The following - which is for amusement purposes only - may be regarded as something like a horoscope, but in retrospective. Any of my fellow pianists and piano teachers in the nodegel are encouraged to message me with their own additions to this text, which shall be appended to it as they arrive. What you see here are the rather consistent stereotypes of music education which I have encountered among my student roster, many of whom switched to learning from me, after moving house, leaving home for university, or having a nasty falling-out with a previous instructor. These stereotypes are the aggregate of perhaps sixty longish-term piano students, scattered over eighteen years as a music educator and thirty years as a pianist.
Bastien Piano Basics by Jane Smisor Bastien: You are a child under the age of 6 (to start), and you are either still learning to read, or you have just grasped the basics of reading, in English - either way, you were fluent in reading music before you fully mastered reading words, and now as an adult you have a mild audio processing disorder which forces you to ask people to repeat themselves frequently. You have a piano teacher you see frequently in person who cares a great deal about ergonomics and using postural best practices to ensure a long healthy career without repetitive strain injury caused by improper technique. You'll look and physically feel better than your pianist peers of the same age who are learning other curricula, and your theoretical knowledge is going to be rock-solid, but your repertoire is going to be saturated with purpose-written curriculum pieces that nobody recognises, because they aren't popular and familiar tunes. Your piano teacher is very likely less than 20 years older than you are, and is wildly dedicated to overall musicianship, striving to make you reasonably self-sufficient at furthering your own learning, once you've gained enough foundational knowledge. Your sight-reading skills are positively to die for, because your music teacher didn't give you a demonstration playthrough of each song before you had to learn it for the first time, and she definitely confiscated the demonstration CD that came bundled with your music books. Your main weakness is a propensity for improper rhythm: you swing your ragtime, you play straight eighths in swing music, your syncopation de-syncopates, your dotted-quarter-and-eight patterns decohere into triplets... all because you have a mildly wretched tendency to automatise your left hand and then attempt to backfill it with right handed melody, instead of focusing on getting everything aligned first. For pity's sake, what is your factory defect, that you can play the separated right and left parts just fine, but as soon as you put them together, you turn off your brain? Your faults are great for business, so I can't fault them too hard, but this is an unflattering mirror you are holding up to me, oh Bastien learner! Why must you remind me of how I frustrated my own poor teachers? Karma is a woman of ill repute.
Suzuki Piano School by Seizo Azuma: Your parents are non-native English speakers, and the elementary school you attend requires your family pay tuition to allow your attendance. Sorry, kiddo, but you probably aren't going to learn even the smallest scraps of jazz method (like improvisation and memorisation by ear) until you're in your twenties and have the free agency to choose new directions to take in your development as a musician. I hope you like at least one of the Bachs, because if you don't, this curriculum is going to inflict upon you an aggressive resentment for all things baroque and contrapuntal. Your practice discipline is going to be downright inhuman, right up until you completely burn out (or develop carpal tunnel syndrome) and refuse to even look at a piano for three years. Also, you use the sostenuto pedal way too much, and you have not earned the smug attitude you present to your younger peers. Please outgrow being a rank bastard, before you attend high school, or everyone is going to despise you and the dozen scholarships you win but don't need, because your tiger mom is richer than God.
Alfred's Basic Piano Library by Willard Palmer: You were a child in the 1980s, or your parents were strongly considering having kids in the 1980s and already planned ahead that you would be taking piano lessons. You are either self-taught, or taught by an elderly lady from your local community (probably your church, which is a protestant denominational church of some description, in a rural area). By the time you reach adulthood, you may still know how to play the piano, but you don't consider yourself a pianist. You took up some other musical instrument in junior high or high school and fell in love with it, and the piano really just acted as an opportunity to learn to read music, before you switched instruments. You don't remark "I wish I'd kept taking lessons." Your piano teacher was an absolute bat during lessons, even if she presented a nice face to everyone else at church. If, against all odds, you actually liked it and stuck with it and didn't have your joy in the instrument poisoned prematurely, your improvisation and embellishment skills, playing by ear, and other jazz method capabilities are likely fantastic, but nobody ever bother to tell you those are jazz method skills in the first place. Additionally, you use the una corda pedal instead of playing pianissimo like you ought to, tsk tsk.
