Piano Progress by Year - Thoughts?

I’m an adult and I started playing piano in 2019. I started with a teacher very early on and I meet him every week for 30 min.  Never switched teachers.  I have done the Faber piano course.

I’m at an intermediate level right now and I have a Music Teachers Association of California Level 5 certificate.

I’m preparing for my level 6 exam and I’m practicing an adagio movement from a Mozart sonata, an easy Prokofiev, some Scarlatti and Gymnopedie No. 1.

The best advice I have is to first be patient (i.e., improvement comes with time) and second don’t practice mistakes: if you make a mistake while practicing you have to avoid it in the future, so slow down.

Hi! I’m 55, an adult learner, 4 th year into serious piano journey. After 8 months of self taught, I found myself a classically trained teacher. I was introduced to easiest Chopin preludes from the start, quite a struggle but I was proud. With practice and lots of research on YT, I managed to prepare the pieces for the lesson.

I still have same teacher and currently I work on Chopin etude op. 10-3. 
There are many moments of breakthroughs: improving sight reading skill (couldn’t read notes before), befriended with all major and minor keys, being assigned to Chopin etude is also big personal benchmark for me. 

Writing daily piano practice journal is a good way for time management, staying focused, planning and reflecting things what you want to accomplish. I tick off tasks as I practice. 
 

I’m 54 years old and started playing when I was 6. My dad said: “now that you’re 6 years old, you will learn to play the piano”. My dad is a music teacher and a terrific, professionally trained singer, but his piano skills are merely decent, and although he always had a few piano students, he really isn’t a piano teacher. He was great for giving me an initial, solid foundation, but he held on to me as a student for much too long. I made good progress in the first 4-6 years, but then the lessons became very infrequent, and I got extremely frustrated because I wanted to play the “big” literature that I had discovered in my grandfather’s extensive collection of piano music but couldn’t develop the skills necessary to tackle any of those pieces.

When I finally got my parents to agree to let me study with a piano professor at the “Musikhochschule” (that’s the German term for a School of Music where professional musicians are trained for a career as a concert artist, instrumental teacher, music teacher, or church musician) in Hamburg, Germany, I was 15 years old already and had very little to show for 9 years of training. I had played all the two-part inventions by Bach and a few of the three-part Sinfonias, Czerny’s entire School of Velocity, a couple of the easier sonatas by Mozart and Beethoven, and sundry small pieces from the Baroque and Classical period. That was all. But I think because I had spent years stubbornly trying my hand at big, difficult pieces that intrigued me but were much too hard for me, and because I longingly just read through countless piano scores each day, my technique must have developed somewhat instinctively. At any rate, even though that first professional teacher had me start with the basics (Cortot’s “Rational Principles of Piano Technique”, Bartók’s “Microcosmos” 3rd and 4th volume, Bach’s Four Duets and some easier Preludes and Fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier), I progressed very quickly. I remember that between 15 and 19 years of age I learned Bach’s 3rd Partita in A minor, Mozart’s Sonata No. 18 D major K 576, Schumann’s Novellette Op. 21 No. 1 in F major, the Schubert E flat major Impromptu Op. 90 No. 2, the Beethoven sonatas No. 5 (Op. 10 No. 1) and No. 18 (Op. 31 No. 3), and at least six of the Chopin Études. I soon was challenged with more virtuosic literature – Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu Op. 66 and the B minor Scherzo Op. 20, Debussy’s “L’isle Joyeuse”, and Prokofiev’s “Suggestion Diabolique”. I had a couple of years left during which I was still eligible for youth piano competitions, so that was the music I played there.

Between high school and medical school (there’s no college in Germany), I had to do civil service for two years, and during that time I studied with a new, more prestigious piano teacher (he, too, was a Professor at the Hamburg Musikhochschule). I learned the Beethoven sonatas No. 1 (Op. 2 No. 1) and No. 7 (Op. 10 No. 3), the second Schumann sonata (in G minor, Op. 22), the Schubert A major sonata D 959, Brahms’ Seven Fantasies Op. 116, Liszt’s Second Ballade in B minor, Bartók’s Improvisations Op. 20, and more of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and of the Chopin Études.

For the first two years of medical school, I still managed to practice regularly (this required a superhuman amount of discipline) and undertook monthly pilgrimages to Hannover for lessons with Karl-Heinz Kämmerling, easily the most famous and successful piano pedagogue in Germany in the late 20th and early 21st century. Under his guidance, I learned – among others – the Second Sonata by Paul Hindemith, as well as Chopin’s 2nd Ballade Op. 38 and his Polonaise-Fantaisie Op. 61.

I then didn’t take any more piano lessons until 30 years later. By that time, I already lived in St. Louis and held a faculty position at Washington University; I was fortunate to find a great teacher in that town who enjoyed teaching adult amateurs. However, ever since I moved to Columbus 6 years ago, I haven’t worked with anyone at all.

As you can see, my development as an amateur pianist is not typical - nor was it organic, ideal, or indeed desirable in the way it happened. But all’s well that ends well. I consider myself extremely lucky that I could dedicate myself to the piano fully and absolutely when I finally was given a proper teacher in my mid-teenage years. This way, I was able to make up for lost time at least a little bit. But what you would want is to start with an excellent, experienced, solidly educated and trained, thoroughly vetted and well-recommended teacher from the very beginning who is invested in your continued progress and who also is wise and humble enough to tell you when you don’t seem to advance anymore and should study with someone else. A “key breakthrough” did come for me with each new teacher, but the main one happened when I switched from having sporadic lessons with my dad to systematically studying with a passionate, uncommonly gifted piano pedagogue starting at age 15. After that, my learning curve became vertiginously steep. I am grateful that this happened at a time when my brain was still young and flexible enough to eagerly soak up and integrate new skills and knowledge.

If I could give my younger self any advice – blessed, as he was, with plenty of intelligence, erudition, commitment, passion, time, and work ethic, but not with any real connection to his awkward body –, it would be to not ignore it when more than one teacher earnestly and repeatedly reminds you that you do not play the piano just with your hands, your ears, and your brain. Those are all very important, but piano playing is an activity that involves the entirety of your bones, muscles, tendons, and nerves. And you should try to do whatever you can - Yoga, Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais, or any other kind of movement/exercise/sport - to help get your whole organism and physical mechanism in optimal, harmonious alignment so that you can play freely and relaxed, with flowing breath and without unhealthy tension. (Check out Dominic Cheli’s phenomenal didactic session on body mechanics in piano playing!)

Thank you for this opportunity to tell my life’s story. ;-)