Adult Education – Pianodao

Adult Piano Education

Supporting Your Piano Pathway
Written by Andrew Eales

Recent decades have seen a resurgence of piano playing by adults for their own personal enjoyment, relaxation, and as a social activity. While many revisit their childhood learning and play privately, others return to lessons or take up formal piano tuition for the first time.

Andrew Eales has enjoyed teaching adults for many years, from working with complete beginners, to supporting diploma candidates and mentoring other teachers. In these articles, he shares the lessons he has learned, and the importance of tailoring tuition to suit adult learners…

A Piano Teacher’s Foibles

Fermata • Pause and Reflect

Supporting Your Piano Pathway
Reflection by Andrew Eales

Which of the incredible teachers in this picture would you like to sign up to have piano lessons with?

Finding the “right” match can certainly prove challenging for some. Writing in a recent issue of Pianist Magazine, Warwick Thompson sagely advises:

“A teacher is actually a human being, surprising as that fact may sound, with foibles, prejudices, blind spots, strengths, and wonders within them.
If those foibles and wonders don’t align with yours, it doesn’t mean you’ll never progress at the piano. It simply means you’ve had the wrong teacher (or rather, to spin the mirror, it means your unfortunate teacher had the wrong student).”

Relief all around, then!

Your New Piano Journal

Fermata • Pause and Reflect

Supporting Your Piano Pathway
Reflection by Andrew Eales

Keeping you own Piano Journal is an idea that is so simple it seems obvious, yet so powerful that it could transform your piano journey in the months and years ahead.

In my book How to Practise Music, I wrote the following to suggest adult learners keep a piano journal:

“Older learners often like to keep their own journal in which they write a more reflective account of their practice journey, which may or may not be shared with a teacher. These can be excellent tools for structuring practice sessions, probing for solutions, or looking back on previous work.”

It is a suggestion I unpacked in more detail in my article Keeping Your Own Piano Journal, which fascinatingly proved to be one of the most popular posts ever published on this site.

That article includes an explanation of what a piano journal is, what the benefits of keeping one are, how to get started, and questions that you might wish to reflect on in your piano journal.

I won’t rehash the answers given in that article, but I want to let you know about a new gift book from Edition Peters, a simple but gorgeously presented notebook which could be the ideal repository for your reflections and tool for piano journaling over the next year.

ADHD • A Pianist’s Guide

ADHD • Insights for Pianists

Education Strategies • Andrew Eales
Clinical Expertise • Louise Eales RMN, NMP

ADHD, or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, has become a hot topic of discussion in recent years, the apparent explosion of both child and adult diagnoses much commented on in the media and society at large.

This article has been cowritten with my wife Louise, who has three decades clinical experience working with children, and latterly adults, who have ADHD. She is now an advanced practitioner at ADHD 360, a leading private ADHD diagnosis and treatment clinic. We gratefully acknowledge that the Clinical Director has peer-reviewed this article prior to its publication here.

For my part, I have lived with this condition for a lifetime, only belatedly recognised and formally diagnosed in my fifties. ADHD has had a huge impact on my piano journey.

Our shared aim is to provide pianists and educators with a unique, relevant, and practical perspective which combines Louise’s clinical expertise with my personal experience, and which specifically addresses the challenges those with ADHD face in the practice room, piano lesson and at live events.

The article which follows addresses many common questions, explaining what ADHD is, its causes, history, the signs and symptoms. We then go on to apply this to piano practice, lessons and performance, offering strategies to help those with ADHD and their teachers. Finally, Louise outlines the process of diagnosis and available medications.

Download This Article as a Printable PDF

Embracing our limits

Fermata • Pause and Reflect

Supporting Your Piano Pathway
Reflection by Andrew Eales

“Every river has its banks, every ocean has its shores. Constant expansion is not possible. Everything reaches its limits, and the wise always try to identify these limits.”

Deng Ming-Dao, 365 Tao Daily Meditations

I love this metaphor of the river: it is the banks which give it direction, focus its energetic flow, and encourage it towards its destination. It doesn’t want to burst its banks, and quickly dissipates when flooding causes it to. How much better to flow where its banks lead.

The shores of the ocean, meanwhile, are ultimately the boundaries which define it. The shoreline is a point of safety, security, a haven from the deep. And while I often remind students that piano playing is the journey of a lifetime, without destination, we all need to spend time in port, resupplying our vessels and finding refreshment.

The desire to push beyond our natural limits may have become an endemic demand in every field of human endeavour, but there is surely little doubt this attitude is responsible for many of the problems we face. So how can we come to terms with our limitations and leverage them to our advantage?

A Lifelong Love of Music

Fermata • Pause and Reflect

Supporting Your Piano Pathway
Reflection by Andrew Eales

I have previously quoted Andor Földes’ eminently humane views about talented children (he himself achieved fame at a prodigiously young age) from his book Keys to the Keyboard (1950).

Here is another equally thought-provoking snippet from the same passage of the book, and for continuing reflection:

“I heartily agree with the words of the great Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály, who, in an interview some years ago, stated bluntly that nothing a musical child produces before the age of eighteen really counts. What matters is a person’s work between the ages of eighteen and seventy-five.”

When children take up piano lessons, have we yet sufficiently understood that this is just the beginning of what will hopefully be a lifelong love of playing the piano, or do we take too short-term a view?

A Fresh Perspective

Fermata • Pause and Reflect

Supporting Your Piano Pathway
Reflection by Andrew Eales

We often hear self-help gurus encouraging us to stop worrying about what others think of our choices, opinions, abilities, behaviour, or work.

And they have a point: many of us become trapped in the mindset of the “people-pleaser”. If we allow ourselves to be manipulated or bullied by others, we can easily lose sight of our own worth and core values. A decision not to care what others think about us can be emancipating.

But wait. If we stop caring about what others think, how long before we stop caring about them at all?

Mutual understanding of each other’s ideas, feelings and perspectives is a crucial foundation for building empathetic, honest relationships. If we limit ourselves to our own perspective, ignoring the opinions, ideas, insights and beliefs of others, we can quickly become arrogant and indifferent.

As the Chinese saying goes,

“However good your eye-sight, you still can’t see the back of your own head.”

We may not always agree with the opinions of others, but shutting them out fundamentally isolates us, and can limit our potential for growth. Clearly a balance is needed, along with an ability to accept the perspectives of others without feeling belittled.

The Power of Returning

Fermata • Pause and Reflect

Supporting Your Piano Pathway
Reflection by Andrew Eales

It is possible in our piano journey, and not uncommon, to take a wrong turn. Sometimes, a single step is enough before we get cold feet. Other times, we persevere, venturing in a direction which instinct warns might not be our right way, but stubborn in our commitment to see through a decision.