Choose one music related profession and explore its duties, skills, main financial, legal issues, intellectual and personal challenges.
Piano teachers play an important role in the arts. In addition to having extensive piano skills, educational knowledge, stage experience, and artistic theory. Other factors are involved, such as legal, financial, marketing, personal challenges, and development opportunities. For a piano teacher, these factors are all linked to important influences. The following essay will explore the daily life of a piano teacher and look at different aspects of their career.
An excellent piano teacher not only needs to have sufficiently solid professional ability, skills, performance level, and rich knowledge of educational theories. They also need to have good musical literacy to be able to accurately express their own educational ideas and content; have a good grasp of theoretical knowledge; use psychology, pedagogy, and educational psychology; and understand the background of different repertoire, style, performance techniques, and other basic concepts (Alexandra, 2012). It is also necessary to read a lot of materials related to piano music, such as music history, to understand the biographies of musicians as well as the social environments in which musicians live. It is important to have good communication, patience, observation, continuous learning, as well as professionalism, to successfully develop a student talent.
The role of a piano teacher is not only to teach students how to play piano, but also to communicate with them, to be fair and impartial, not to favour any student, the difficulties and ideas that each student encounters in their piano studies. The classroom is an educational environment as well as a social environment, and interaction between teachers and students. I also think that communicating with students through exchanges is a very good thing. Being strict with students in lessons and chatting with them like friends after lessons. It is also necessary to let students learn more about the musician’s contemporary environment, daily life situation, and fighting consciousness and appropriately guide students to experience their feelings, which is also closely related to the teaching effect and positive influence. Observe students’ sitting posture, hand posture, gestures, fingerings, skills, and techniques. Regularly evaluating students’ learning, progress, and speed, and providing feedback and advice (Williams, 2017).
Access to music education, not just the music courses offered, but the music curriculum that values students’ strengths and is responsive to students. The teacher’s organisational skills in the classroom are also particularly important. Whether or not they can express the content of the teaching clearly and present the teaching concepts and artistic viewpoints can satisfy the enthusiasm and understanding of the students, which has a very positive impact on the teaching results. Research by many educators and educational psychologists has shown that the judgement of a teacher’s teaching depends more on the teacher’s ability to teach in the classroom than on the teacher’s level of intelligence or ability to learn principles unrelated to education. Posner, an American scholar, suggests that the growth of a teacher is the result of experience plus reflection (Posner, 1989). Reflection is the basis for teachers’ growth. In the process of lesson preparation, in the course of lessons, and after lessons, piano teachers have to reflect. Find out the deficiencies, analyse the reasons for the deficiencies, find out what makes them satisfied, record them, conclude a set of teaching methods that belong to them, and improve their own teaching ability. Providing appropriate musical challenges for students of all abilities. Some students have good ability and strong initiative to learn, but their movement coordination is weak, and their musical sensibility is slow, so they need to keep practicing many times to overcome these technical difficulties. It is appropriate to let go of the piano so that they can improve themselves through self-study training. Teachers also hope that piano is a way for students to relax, relieve stress, to enjoy themselves while playing the piano, and to stay calm.
A piano teacher’s attitude and behaviour also affect the overall development of the student and trigger the student’s passion for the art. If the teacher does not love the profession and has negative emotions that cause agitation, these negative factors and behaviours will be brought to the students and have an adverse effect on them. On the contrary, teachers who love their job, who integrate piano into their lives and make it an important part of their lives, and who convey their passion to their students in lessons, create a happy atmosphere in lessons. ‘There is no education without love” (Xia, 1923). This phrase first came from Mr. Xia Mianzun’s translation of an Italian children’s novel, ‘Cuore’ (Edmondo, 1886), which is the fictional diary of a young boy’s life. A quote from The Education of Love: ‘Education without emotion, without love, is like a pond without water; without water, it is not a pond, and without love, there is no education.’ My understanding is that Mr. Xia Mianzun here stressed that the premise of education is ’emotion.’ Education is facing people; there are feelings between people, and these feelings are like water in a pond.
Teachers can also bring students into contact with people and events related to music, attend concerts to listen to masters’ performances, and read more biographies of musicians. In this era of internet development, teachers can also let students watch videos on different websites like YouTube, Tiktok, which can also let students feel the distance between different famous musicians. While allowing students to learn, they can also allow themselves to continue to learn and improve their knowledge and ability to maintain their professionalism. Participate in exchanges and sharing of experiences between education experts and piano teachers, and have more ways to guide and help students.
