Almost anyone can learn to play well.

I teach because I believe that almost anyone can learn to play the piano well, and that the way a student is taught in the first months decides how far they will go. Talent matters less than most people think. What matters is the quality of your fundamentals, the patience of your teacher, and whether the pupil comes to love the instrument or merely endures it.

Much of how I think about teaching I owe to Carl Czerny, whose Pianoforte School (Op. 500) I return to constantly. Czerny taught for thirty years, and the convictions he set down still describe, almost exactly, the kind of teacher I try to be.

The single most important thing I have learned is that warmth and discipline are not opposites. A lesson can hold a student to a high standard and still be a pleasure to sit through. Czerny put it better than I can:

I take that seriously. Impatience teaches nothing except that the instrument is a source of anxiety. I would rather a student leave a lesson having understood one thing completely and gladly than dread ten things.

I work with children, adult beginners, and advanced players preparing for serious study, and I have never found a single approach that fits all of them. There were years I would teach strictly from any number of methods: Edna Mae Barnam’s Step by Step Series, Faber’s Piano Adventures, Hal Leonard’s Piano Library. Without fail, every single system would fail to meet the growing needs of the pupil. Each one arrives with a different temperament, a different reason for being there, and a different idea of what “playing the piano” means to them, and these issues complicate over time. My first job is to adapt to these changes. My second job is to lay such a solid foundation that carries through it all.

This is why I plan for the individual rather than running everyone through the same sequence. A retired adult learning for the joy of it and a teenager aiming at conservatory need different things from me even when the underlying technique is identical. Czerny believed that much in teaching must be left to the judgment of the teacher, and that judgment is most of the work.

The most consequential teaching happens at the very start, with beginners, and it is often the least glamorous. A poor foundation is expensive: Czerny warned of students forced to spend years correcting what was wrongly ingrained during their very first lessons, and I have met those students. “Youtube University”, as I have come to know it, has amplified the problem. Undoing a bad habit takes far longer than forming a good one.

So I am unhurried and exact about fundamentals: posture, hand position, an even and unforced touch, a steady sense of pulse. I explain things fully rather than briefly, because a rule memorized in a minute can take months to live in the hands. It would be a mistake to view this as indulging myself with the breadth of my explanations, but I truly believe is the most efficient thing I can offer.

I believe students learn fastest when they are playing music they actually want to play. This is not a compromise of standards; it is how standards are reached. Czerny was blunt about it — a student “makes far greater progress when he plays all his assignments willingly and with pleasure” — and I have found it true at every level.

I am equally wary of the opposite temptation: drilling for its own sake until the joy is gone. Czerny’s sharpest warning to teachers was against robbing students of their time with dry and insipid assignments, and making the beautiful art hateful to them. That sentiment governs how I choose repertoire and exercises. Technique is a means to an end. The end is control of the compass, and the ability to play whatever you set your desires to. Part of my responsibility is to form a student’s taste early, so that over time they come to love not only the pieces I assign but the act of playing anything beautifully.

For my more advanced students, the central work is holding two things in balance that are often taught as if you had to choose between them: rigorous technical control on one hand, and musical freedom on the other. Some teachers polish a single piece for months and produce a student who can perform one thing and do little else. Others race through reading and never develop real artistry in anything. Czerny thought both extremes were mistakes, and that “with the right approach, the two can, and must, be combined.” I agree. Fluency and expression are not rivals; each one makes the other possible.

I also push students, gently but firmly, past their comfort into harder keys, unfamiliar styles, music that feels out of reach. Much of the difficulty in playing, Czerny observed, lies more in the imagination than in the fingers. A good teacher’s job is partly to dissolve that imagined difficulty.

Finally, I believe music is meant to be shared, and that performing even informally, for a friend or a small room is one of the most powerful motivators a student has. Czerny saw this clearly: “Nothing spurs the student more to attentiveness and diligent study of a piece than the thought of being able to perform it before an audience.” It is also, in his words and my experience, the surest cure for the nervousness that keeps so many capable players silent.

So I create low-stakes chances to perform from early on. The goal is to improve the confidence of my pupils in their musical communication: the steady, hard-won assurance that comes from having played for others and survived, and then from having played for others and enjoyed it.