I have a new student. Early advanced, learns a new 4-5 page piece in one week, note-perfect. I can tell that his previous training has been good – he knows his stuff. Except for technique.

His technique isn’t bad in the way a student’s technique is so often bad: floppy, mushy, undefined, collapsing joints and the like. Instead, his technique is very limited, and therefore limiting: even when he tries to play softly, he only knows how to play with a sharp, aggressive, percussive touch.

He is aware that this is limiting, he just doesn’t know how to change it since this percussive touch is all he knows, all he was ever taught.

Perhaps due to his age – middle school – he strongly dislikes soft and/or slow pieces, prefers instead loud and fast, the louder and faster the better. Beethoven and the Romantics, yes please.

We are working on some smaller, shorter pieces with specific technical challenges, and also on large masterworks. I try to satisfy his immense hunger for The Big Sound while slowly working to broaden his horizon where it concerns nuanced touch. A big part of this involves listening, very active, involved listening, and constant (mostly …) evaluation: is this the sound I want for this part? If not, how can I change it?

Changing a student’s technique is like braces to straighten teeth: it’s a long-term project. But at least with braces, one sees that this is a work in progress. As long as someone is wearing braces, nobody would fault the orthodontist for the person’s not-yet-straight teeth.

Many years ago, I knew of a very respected and well-known piano teacher whose middle-school aged male students entered a lot of competitions and had a reputation for playing very difficult literature with technical ease but an obvious lack of expression. The teacher was quoted as saying, yes, it’s a phase, they’ll grow out of it (and back into more expressive playing), but does that mean that for this time period they should not perform/compete?