However, teachers also need to be aware of the copyright issues of different music works on different websites, especially in teaching materials. People who upload scores on different websites do not necessarily have copyrights, so teachers should pay more attention to whether the scores are original scores or adaptations when downloading the teaching materials (David, 2021). To ensure that there is no infringement of copyright or plagiarism of other people’s works. The Muse Score application is licensed under the GPLv3, which allows musicians to create, share, download scores, and the vast majority of scores are created by users. However, there are many other scores that are copyrighted, commercially available, and need to be paid for. But these scores also contain many errors and are not optimally arranged for different instruments (Eric, 2023). Quality is a real issue. IMSLP is another quality software for free sheet music, and it is software for public copyrighted music. Publicly available music is music that is no longer protected by copyright, so it is mainly classical music. This project was started in 2006 with the main aim of making public music available for free over the internet. However, it has the disadvantage of only having uncopyrighted music, no pop/rock music in the library, and a few seconds of adverts before accessing the free sheet music (Hannah, 2020).
A piano teacher’s income usually comes from student fees. Employment status can be divided into three types: employees, workers, and self-employed workers. Of course, different identities will have different rewards, rights. But good teaching and certain academic qualifications will also help to increase the teacher’s income. Good pre-job service contract agreement, having signed a contract, main statement of employment. Whether full-time or part-time, start date, end date of employment, where you work, how you are paid, hours worked, holiday pay calculation (David, 2021). Piano teachers’ incomes may also decide to increase or not according to the fluctuation of the market, such as COVID-19 a few years ago; the market and environmental changes incomes are unstable, and many of the teacher loss students. At this time, many piano teachers will choose to become private individuals and conduct one-to-one lessons at home or online. In the absence of a company or piano organisation, they are not protected by the law and are not entitled to employee benefits. They do not receive the same treatment as other employees, such as free lunch and overtime pay, paid public holidays, paid sick leave, workers’ compensation, pensions, and so on (David, 2021).
As a self-employed person, they need to be responsible for what they do, financial planning, having a promotional website, and business cards to show for it. Business financial planning has a promotional website as well as a business card presentation. Feel free to decide on transaction terms and fees, as well as decline other job offers. They need to pay their own self-employment tax and declare their business licenses. Teachers need to keep their own good financial records, consider expenses, purchase teaching materials, sheet music, equipment, facilities, maintenance, tuning, equipment resources including warranty and repair maintenance costs (National Assciation for Music Education, 2023). Calculate the number of hours and cost of each lesson, sign a contract with the student or parent to arrange the lessons, collect an invoice for the lessons, specify the content of the lessons, the method of payment, and whether to pay per lesson, per month, or by the hour. Simple written agreement to avoid unnecessary disputes. Make the price list and terms and conditions public, as if the piano teacher were running a studio on their own. They can promote their work on websites or on social media.
Piano teachers can also upload their own piano videos on various platforms that can be viewed by students all over the world, such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. They can show their playing results, teaching results, some free tutorials, and practise tips. They can also take some vlogs about their daily life as a piano teacher so that more people can explore more about the daily life of a piano teacher, share their own successes, and attract more attention from students and parents. They can also participate in music activities, music performances, music festivals, and art exhibitions in different places to get to know more musicians from different places and have more opportunities to communicate and cooperate with them. With accumulated experience, there is a possibility of career advancement and development, such as university professors, art directors, piano players, film scores, opera performances, choirs, band formation, music publishing, music production, and other areas of development (David, 2021). The accumulation of social experience, contact with more diversified groups of people, constant exchanges with various types of people, and the experience of different lifestyles can be used to widen the circle of life and broaden one’s horizons.
Skills can keep improving and rising; passion is the best teacher; having a good mindset is the beginning of the equipment; this is the so-called work ethic, which is very important and equivalent to a good work ethic. Their job is no easier than any other job. Piano teachers are not just about having a piano, but a combination of different aspects, such as education, skills, law, marketing, performance, and so on. These factors are also things that a piano teacher needs to know and be aware of before entering the arts industry.
Bibliography
Alexandra, W. (2012) Piano Teaching as a Career Trips And Advice On Becoming A Piano Teacher. Lulu.com.
David, B. (2021) Employment Status for Instrumental and Vocal Teachers. Music Education Official Musicians’ Union.
De Amicis, E. (1886) Cuore. Peter Owen, Treves.
Eric, M. (2023) Musescore 4 – First Impressions (Spoiler Alert, IT’S AMAZING. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nM_MVRt0gg [Accessed 29/11/2024].
Hannah, H. (2020) What is IMSLP? A Musicians’s Guide Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1LuXFxq2yY [Accessed 29/11/2024].
Mianzun, X. (1923) Eduation of Love. Oriental Magazine, The Commercial Press.
National Assciation for Music Education (2023) Divisive Concepts Laws and Music Education.
Posner, G. J. (1989) Field experience: Methods of reflective teaching. New York: Longman.
Williams, A. (2017) The Piano Teacher’s Survival Guide. Faber Music, 7-10.
