Fundamentals of Piano Practice
A good book. Although this statement:<p><i>While writing it, I discovered that piano pedagogy had never been researched, documented, and analyzed properly</i><p>is totally wrong. There&#x27;s a Piano Pedagogy group just in the Bay Area, and lots of books on it.<p>I was an Adult Beginner, which is <i>sorta</i> a Thing. My teacher had about 12 adult students, and we had separate recitals from the kids. The hidden reason for this is, you don&#x27;t want to hear some 9-year-old kid who plays better than you ever will.<p>Almost all of the other adults had played as a child and given it up. Many teachers won&#x27;t take adults like me because they have unrealistic ideas about how good they&#x27;re going to be. The truth is, you are not going to be very good, and lots of people who are orders of magnitude better than you can&#x27;t make any real money playing piano, because that level of skill is so common.<p>The interesting thing about how our brains work is: I could memorize effortlessly, but I couldn&#x27;t sight read worth shit. There are other people who are the exact opposite.<p>Lastly, one thing they said really resonated with me:<p><i>The first thing that must be done is to eliminate the habits of stopping and backtracking (stuttering), at every mistake. The best time to develop the skill of not stopping at every mistake is when you begin your first piano lessons.</i><p>OMG, in the recitals there was one lady who just <i>had</i> to play every note correctly, no matter how many times she had to try. She stopped at every mistake and &quot;corrected&quot; it, until you wanted to scream at her.