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Comment by tuzemec | Hacker News Reader

When I started taking piano lesions a few years ago, one of the first rules that my teacher established was: "No Moonlight Sonata" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

My guess is that it resembles in a way playing "Smoke on the water" in a guitar shop.

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A lot of music teachers are like that. I personally consider it shitty. My friend's first violin teacher (when she was 10 years old) made her do empty string bowing for a year. Just pull and push bowing. Now, don't get me wrong, technique is extremely important, and a lot of teachers have "if you can't do it well, don't do it" mentality. But really these people miss music is also tons of fucking fun. For a 10 year old infant, you really need a better curriculum to motivate her than just perfecting empty bowing.

I tell people: you wanna play Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto? Go fucking play it. I mean you're not gonna play it well, even some world-class pianists can't, but if it gives you pleasure to try, and motivates you to play piano, that's fine. If you're gonna be a professional pianist, or you're a student at university, it's an entirely different matter. Some people are just hobbyists, or they want to be composers and learn piano to help compose (which is an extremely important core skill for a composer). Those people can just sit down and play whatever they want, along with things that are at their level that they can perfectly play.

This happened to my sister. She was having fun playing Disney and ABBA songs, then changed to a different teacher who discouraged her from playing anything but classical. She quit playing within a year and now refuses even to play her favourites.

I give the Moonlight Sonata credit for me becoming a decent pianist. It was above my level when I was a kid, but I wanted to learn it, and my teacher encouraged that. With enough practice on a piece that was so far above my current ability, I seriously leveled up as a pianist.

My teacher's ability to help me learn what I wanted to learn made me so invested in piano as a kid. Many kids don't stick with music because (IMO) they can't find a way to enjoy it or be invested in it. For me, what I enjoyed happened to be Beethoven, but at other times I just wanted to improvise various modern songs. (Which can be as simple or as complex as you want, but a lot of classically trained teachers can't/won't/don't teach improvisation.)

Technique and theory only get you so far. Being able to emotionally invest in your playing is what sets musicians apart, imo. And as you're growing as a musician (even when you're a kid), you're going to sound like shit if you just try to monotonously follow the instructions. I'm not sure enough music teachers get the importance of being personally and emotionally invested in the moment as you're playing. (One-buttock playing is a good word for this: https://youtu.be/r9LCwI5iErE)

The choice of what you want to play is pretty important in keeping you invested.

This hits the nail. I agree that there are tons of music teachers, especially classically trained teachers who are like this. They can't/won't/don't teach improvising, composing, encourage you to develop your personal style, ask you to bring your favorite pieces to play, teach you musicianship etc... My own violin teacher taught me nothing other than playing Bach et al. I did pass all those ABRSM violin exams, so people would call me a "good" violinist but I had absolutely zero idea when it comes to ear training, interval training, composing, improvising, listening to music, rhythmic training, notation, music theory etc. Nothing. Now as an adult, I'm composing, writing my own pieces I like that other musicians play, and I'm only now realizing how incredibly shitty my music education was. They made me a robot. I didn't learn any music, I just learned how to correctly move the bow.

Nobody should work with a pompous instructor who decides what is / isn't acceptable on an instrument. As a former guitar teacher, I would help my students learn whatever they wanted - Van Halen, Brittany Spears, Garth Brooks, whatever.

All music has something of merit if you're willing to look for it.

I mean I agree with you but I also understand not wanting to do the same fucking song done badly for millionth time.

> I also understand not wanting to do the same fucking song done badly for millionth time

My wife is a piano teacher. This describes a large part of her job, especially since she focuses on beginners. She'd be so happy if she could teach "Moonlight Sonata" all day. "Old Macdonald" is much more common.

My wife does feel looked-down-upon by some in her profession who see teaching advanced students as more prestigious. But the process of taking a student from beginner to Beethoven (not that she stops there with her students) is every bit as challenging as taking a student from Beethoven to Rachmaninoff.

I can't understand why someone would look down on people teaching beginners. If you teach beginners you play perhaps the most critical role in someone's development. For one, it is the stage where someone is going to decide if this is something they enjoy, and want to carry on doing, or not. Second, you are taking someone from nothing to something. That's a huge step.

We as a society need to step down our high horses. All jobs have a purpose without which our society would not be what it is today, good or bad.

You're spot on.

My wife is a middle school mathematics teacher (and a damn good one). Sooooo many former students (now high schoolers) have approached her and said, "Because of you, I excelled in math in high school...and I love it!"

She had a student last year who actually told her in a very long letter, "You taught me that math matters. You taught me that I MATTER."

The earliest teachers / coaches / mentors set the foundation which is absolutely critical for all future learning.

Want to experience the highest of highs? Become a teacher. Alas, being do close to kids who are changing so rapidly (and often struggling with things outside of school) it also comes with some pretty deep lows.

I was a teacher and the enormity of the highs and lows is spot on. It's not a job for the faint hearted.

I remember someone many years arguing in the media that we shouldn't have the best coaches for the national soccer team. We should have the best coaches for our kids, and in a few years that would pay off tremendously. While I don't know how to do that in practice, that upside-down thinking kinda struck a cord with me. We should do that with more things.

I think it's more it's probably not a very effective piece to learn with. You can learn a few techniques from your teacher and then it's just practicing the variations and transitions, because it repeats roughly the same changes over and over. Learning the piece during your lessons is likely a waste.

