Those poor students! I wouldn't want to be their next teacher/piano bench psychologist.

Be shocked. Clueless teachers are quite common.

In my experience, there are three scenarios:

1) The teacher is incompetent. Does not know any theory.

2) The teacher chooses to focus on repertoire and technique, and leaves everything else (including theory, sight reading, and ear training) to somebody else.

3) The teacher chooses to focus on repertoire only because competition is what piano is all about. Every second of every lesson is dedicated to teaching Liszt etudes or Chopin Ballades. Testing is for the average students, and even the dumbest kids can fake their way through theory, or just buy a theory book and teach it to themselves.

If there were a way to systematically eliminate all the clueless piano teachers in my area, the rest of us would all have 50 students and 30 more on the waiting list. So clueless teachers do serve their purpose.

[I'm kidding!]

I had a piano teacher who taught me when she was 78. That was her final year of teaching. She was an excellent piano teacher. All together, I took 8.5 years of lessons with her.

As to your original question, you can make a living, but for me, it's always been about just making ends meet and having only a small amount of discretionary income. If you need a lot of money to be happy, a car and a house, this is not the right job for you.

The only way you can do well is if you take all the lousy teachers away and that will never happen. Many people think of piano teaching as a nice way to make a few bucks on the side and they will always crop up, particularly if the economy is bad.

Yep, you can make a living, a musician's living not a stockbroker's living that is. That's if you're not in an area saturated by piano teachers, you teach well enough to earn recommendations, and if you can allow yourself a ramp-up period to get known in town. I live in a small town where there is only one other private teacher I know of. I set my rates so as to be affordable to the town where I live. (Neighboring towns have a higher cost of living and the teachers there charge more; then again, those teachers have to pay for their living arrangements in the more expensive towns, and I don't.) It took about 2 years to get to the point where 3 families in town knew me and liked my teaching and felt that they had enough of a track record to recommend me to others. After that my phone never stopped ringing. By choice I also do other work, but after passing that tipping point, I could teach full time easily. I do not advertise except a little perfunctory notice on my website (which says "my studio is currently full" now anyway).

Keep in mind that unless you get lucky and find a lot of students with daytime availability, full time piano teaching really isn't a 40 hour work week, it's pretty much 3pm until whenever you want to call it a night, presumably no later than 8, so that's a 25-hour work week plus whatever happens on weekends.

Thanks for this observation, Heather. Cost of living is an important factor in this game. I also think setting up a teaching studio in a smaller town can often be more successful than in a major metropolitan area. Plus your talents may be more obviously valued, because without you, piano teaching might collapse.

Et voilà...hurray, Heather!

Mornings are for practicing piano!

And for other job-related tasks. I keep my mornings filled with activities that will help my students.