The objection I have frequently heard about learning to play the piano as an adult is that they can’t read music. Learning to read music and understanding what every part of the notation means is really important when you want to play the piano or any other musical instrument.
I’ve had a number of conversations about how people think that learning to read and understand musical notation is so complicated and therefore just for kids to learn. I’ve often heard that its like learning a language.
First of all, I would agree that it is like learning another language, or to be more accurate, its like learning to read another language. There is no learning to speak it and no getting the pronunciation wrong.
Secondly, I completely disagree that learning to read music is only something a young person can do. It is indeed like learning a language in so far as the experts say that the ideal age to learning age is while a person is a child. The important thing to note is that these experts don’t say that it is impossible to learn to read and understand musical notation (or learn another language).
If you are really wanting to learn the piano in your retirement but the one thing that is holding you back is that the music notation looks too hard, just remember this: A piano teacher will only teach you a little bit at a time and they will not move you further on to more until you can understand and play the most simple of notation.
Any piano teacher, even the ones that aren’t that great, will only take you one step at a time and its not until you ‘get it ‘ that you will be moved on further.
If you are concerned that you will not learn about the notation quick enough, talk to your piano teacher about it, even before you start any lessons. They will help reassure you and make sure that you do have a good grasp of what they have taught you before giving you something more complicated. A good teacher will make sure that at every stage you do not feel overwhelmed.
Part of the reason why piano music can look so complicated is because pianos can have more than one note played at a time. If you look at music for instruments like flutes, clarinets, trumpets and trombones, the music looks quite simple. The complex part for these instruments is actually producing the sound – they have to hold their mouth just so and use a precise air pressure from their mouths in order to produce a decent note.
Reading piano music is not too hard for an adult to learn because the musical notation is logical. I know that might sound easy for me to say this because I have been reading music since I was a child, but the truth is that I think its quite straightforward to comprehend, because of its logical system.
When you first start learning to play the piano, whether you are an adult or a child, you have three areas you focus on: the notes themselves, the timing (or length) of those notes and the fingering you use (which means that you use a particular finger on a particular note).
When you are looking at piece of piano music, whether it is simple or extremely difficult with many, many notes, what indicates the note you play is the position of the note. Piano music consists of two staves joined together by a bracket at the beginning. Each stave or staff (the other singular of the word staves) consists of 5 parallel evenly spaced. Each note has its own unique position on the staves and when I refer to the note, I refer to the circular part of the note. Over time you get to know where each note sits on the staves. The logical part is that the notes sit on the lines or in the spaces between the lines in order so the higher pitched notes are written higher up than the lower notes (which are therefore written lower). Also what helps when you are a beginner is that you are starting with only 3-5 notes.
The next part is how to work out the length of the note. To put it simply, the more embellishment there is to the note that is just an oval or circular shape, the faster the note is. When you are a beginner, you are starting out with 2-3 different lengths of time that the note has to be played for. Again, a reasonable piano teacher will show you the difference and make sure that you can see the difference for yourself.
The fingering is probably the simplest part to learn. Especially for music written for beginners, there can be numbers above or below the staves. These numbers are 1 through to 5. Number 1 refers to your thumbs, 2 – index finger, 3 – middle finger, 4 – ring finger and 5 – little finger. Quite a simple yet effective system for indicating which finger to use.
I know that it can seem daunting about the prospect of learning to read musical notation, but remember that it is a logical system and its a system that you need to learn only a little bit at a time. Finally, even an average piano teacher can make the whole process simple and painless.
Don’t allow your misconceptions stop you from pursuing learning to play the piano. It is truly never too late to learn.