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I already posted this on "adults beginner" forum, so please apologize me to double post it. I just wanted to listen to teachers' views.


Hello all,
It's been about 3.5 years since I began to learn to play classical pieces again as an adult. I've been taking private lessons ever since, and I'm now with my 3rd piano teacher who has been teaching me more than a year.

She has done her undergrad in a prestigious music school and doing her masters at the same university. She has a strong and strict personality which kinda help me to concentrate on my practice and forget the fact that I'm an adult player.

However, I feel like she changes the piece I learn from her too often. I've never learned a piece more than two months. Usually our lessons on a piece end in 4~5 times. Throughout a year we've covered Chopin op.66, Bach Italian Concerto, Partita, French suite No.2, No.6, Debussy Passepied, K265, some Schumann pieces, etc.. I know that learning a lot of pieces in a short time can improve my sight-reading and general technique, but I now notice that I'm tired of moving so quickly to other piece from a piece.

I want to spend more time learning one piece and want to raise my ability as much as possible. But my teacher doesn't really consider how I feel about switching pieces, and just say "I've told you everything that I could tell about the music, bring another piece." if I bring the same piece that I learned the last time.

I have no idea how I could bring up this issue with my strong-strict piano teacher. Would it be rude if I ask her to have higher expectation on a single piece that I learn from her?

Perhaps your teacher has given you the basic overview of the piece and the technical and musical issues that occur, and also hepled you to solve some of them you experienced, and now expects that you will continue to explore and develop the piece to performance standard in your own time.

Your teacher wants to expose you to more rep and technical and musical concepts. You could ask to slow down a bit, but, in the end, it is your job to bring the rep to a higher standard, not your teacher’s, and the lesson time is not a practice session.

I think you are very fortunate.

Six weeks on one piece sounds okay to me?



I agree with prout's comment-- there's nothing to stop you from continuing to play a piece on your own if you want to keep perfecting it. I often tell my students that even if we've moved on from a piece in lessons, they can still play it whenever they want to at home, especially if it is music they enjoy.

If there are certain pieces you'd like to bring to a higher standard (memorised, etc.) then it may be a good idea to find some performance opportunities. You can continue to learn new rep in lessons while polishing a few pieces in the background. The performance provides you with a deadline, and hopefully a sense of accomplishment that you have studied a piece in depth.

Thank you Prout. Your comments were helpful in thinking about my situation in another way!

Thank you Pianist Lady for the comments!

Just for more information, actually six weeks on one piece doesn't occur that often. Sometimes 2~3times for one movement since I'm not that bad at sight reading. And the thing is my teacher never recommends a piece for my rep. looking for a piece and read it fully before a lesson doesn't really allow me to polish the pieces that I like or I've learned before since I'm working and my practice time is just enough to do my best to follow up the lessons from her.

Here's what I just posted on the Adult Beginner board:

1. I would guess our OP is a far more advanced piano student/player than he or she suggests, and this colors the story.

2. Dolcelatte, there is no harm in raising the issue clearly with the teacher, but I wouldn't bother: she is herself still a student, and too inflexible to adapt her teaching style. This is simply a teacher/student relationship that has run its course, and was never a good fit. It is time for you to find a better teacher. Persist until you find the right person.

If you hate hurting someone's feelings, then find a second teacher to study with simultaneously and keep quiet about it.

"My teacher's low expectation make me disappointed" is the insightful title on the Adult Beginner board.

There's nothing wrong with your teacher's approach. However, if you want to spend more time on some pieces, why not ask your teacher to help you "polish" a couple of selected pieces, maybe for a concert or recital? It's another brand of learning when you need to polish a piece to performance level.

Have you ever considered taking lessons online? I've been learning pieces so much quicker that way. This is the site I use; http://bit.ly/2ORS9CX

Why would an fairly advanced student who can read music competently want to 'learn' from an online course that supposedly "teaches" beginners basic keyboard recognition by using colored keys which gets you nowhere?

Are you trying to sell the course, with the same post on two threads?

Now the same post on four threads.

I don't think OP's teacher is necessarily "wrong" in her approach. I will use my own situation as an example:

Every year my teacher and I will sit down and pick 4-5 pieces for the upcoming year. I take lessons in community music school so I use school year/calendar as a guideline. We agree that my goal is learn AND perform all of them by the end of the school year. Each week I will bring 1-2 pieces on the list to my lesson and we work on them - for bigger pieces we may only work on a few pages. There are 35 lessons per school year so on average each piece gets 7 weeks or so but that includes some performance run-through. My teacher's approach is not that different from OP's teacher. If my goal is not to perform these pieces, I can pick at least 2-3 more pieces for the year, which will end up almost exactly like OP's situation.

Learning/getting exposed to more pieces can be a reasonable approach, especially for people like me who just returned to the piano after a long break. My teacher at that time said the biggest thing for me was just keep playing, playing anything and everything. This way I know what music is out there; what style of music or composers I enjoy (or not).... I could get more familiar with the key board, the piano literature, and the feeling of playing...etc. Polishing and performing a piece could come a little later on pieces I really want to perform. Then here comes with memorization, dealing with stage fear, playing consistently at all venues....etc. It's a separate issue. It all depends on what OP wants - and OP should discuss with the teacher. I know some people just keep learning different pieces for years and not performing even once in decades. There are also people who perform regularly...

I liken learning piano - and music - to mastering a new language, as I had to with English (as my fourth language). I started with the Western alphabet at nine. By eleven, I could read children's books with the help of a dictionary. I read everything in English I could get my hands on from my local library's children's section, even as I was still learning basic English grammar, writing simple sentences, taking dictation etc. They were all adventure stories, detective stories, aerial warfare etc - none of it was great literature, but my English improved with every book I read. I was reading two to three books a week.

When I moved to a Western country in my early teens, my English was already good enough for me to study English Literature as one of my 'O' Level subjects for the state exams. (The books I had to study included a Shakespeare play, a Wordsworth poem, and a Thomas Hardy novel). And I was still devouring boys' adventure stories, though was now into books written for teenagers rather than young children. Once a book was read, I moved on to the next. It was all for my own personal enjoyment rather than edification, one might say. Of course, that was quite different from the way I studied the set literary texts, for which I had to sit an exam in due course to show that I understood them in great detail.

And that, in a nutshell, was exactly the way I approached learning to play the piano. I learnt a lot of pieces, some with my teachers, some by myself (for my own personal pleasure). Some were only half-learnt, but I got what I needed (or what my teacher wanted) from them. Only a very few of them were 'studied' to great depth - the ones I did for my exams every year. Thus I became acquainted with a huge variety of piano music and different styles from different eras. And I also had to master a few pieces for my exams every year.

I never performed (as pianist), because unlike for some, music was an education (as well as an art form) for me, not a showbiz thing to show off with. Which also fitted in perfectly with the music syllabus (ABRSM) that my teachers used, with its emphasis on good reading skills, technical skills, and aural skills - but none at all on performing from memory.

However, I did perform as a school kid: singing in the choir, for which my aural skills (developed from learning to play the piano) was indispensable - and in turn choral singing improved my aural skills.

If I'd only ever studied a few piano pieces a year - all in great depth, and until completely mastered - as a student, I'd have been a lot poorer as a musician and as a pianist. In fact, I wouldn't have been the pianist I am today, with a wide range of interests and experiences, if I had gone down that route (or if my teachers had taken me down that route). The same way I wouldn't have had the wide-ranging interest in the world, and knowledge of the universe, and curiosity of the human mind , if all I ever read as a student were a few books a year and studied them to great depth, but nothing else.

All work and no play makes Jill a dull girl, as Socrates would say (or didn't say).