Piano Adventures by Nancy Faber: Oh, sugar, you've had a time. You've bounced between five or six piano instructors over the course of a decade - military family? Teachers keep retiring a year after you start learning with them? Prices got unsustainable, so you had to take a year off until your household could afford it? Maybe you did a lot of extracurriculars, and your parents made you prune your activities, so piano just didn't make the cut. Something like that. Anyway, you haven't had much consistency in your music education, but not for lack of interest in continuing to learn the instrument. Maybe you have a younger sibling who is learning on your hand-me-down music books, and if so, your parents have definitely recruited you to teach them, which neither of you is thrilled about, and you definitely aren't qualified (or paid) to do. In your late twenties, it'll come up in conversation with a zealous musician, "Oh, I used to take lessons. Wish I'd kept up with it; I was pretty good at it for awhile there." And you were, actually, but you didn't get the support you needed to keep advancing, and maybe your parents kept putting off buying the next books in the series, even though you were ready to move forward. But let's say you did get to stick with it - what then? Well, you're startlingly well-rounded, as young musicians go. Jazz method is mixed in balance with classical method, and everything is explained in clearly printed paragraphs, and there are nice CDs included to demonstrate how everything is supposed to sound. Your sight-reading skills are garbage, and you envy the kids who learned from Bastien. Your transposition skills are spectacular, and your Suzuki-learner peers envy you. Your practice discipline is fair to middling, but you get a lot done with fairly short practice sessions. You abuse the damper pedal as a substitute for proper note durations.
Essential Elements Piano Theory by Mona Rejino: You were a member of your grade school band before you took up piano, and your parents just grabbed books from the same series as your clarinet / trombone / saxophone class book, but for piano, not realising the disservice they were committing against any goals you had of being a soloist. EE is a great series for group musicianship, and learning piano will definitely supplement what you're doing in the band classroom, but with this series it will remain just that: supplemental, never the focus. Be consoled, for you are by far the most genial and pleasant person named here, and there are half a dozen extracurricular groups who would love to have you.
Mikrokosmos by Bela Bartók: Please, for the love of God, introduce me to your piano instructor at the earliest possible occasion. I need to pick his brain and figure out what on Earth is wrong with him. This speaks of an extraordinary level of musical sadomasochism, the likes of which Tom Lehrer would doubtless be thrilled to turn into a jaunty, audience-pleasing tune. As for you, poor innocent afflicted by an absolute demon of a music teacher, I owe you a stiff drink and a duet on the musical selections of your choosing, as well as - if you do not mind terribly - a complete psychological case study. What does Bartók do to a child at the tender age of seven years? In greater seriousness to better match the tone of the rest of the writeup, you have probably had the least fun and the most confusion of everyone here listed, but your muscle memory, parsing of rhythms and key signatures of extreme complexity, automatism and hyperfocus (or flow state, whichever it proved to be for you specifically) definitely surpass everyone else named here, provided you did not dash away screaming and frothing at the mouth.
The Anna Magdalena Bach Notebook by her dear husband: Is it modern? Not even slightly. Is it effective? Staggeringly so, to the willing and dedicated. Where Suzuki method will make you feel guilty for not being a perfectionist, Bach's method will actually induce perfectionism in the unwary learner - or, if not perfectionism, at least a violent allergy to improper fingering of highly technical passages. Before you know it, you're going to have argumentatively strong opinions about the proper realisation of mordents and other ornamentation, and you'll avail yourself of the damper pedal nearly not at all, compared to learners on other methods. You low-key think Mozart was a derivative hack, but you are far too polite to say it aloud in mixed company.
A Baptist Hymnal compiled by William Howard Doane: Ouch. You never had a chance to learn how scales and arpeggios work, didja'? Grab yourself a copy of Bach's lesson book for his wife; he'll get you sorted out. Your implicit understanding of chord voicings and seventh chords is honestly probably as good as mine, if not better, especially if you've actually been performing for church services, so while I'll assert emphatically that this is just about the most counterintuitive possible way to learn to play piano, I won't deny the unique strengths of this approach. You just could've gotten those strengths a lot faster and with less frustration by being taught through jazz methods, instead of from a text of liturgical music structured to accompany mixed voices.
Self-Taught, No Curriculum by The Seat Of Thine Own Trousers: My, aren't you a clever one? How's the tendinitis treating you? Your ergonomics are painful to look at, if you haven't taken the time to closely watch someone else play with proper technique, but aside from that issue, there's really nothing meaningfully separating this from the earliest manifestations of jazz method. Who am I to tell you not to reinvent the wheel? You're genuinely passionate about the instrument but received no support in learning it, and the most common reason for that is simply growing up in urban housing, with neighbours on all sides, above, and below, who would take vigourous exception to the sounds of practicing. It's also fairly likely that you never had a piano in your residence, to begin with, and only had the most limited access to one at school, church, or the YMCA. You probably think the Suzuki kids are privileged little jerks with no appreciation for how good they've got it. The first song you ever played through by ear was something you heard on the radio or in a video game soundtrack. "Pantsers" like you are the hardest to teach theory, because you've got your own labels for things, and you tend to be reluctant to switch over to the 600-year-old labels that already exist for those phenomena. This frustrates you far more than me, I assure you, as of the two of us, I am getting paid to be frustrated. Consequently, you account for about a fifth of my job security, so thanks for that!
Iron Noder 2023, 13/30