Advice on Motivating Children to Practice Music

from someone who once hated to practice the piano

In order to persuade anyone to read or believe what advice I attempt to provide, I must first relate that my strong disinclination for music practice is long past, and that not only did I major in music, but practicing the piano is now a favorite form of study and recreation. From growing up among other musicians and my little experience in teaching piano lessons, I have never doubted that inability or reluctance to practice is more common than it is uncommon. I have the firsthand experience of being a reluctant piano student and a trial upon the patience and efforts of several piano teachers and my mother and so would like to help those in that frustrating position by sharing my observations concerning the various reasons which may prevent regular and productive practice by young or beginning music students and offer some possible suggestions for improvement.

It is a funny thing that practicing the piano should seem to require so much discipline. My sister and I were really very easy to manage as children and teenagers. We did well in school, preferred to read books rather than go out, hardly spent any money, were never punished, and did everything expected of us except to practice the piano (we started learning at the ages of 5 and 3). In fact we both so severely disliked piano practice that our usual way was for each of us to play through our pieces for 20 minutes once a week just before walking to our teacher’s house. Incredibly enough, we advanced enough to show that our dislike of practice did not result from lack of ability because we successfully performed at recitals, church and school events, and our parents were proud.

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Playing the Piano is a Privilege (Not a Chore)

An interesting experiment would be to forbid a young child to ever touch the piano, after all it is a very expensive instrument. One can easily imagine how much higher the piano instantly rises in that child’s estimation. One then promises the child that he or she will be “allowed” to begin learning the piano at a certain age. Even better then, if someone in the family—a parent, older sibling or cousin—were to frequently play very charming pieces of the kind accessible to children. Pieces from the Romantic era are very suitable for this purpose (e.g. Fϋr Elise & Doll’s Dream), should be repeated often and might even have stories invented about them. It is very natural that the child will aspire to play these pieces someday, and a united goal has been formed without duress.

When the long awaited birthday or predetermined date is come, the parent or guardian sets a time limit in which the child is allowed to practice the piano (concentration usually lasts 15-30 minutes so it is better to set too short a time than too long) and strictly enforces it. What happens after this point is too individual to generally state, but I think it is likely that practice will be less dreaded, more concentrated and the end will seem to come too soon. Eventually the child may become proficient enough that the proficiency itself will be a great motivation and make strict regulation of practice unnecessary.

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Playing Slower for Faster Results

In music, speed of execution has a tendency to be a used as an indicator of excellence. Playing fantastically fast is the trait commonly associated with musical virtuosity and accomplishment, most especially by amateur listeners. I will only say briefly how this favoritism for one trait does great injustice to the other facets of musical performance such as tone, articulation, etc. as the point of this little essay is to explain how overvalue of fast playing is many a young musician’s greatest enemy.

Playing music very fast is satisfying and a often sure way of getting compliments. For these reasons, young and beginning musicians will too often attempt to play a piece at a faster tempo than they can execute correctly. Sometimes the result is that the piece sounds “okay” but will never reach the level of excellence that is possible with slower practice. Usually the result of trying to play too fast is that the student repeatedly plays the wrong notes or the wrong rhythms and unless slow and deliberate practice is applied, scant improvement will result from many hours of such practice. The frustration of making the same mistakes over and over is the frequent reason of a child declaring “I hate this piece” or “I hate piano practice”.

The reality is that those who learn to play brilliantly and fast have learned to practice very slowly. It is possible to make a game of playing slowly and deliberately by praising it as a skill and offering the task as a challenge. Setting slow tempo as an objective may help to remove the common delusion of its being tedious. Children should be encouraged to practice no faster than they can play without errors. The tempo should be gradually increased and if incidence of errors increase, it should be slowed down again. An older person should sit by if necessary and count out each beat as it is almost impossibly hard to play to a metronome when very young. A teacher may explain this principle, but cannot enforce its application in daily practice, therefore parental participation will be necessary on a daily basis.

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Divide and Conquer

There is a skill called sight-reading. Sight-reading is the act of playing a piece of music through without having practiced it beforehand. We usually sight-read a piece when considering whether to learn it or when it is first assigned to us by an instructor. Some people continue to sight-read a piece indefinitely without ever resorting to the other skill: practicing. Practicing is to study a piece of music and usually by dividing it into sections to be repeated as many times as necessary until mastery of the whole is achieved by mastery of the parts. Sometimes these small sections are divided and studied in even smaller sections.

My definition of practicing might be called “boring” by those who like the immediate pleasure of playing and hearing an entire piece at once, and to play and hear it again and again just the same with probably a few slight improvements. That is entertainment, not practice.

By an unfortunate accident in the course of history, the word “Discipline” has been alloted a rather negative connotation and made synonymous with words like “Arduous” and associated with doing things that are “Not Fun”. Discipline is also presumed to require long periods to time, but time we have known to be relative since 1916 (thanks to a famous publication by the other Einstein). Therefore it should come as no surprise that a short duration of disciplined practice is rewarded by the “Instant Gratification” of noticeable improvement.

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