How to get the perfect balance between teaching and performing piano

The professional piano teacher: The balance between performance and education

As artists, we began our life like everybody else, with piano tuition, learning from piano teachers. We are only involved in the role of piano students. The hope is to become a concert pianist one day and offer the world our performances, sharing the music that we cherish and love. But life gets in the way, and usually, this path takes us to another direction. This path can direct us to the life of a piano tutor. It usually starts to afford our piano lessons, sometimes for other reasons.

The consequence of this is to have less time at the piano: the instrument that we devoted so much time and effort get farther and farther away. The practice becomes less and less, and we find ourselves teaching more than practicing.

Still, something surprising arises from our teaching: the hope to find a new genius, someone we could pass on our knowledge and our experience after so many years of study, but after a while, we discover that this might never come. Although we have outstanding musicians, this “genius” we once envisioned never turns into a reality.

What to do?

As Maestro Rezzuto, founder of Pianist AID, states in his article “We have reached the most critical inflexion point in our musical careers. We can now decide not to take action; we can just let ourselves drift into professional frustration.Or maybe…, we can try and now and redefine the way we organice our musical and professional lives.”

This situation will propel us to another state in our careers: The joy of coming back to perform live is also accompanied by a certain level of frustration, we know we don’t have the same level we used to have before.

How to deal with this new phase of our lives?

When we were young musicians, we spent an average of six hours in the piano every day. Now those days are gone. We gained experience; we are more efficient!
Now, we can size our challenges to our possibilities better. Also we will need to define our musical projects very well, so they can be genuinely transcendental for our development. And organising our diaries, chose our projects carefully and methodically, and we will see more and more satisfaction from our performances, and this will reflect in our teaching process.

Do not miss this great article, and piece of advice, posted on WKMT Music Blog. We all, as pianists, musicians and also teachers, know how hard for us could be getting all these activities and responsibilities on our backs, so let´s read from a Maestro experience to know how to do it properly, and get the best out of our acts! Click on the link aforementioned to access to the full article.

Maestro Rezzuto on the piano, accompanied by WKMT Piano and cello teachers, also musicians for Pianist AID