Train the ear. Lack of ear training is the inevitable road to lack of interest, lack of progress, lack of success.
Train the mind. Mechanical perfection is merely the first and least step in music.
Train the senses. Music without interpretation is music without meaning.
Appreciation must show through your playing if it is to have a soul; and anything without a soul is ugly.
Put dreams into your playing.
Beautiful practicing. Beautiful playing.
Do not play just sound, play music.
Get the big idea in your piece and develop it.
Make your music active, real, alive, enthusiastic, and your audience will take fire.
Practice as regularly as you eat, and think all the time you are doing it.
Practice all your lesson. The teacher assigned nothing to be omitted or overlooked.
Music courses are so arranged that they form a smooth level path to the summit of efficiency. But if you leave the path or try any short-cuts, you will be exhausted for nothing and will expose yourself to rough, open, untraveled country.
Don'ts for Parents of Piano Students
Don't be too eager to have your child progress rapidly in his music studies. Remember that the student who is farthest advanced at eight or ten years of age will not necessarily be in the lead at fifteen.
How Shall I Practice the Piano?
1. Never miss a day's practice, if you can possibly help it. If it should happen that your time is limited, practice your regular daily technical exercises at least.
How 'Easy' Is Piano Playing?
Has anyone ever told you how easy a thing it is to play the piano? Have you ever had people convey to you the idea that piano playing involves little skill, and therefore, does not stand very high, in their estimation, as an art - that it cannot be classed with the art of say, painting or sculpture, as an indication of the possession of brains? Such opinions only show that anyone holding them has given the subject little, if any thought. Until we begin to think, very few people realize what a really complicated thing it is to play even simple piano music.
