The Everything Guide to Picking Up the Piano
An adult-specific guide to hosting a sing-along in your living room, learning a Bach invention, and buying an actually functional Yamaha on Craigslist.
As an adult
Dwight bell, 64, first heard Mozart’s Sonata in A-major, K. 331, 30 years ago in an episode of The Twilight Zone in which the dolls in a dollhouse come to life. He eventually wanted to play it—a desire that only intensified after he heard Spanish pianist Alicia de Larrocha’s version on the radio. “It sounded easy to play. Little did I know,” he says. When the pandemic began, Bell found himself with more time on his hands and began looking for a teacher who could give him lessons over Zoom. Since June, he has been meeting virtually with Arielle Levioff, an instructor at the 92nd Street Y School of Music. And with work—he practices two and a half hours a day—he has gotten surprisingly good: He now sails through the left-handed pyrotechnics of Handel’s Sarabande and Variations, sounding like a moody harpsichordist in a vampire movie. “Dwight has progressed, I would say, faster than many,” Levioff says. Bell credits playing the trumpet in high school, which gave him a leg up on reading music.
Piano is a different beast from other pandemic hobbies—knitting, for example, or baking sourdough (difficult as mastering stitches and perfecting proofing may be). There’s just so much for an adult brain to master: two hands, two musical clefs, emotion, phrasing, performance anxiety. If you want to get good enough to perform Chopin’s Sonata No. 2 onstage at Carnegie Hall, it might be easier if you start during childhood, after which the window of extreme neuroplasticity for finger dexterity and auditory skill learning begins to close.
So how good can adults reasonably get? “It’s a complicated puzzle,” says Alexander Burgoyne, a postdoctoral researcher at Georgia Tech who has spent his career studying the acquisition of difficult skills. Thoughtful practice—preferably with feedback from an instructor—has a large effect but still accounts for less than half of the variability in eventual performance ability. Other factors include music aptitude, auditory skills, and overall intelligence. “In my piano study, we found individual differences in cognitive ability were the best predictor of skill acquisition, particularly at those very early stages, like the novice stage of learning from scratch,” Burgoyne says. In other words, if you’re smart, you’ll probably do better.
Because of that whole neuroplasticity thing, adults will likely have to work harder than children to reach similar levels of musical skill. But this does not at all mean you can’t have fun, learn to read and appreciate music, or even get quite good. Piano teachers love adult students: They’re often more dedicated and practice without having to be cajoled. “I like to say that adults and children are opposites because children have all the curiosity and the learning-sponge abilities, but they have no discipline. And then adults have all the discipline but are restrained by fear and insecurity,” says Kai Ono, a Queens-based pianist who teaches children and adults. In his experience, adults may even learn faster than children at first.
“I will tell you one thing,” says Ronn Yedidia, a composer and former child prodigy who is the co-founder and classical program director of New York Piano Academy. “If you have a good, caring teacher who can show you the way, you can really bring yourself a lot of joy in doing it, if you’re okay with the fact you’re not going to become an elite concert pianist. If you’re willing to pick a sample case of beginner to intermediate music, and play it artfully and meaningfully and very well, you are totally capable of sounding like a master.”