Adults almost never ask me whether they can learn the piano. They ask whether it is too late — which is a different question, and usually a way of asking permission. So let me get the permission out of the way and then be useful about the parts that are genuinely harder.
It is not too late. It is, however, different, and the pretence that it is exactly like teaching a child does adults no favours at all.
What you have got that a nine-year-old has not
You understand things. When I explain that a piece has modulated to the dominant and that is why it suddenly sounds like it is leaning forwards, an adult takes that in once. A child gets there too, but by a longer road, and I have to build the road first.
You chose this. Nobody drove you here after school. In fifteen years of watching people practise or not practise, the single best predictor of whether someone still plays in two years' time is whether the whole thing was their idea — and for adult beginners it always is.
You do not have to take the permission from a teacher, either. The pianist and writer Frances Wilson gave the piano up when she went to university, left it for twenty years, and came back to it hard enough to take two performance diplomas; her short piece "Never too late" says in one page what this one takes ten to say.
You can also choose the music. A ten-year-old is usually working through a book. You can walk in and say: I want to play that one, the Chopin nocturne my mother had on a record, and I do not care how long it takes. That is not a lesser motivation than a syllabus. It is a much stronger one, and it is the way I prefer to teach anyway — the technique and the theory arrive because the tune asked for them.
And you can practise properly. Deliberate practice — isolating the bar that is failing, slowing it down, fixing the actual fault — is a skill of attention, and adults already have it from the rest of their lives. Most children have to be taught it over years. You have to be told once, and told firmly, because you will still want to play the piece from the top instead.
It is also the reason I am glad to teach composition and improvisation to adults who want them. A child is usually pointed at repertoire; an adult who says "I want to be able to sit down and make something up" has told me exactly what to teach, and it is a perfectly respectable thing to want instead of a certificate.
What is genuinely harder, and one thing that really is
You will feel clumsier than you are. The physical side takes longer to stop feeling deliberate. A child's hands become automatic almost without them noticing; yours will arrive at the same place, and you will be conscious of every step of the journey. This is a difference in the experience of learning far more than in the outcome, but it is the thing that makes adults quit, so it is worth naming in the first week.
You can hear how bad it sounds. A seven-year-old murdering a piece is having a nice time. You know exactly how it should go, and the gap between what you can hear in your head and what your hands are producing is discouraging in a way it simply is not for a child. Everyone who has ever learned an instrument as an adult has sat in that gap. It closes.
The diary. Children have a fixed weekly slot and someone else defending it. Adults have work. The practice that survives is the practice attached to something already fixed — after supper, before the news, first thing on a Sunday. Twenty minutes on most days will get you a long way; two hours on the one Saturday you are free will not, and you will conclude you have no talent when what you have is a scheduling problem. There is a whole page on how long this actually takes, using the exam boards' own published hours, if you want to plan it properly.
And the real one: sight-reading. I am not going to pretend this one away. The best study of what predicts sight-reading ability tested fifty-two piano majors and concluded that there is a critical window, up to about the age of fifteen, in which sight-reading expertise has to be acquired.1 An adult beginner is unlikely to become the person who sight-reads a Schubert song at first sight in the way a conservatoire student can.
Read that finding accurately, though, and it costs you far less than it sounds. It is about one skill — reading unfamiliar music in real time — measured in people at the very top of the range, and it says nothing whatever about whether you can learn to play, learn to play well, or learn to play difficult repertoire. Adults get better at reading with practice like everyone else; there is a page on how, and starting with the reading itself is not a bad first move.
The evidence that it is doing you good, and what it actually says
There is a small research literature on adults learning the piano, and it is more interesting than the usual claims about brains and puzzles.
