piano lesson – Clara Hsu

I won’t tell a student to let go of his prejudice. As long as he comes into my studio at the appointed hour and shows a willingness to work, it is all that I ask of him. I’m talking about a piano student who doesn’t like to read music. At a certain point his playing suffers because he can no longer memorize all the notes. Learning becomes tedious and frustrating. I decide to stop everything that we have been doing and just focus on improving his sight-reading ability.

It seems a long time, and parents are worried that their son plays the same song over and over for nearly a year. But his real work is during the lessons, when he is drilled to make his fingers “see” the keys on the piano. It is eye-hand coordination. Some of us do it better than others, but all of us can do it given time and persistence. My student had a break-through yesterday, playing something the very first time correctly by sight. All at once time and grievances melted away. We reveled in the unsuspected moment. I watched him walked away with silent pride.

My piano students don’t understand why they have to perfect their Hanon technical exercises. What’s the point in playing perfectly in a lesson only for their teacher to say OK let’s move on to a new exercise? Surely they are not practicing that hard to please me.

“Imagine you are an apprentice working in a piano factory,” I said to twelve year old Kelly. “You are trained to do one thing, like wrapping the bass wires to make them thicker. You’re doing it and doing it because it’s what your boss asks you to do. Then after some time they train you on leveling the keys and you do that over and over until it becomes second nature. With each skill you know a little more but in the big picture you don’t know how the piano is put together. But as you accumulate these skills, you’ll begin to have some ideas, and I’m talking way down in the future. Some how, some day, these little insignificant details you have perfected will have an impact on your playing.”

She nodded at me politely. Did she understand my point? Will she practice more vigorously for her own sake? Each night I write a poem and each day a blog. It is how I polish my writing skills. As for my students, I only hope my teaching means more to them one day than their piano lessons.

Tag: piano lesson

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