Piano Guidance
Piano Guidance
Photo: Nugroho Wahyu
Depends. If you want to pass the grade 8 exam, then 3 years will do, but you will just get a pass. to actually reach grade 8 level, it will take more than that. Depends on how much you can practice, and your previous musical experiences.
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Read More »I realize this is an old post, but seeing that it has been bumped a few times, and given that I think this continues to be a relevant topic, I thought I would chime in with my perspective on the matter. I will state this up front--yes, it is possible. But what you would have to do to get there is probably beyond reasonable for most people, because if the sacrifice necessary and the passion required to get there. I was an adult beginner. I had never touched a piano (though I have always sung, and I dabbled briefly with a violin as a child), but at the age of twenty, I got it in my head that I should study music at university, and decided that, starting in January of 2008, that I would begin taking music classes and buy a keyboard to begin to play with. I found a (fortunately very good) video series introducing the basics of piano, and spent the first six months teaching myself and taking a basic music theory course, which let me read some music, before I enrolled full-time in the Fall of the same year, and began to take instruction from the university. My school was very small, and the music program especially so, which meant that whereas I could have slipped through the cracks in a larger institution, I received very good instruction and personal attention from my instructors as I went about learning everything I could about music and playing piano. Since then, I've taken piano lessons off and on (mostly on), and practiced piano constantly, all the while taking classes in various music classes. And I would say that I got to the point of playing grade eight pieces somewhere around the three or four year mark, as in, I could at least play enough that I could handle them, although they remained quite challenging. I believe I attempted to play, though it went badly, a grade eight piece to audition into piano as a primary study area (it was either the second movement of Beethoven's 79th opus or Mendelsson's Venetian Boat Song, I followed up my failed audition with a successful one and I forget which was was which), at the end of my second year of university, which would have put that time at April 2010. It went badly, and I doubt that if I had specifically tried to prepare an audition for a grade eight piano that I could have passed, but the point is that I had improved enough that grade eight pieces were, at least, on the radar, within the very fringes of my ability, and that this is about two and a half years after I began playing. But consider the circumstances. I was practicing probably over an hour a day on average, and I was doing so partly because I wanted to make up for lost time, and partly because I really enjoyed playing piano. I was also enrolled in a Bachelor of Arts in Music, which meant that when I wasn't playing piano, I was developing relevant skills, such as ear training, theoretical knowledge, was singing in a choir, and a lot of other activities that were at least indirectly related. I can't measure exactly how much this helped, but it was certainly a contributing factor. I think if you wanted the same kind of explosive growth I experienced, you need both my fairly high levels of practice time (for a beginner), and immersion in general aspects of music in your other hours, IE, a university education or similiar in music. It also helps that I'm generally quite bright and perceptive, which helps. But I also think it's possible for someone to grow faster than I did. I've dealt with issues of ADHD-Inattentive Type and depression for the majority of my life, and this lead to great inconsistency in my practice time. Some days I would regularly practice for four hours a day, other times I was so depressed and overwhelmed by life that I was lucky to practice four hours for the entire week. It averaged out to a decent amount, but if someone was NOT dealing with my issues, and had a similiar passion in the situation I was put in, they probably could have advanced faster.
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Read More »Malcolm Gladwell has a fascinating book called Outliers. He mentions a study where at a classical academy, they looked at the people who were rated future stars in the classical world, ones who would be merely great players, and a group that consistent of people who were merely competent players who would likely go on to teach. They found, without exception, that the future all-stars clocked in at about 10,000 hours of practice, the great players at 8000, and the okay players at around 4000 in lifetime hours. I believe he mentioned briefly they found similiar results with pianists. The interesting thing was they couldn't find exceptions--there weren't any people in the future masters group that only had 8000 or 4000 hours, or anyone in the teachers group that had worked 8000 or 10000 hours to only get mediocre results. The point of his book is that greatness tends to manifest itself through a person having the passion and the opportunity to work extremely hard. I think when we look at what's involved, being in some kind of musical education, instead of having a day job, is the only situation in which you could experience the explosive growth necessary to get to grade eight in two years. Grade eight is probably about 4000-5000 hours of total work, which probably means eight hours a day, five days a week, for two years. That would be 40 hours times fifty two weeks times two years, which equals a little over four thousand hours. Doable, but not if you're doing something other than piano full-time. The thing is, despite the struggles I've had with ADHD and depression slowing me down more than I would have liked, six years out, I'm playing grade nine and ten pieces, and about to take my grade nine exam in June. My ability to play repetoire is more grade ten level at this point, but my technique is lagging a bit, which I'm trying to brush up to grade nine level, which is why I'm taking that exam. It's had a lot to do with being in school the past six years (minus one year I took off) which meant that I have more or less had the ability to dedicate close to full-time hours to music. I am also starting to teach piano lessons, which means that even as I work, I remain around a piano. I do all this because I really love music and really love playing piano, and I have the passion to continue to push myself to great lengths in order to become a truly great pianist. If the question is, can I clear very distant hurdles in piano despite starting as a beginner as an adult, then the answer is a resounding yes, but there is a catch. You do have to find a way to be able to dedicate immense amounts of time to the craft. More importantly, you have to care enough to WANT to dedicate those immense amounts of time. If it sounds like a burden, rather than an intense and interesting journey, you probably don't have the disposition to get there. No, you have to truly LOVE piano and music in general to get there. If you merely like piano, you should content yourself with having a side hobby, that you maybe dedicate 5-10 hours a week to, and you can see yourself grow into a very respectable amateur player over the course of a decade or so. And if you can't find a way to get into a musical program or another situation where you can dedicate long hours to music, then even if you have the passion, you won't have the time to make it.
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Read More »Bottom line, I think grade eight in two years represents something close to the upper limit of what the most passionate person with the greatest amount of opportunity to expend effort on the pursuit could accomplish. I was close enough, in about as ideal a circumstance as possible (deep love of practice time and lots of musical education) with a few drawbacks (depresssion and ADHD), and I was barely within range of that. But possible, still, I think so.
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