I have bad news concerning pop music.

Very little pop music is as repetitive as the moonlight sonata. In that respect it is more closely related to trance than pop. Most pop music is also shorter, and an easier mix of even shorter movements.

In other words, most of it will be over a lot sooner for the poor, suffering teacher.

Do you play piano?

that's sad. a yearning musician should be able to learn and play whatever they want and whatever makes them feel a certain thing. moonlight sonata evokes something in me i can't explain (which is probably why it's a legendary piece). having strong opinions on what to play when learning feels so gatekeepy. i would have dropped that teacher quickly

Yes, but a teacher I think has the right to decide that after teaching the same song 500 times they never want to hear it again.

I think people can be allowed one song they are tired of.

I’d guess the reason would be different, I think that a person that gets bothered by music repetition would not work as a music teacher.

You might avoid moonlight sonta, but then it’s 500 servings of fur elise.

Or they've learned through their experience they simply don't like the kind of person who insists on learning the one song they like, and can't teach them well, so it's a good filter.

But hey, not every teacher is for every student and vice-versa; and that's okay.

a major rule should instead be: "choose the song you love and let's learn it" -- tells me a lot more about the kind of teaching they do than off the bat shooting down songs. sounds obnoxious. teachers can do whatever they want ofc. doesn't make them good teachers

Naw, the priority is the student not the teacher

My kids just started piano lessons last night and definitely I was a little unsure to hear one of them starting out with I Like Coffee ("the knuckle song"), but I quickly went through this same thought process myself: it's great they're off to a good start doing something that is fun and exciting for them.

Actually, teachers are human beings and they're allowed to have preferences, likes and dislikes. It's okay that not every teacher is for every student 100% of the time. Something can be a bad student/teacher fit without it being a negative value judgment ("sad", "gatekeeping", "drop").

teachers are held to a higher standard because their responsibility is a lot higher than the average citizen, so while theyre fully allowed to do whatever they want and have preferences -- i won't hold them to a standard that i do an average person. they need to above all have the highest patience and the least amount of gatekeeping, full stop.

I wouldn't be surprised if the reason it's so famous is simply because it has that title.

B. wrote 32 sonatas, only a few have titles, and they're usually the most known ones. No one remembers "Opus 27 No. 2".

Don't get me wrong, it's a beautiful movement, but there's much better ones among his sonatas.

I started piano lessons at age 5, I’ve taught piano, and I still arrange music and accompany professionally from time to time, so I’m a fairly snobbish classically trained pianist, and it is my considered opinion that that is a lovely piece of music and every pianist should play it any time they want. If you teach, and you don’t like the Moonlight Sonata, you should hold your nose and teach it anyway.

My guess is that reason is that Moonlight Sonata is not hard to learn, just tedious to teach a beginner, because of the endless repetition of relatively short phrases shifting and changing a little bit at a time.

This is what makes it fantastic, but learning to play it is mostly learning a few phrases and recognizing the shifts, which I can imagine would drive your teacher nuts until you're at a stage where you can pick up the changes rapidly enough sight reading to not have to remember every transition.

I'd guess - as a very mediocre piano player - that it's as a result low "bang for the buck" for a beginner on top of annoying to your teacher.

Upside is once you get even just relatively mediocre at sight reading it's fairly simple to work your way through yourself.

Whilst the first movement is fairly technically straightforward, the last movement is pretty tricky and requires solid technique; I certainly wouldn’t characterise it as “easy” even if it’s not the hardest piece in the repertoire.

If anything, the issue is that as a whole, the piece is fairly technically demanding, but the first movement is simply enough for most intermediate pianists to sight-read, so something that seems approachable soon becomes impossible for anyone below a certain level.

I can buy that it's technically demanding to do the last movement well, in the correct tempo, but learning it to a standard a relative beginner will be happy to achieve was not hard for me. But that may well be another distinction that makes it frustrating for a teacher to try to teach to a beginner, because, yes, it will likely be noticeably flawed.

Smoke on the Water in a guitar shop is annoying simply because people playing loudly in guitar shops are annoying and that's one of the most widespread stereotypes of something an annoying person would play loudly at a guitar shop (incidentally, I'd argue that Stairway to Heaven is the more widespread stereotype).

A guitar instructor shouldn't criticize a beginner student for wanting to learn Smoke on the Water, at least assuming it's in the instructor's wheelhouse—it's also okay for a particular instructor to offer a specific curriculum rather than taking requests from the student.

Smoke on the water is great starter song - and given that amateurs and new players are a large part of people buying guitars, makes sense as a guitar shop song too!

Agreed! And a skilled teacher would start by teaching Smoke on the Water with dyads (two-note chords) and then use that as a starting point for two discussions. First, one about barre chords and second, one about the same chords in their open format.

If the student is into classic rock, it's easy to expand this lesson into Cat Scratch Fever, Rock You Like a Hurricane, and Iron Man which are all similar to Smoke on the Water.

The bigger issue in guitar shops is that the least experienced player is the one salivating to hook up to the Marshall stack and play smoke on the water. Make them demo small combo amps instead and we are all good

Stairway to Heaven, a la Wayne's World.

No Stairway? Denied!

There's a Highway to Hell

I had a similar teacher, but it was no fur elise

Wonderwall :-)

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