Horror Stories from the Piano

 

With Halloween coming, I thought I might tell you a few spooky tales from the piano. These are really scary! And to make it worse, they are all true.

The following stories were all related to me by either my own students (about their previous teachers) or other acquaintances.

1.      The teacher who ended the lesson early with a shy and vulnerable teenager saying “You’re wasting my time. Come back when you know the notes.”

2.      The teacher who took the music book of a student (who was in her 70s), tore it up and threw it on the floor, because she used a fingering he didn’t approve of.

3.      The teacher who dealt only with the notes, no rhythm at all. This adult student would sometimes play for his friends, and they would say “your rhythm is all off, man!” When he asked his teacher about it, she just waved it off.

4.      The teacher who would sit by the student (a pre-teen) with his music in her lap (presumably he was playing from memory), but on top of his music she had a magazine which she would read while he was playing.

5.      The teacher who drew a red line horizontally across all the white keys of the piano and instructed the student that her fingers should always be on that line. When the student related this story to me, I asked “what about when you have to play on the black keys?” She replied, “we never talked about that.”

6.      The teacher who had the student work on only one piece for the entire year, so that he could play it perfectly at the end-of-year recital. Naturally, the student quit after the year ended.

7.      The teacher who had the student play scales at the lesson for the first 45 minutes, and her pieces for the last 15 minutes. When she asked if they could spend more time on music, he replied yes, but only if she took a 90-minute lesson.

8.      The teacher who had this adult student set the metronome to tick with the fastest note in the piece. So, for example, if the piece had sixteenth notes, he would set it to the sixteenth note, and if he came to a quarter note in the piece, he would listen for four ticks to go by. If he had a whole note, he would have to count 16 ticks of the metronome!

9.      Teachers who proudly show videos of their student recitals. However, in those recitals, they haven't bothered to adjust the height of the piano bench for each student’s height, and they probably don't at lessons either. Thus, little kids are sitting so low that their arms and hands are falling well below the keyboard. This is a huge risk for physical injury later on.

10.   I met a teacher who admitted her own playing was so below par that she could not play the pieces her students were working on.

11.   Teachers who would hit the hands of students for playing wrong notes, or other types of physical or verbal abuse. In previous centuries this was common practice. But it’s shocking that it still exists.

12. The teacher who encouraged the student to write the letter names above every note in the score. This means you're not actually reading the musical notation itself. This is wrong for so many reasons. The note "C" for example, occurs eight times on the piano, so just seeing "C" doesn't tell you which one. Most important, if you are looking at letters you've written in and not the notation, you probably aren't seeing the rhythm. Why would notation exist at all if just writing letter names worked? It's no surprise that this student never learned to read with any fluency, and couldn't read rhythm at all!

And from my own personal experience:

When I was a student at Manhattan School of Music I had a teacher who had been a famous pianist in his day, but sadly, didn’t really seem to want to teach. He liked to have students who were already so proficient that he could just “coach” them. (See my post on coaching vs. teaching.) But I needed actual teaching to improve my technique, among other things. My playing was a mess. One day at the lesson I was playing a difficult piece, when I became aware he was saying something (almost yelling, actually) and so I stopped and turned around to look at him. (He sat behind us in a comfy chair, smoking his pipe, not beside us, where the teacher should sit.) He had his hands over his ears and said “Please, don’t play so many wrong notes!” I was dumbfounded. He didn’t think I was playing them on purpose, did he? And if not, wasn’t he supposed to be helping me not to play so many wrong notes? The lightbulb went on for me that day, that I needed to find a new teacher. Which, luckily, I did, and everything changed for me.

If those of you reading this have horror stories of your own, I would love to hear about them. You may post them as comments at the end of this post, or email them to me at deborah@pianobrilliance.com. I may include them in a future post, Horror Stories, Part II.