In one randomised study, thirty-one adults aged sixty to eighty-five, none of whom had played before, were split into a group given six months of individual piano lessons and a control group who were not. They were tested before, after, and again three months later. The piano group improved significantly on two standard measures of executive function and processing speed, compared with the controls.2
A second study followed twenty-nine adults aged sixty to eighty-four over four months of lessons and daily practice. This one had the better comparison: the control group were not sitting still, they were doing other things they enjoyed — exercise, painting, languages, computing. The piano group still came out ahead on a test of inhibitory control, and reported lower depression, less fatigue, better mood and better quality of life.3
Two studies of about thirty people each are evidence, not proof, and I would not want anyone taking up the piano as a medical intervention. But the direction is consistent, the second study's comparison was a fair fight against other pleasant activities, and it does dispose of the idea that starting at sixty is a sentimental gesture. It is a real skill being acquired by a brain that is demonstrably still building things.
Should you do grades?
Usually not, and adults are often surprised to hear a teacher say so.
Grade exams are extremely good at what they are for: giving a child structure, a deadline and a certificate at an age when certificates are thrilling. Most adults have enough deadlines. What they want is to play the piece — and a syllabus that hands them three set works chosen by a committee is working against the very thing that got them through the door.
There are honourable exceptions. Some people want the external standard, or are working towards teaching, or simply like the shape of a target; and if that is you, grades are a good and well-designed ladder — the two boards differ in ways worth knowing about. But "am I about Grade 4 standard?" is a question I can answer in a lesson without anybody entering an exam.
If you want the view from someone who did enter — an adult learner three and a half years in, who sat ABRSM Grade 5 by the video route — his account of what it cost and what it was worth is honest on both sides, and lands roughly where I do.
Practical things, before your first lesson
Get eighty-eight weighted keys. Not necessarily acoustic, not necessarily expensive, and secondhand is fine. But a small unweighted keyboard cannot teach your hand what a piano feels like, and everything you build on one has to be partly rebuilt later. This is the only piece of shopping advice I feel strongly about.
Book an hour, not half an hour. A half-hour lesson is right for a young child's concentration. Adults can work for an hour, have more to discuss, and generally get further per pound spent. What lessons cost, and what to check before you book, is a page of its own.
Bring the piece. Turn up with the thing you have always wanted to play, even if it is absurdly beyond you. It tells me more about how to teach you than any amount of discussion about aims, and there is almost always a way in — a simplified version, an easier piece by the same composer, or the one passage that is actually within reach today.
Expect to be bad for a while, and decide in advance that it does not mean anything. This is the piece of advice I would most like adults to arrive with, and the one nobody takes seriously until about week six.
If you are in this corner of Surrey
I teach piano — and several other instruments — from Thames Ditton, to adults as readily as to children; the areas I cover take in Surbiton, Esher, East Molesey, Kingston, Hampton and the villages between. Adult beginners are among my favourite students to teach, for the plain reason that they are the ones who chose to be there. Get in touch and tell me what you want to play.
References
- Kopiez, R. & Lee, J. I. (2006), "Towards a dynamic model of skills involved in sight reading music", Music Education Research 8(1), 97–120. Fifty-two piano majors across five levels of sight-reading difficulty. The follow-up study (Kopiez & Lee, 2008, same journal, 10(1), 41–62) found four predictors — trilling speed, sight-reading expertise acquired by age 15, speed of information processing and inner hearing — together explaining 59.6% of the variance.
- Bugos, J. A., Perlstein, W. M., McCrae, C. S., Brophy, T. S. & Bedenbaugh, P. H. (2007), "Individualized piano instruction enhances executive functioning and working memory in older adults", Aging & Mental Health 11(4), 464–471. Thirty-one musically naïve adults aged 60–85, randomly assigned; the piano group improved significantly on the Trail Making Test and Digit Symbol measures against healthy controls.
- Seinfeld, S., Figueroa, H., Ortiz-Gil, J. & Sanchez-Vives, M. V. (2013), "Effects of music learning and piano practice on cognitive function, mood and quality of life in older adults", Frontiers in Psychology 4:810. Twenty-nine adults aged 60–84 over four months; the control group were engaged in other leisure activities rather than none.
