Classical Piano Lessons: A Step-by-Step Guide
Ah, classical music. The names of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Chopin ring out across history as titans of composing music, with their symphonies, sonatas, preludes and fugues played many centuries after their death, and their sonic achievements held in the highest of esteem across the world. The music of these giants has been played by almost every student studying their instrument, and there’s just nothing that compares with the majesty of that classical orchestral sound, or the awe-inspiring sound of a Debussy piano prelude.
Luckily for you, at Boston Piano Lessons — a music school near Watertown, MA — we make it possible to not just take a dip in the world of classical music, but to learn how to swim in it with passion, skill, and a new appreciation for its magic.
What Is Classical Music?
The classical world of music is expansive. Although most people use the term classical music to refer to a very large collection of music, technically classical music is split into three periods, in chronological order:
Some also argue that Contemporary music today is the natural progression of the Romantic period of classical music, so add it as a fourth period.
Why Learn to Play Classical Piano?
Even for students who are most interested in playing other genres of music, playing classical music is essential to understand both music theory and the way that music has developed over the years into what it is today. It’s hard to understand the present without knowing about the past, and there are a ton of recognizable melodies that were written by Bach, Brahms, Mozart, and others that you would be surprised to learn were written so long ago. There are time-honored training methods of learning the piano from classical music that I believe are still the best ways to learn how to play. It is always good to broaden the horizons of our knowledge, and playing classical music is a great way to do just that.
Taking classical piano lessons is by far the best way to learn about classical music. Every single composer that made music back then learned to play the piano (or harpsichord, or organ, or other precursor of the modern piano) as it is visually and tactilely the best instrument on which to compose on. You can both play the most notes out of all the instruments at once (Winds have some extended technique where they play two or three notes at once, but it is very hard to do), as well as have the most range out of any instrument.
This leads to easily transferring the melody and harmony worked out on the piano to the full orchestra and is a strategy that most composers still use today, though the advent of computers and the aid they provide to making music has definitely made a lot of things easier. Because of this, a student of the piano can learn the music theory behind classical music most effectively, and the different periods it makes up.
First Steps to Learning Classical Piano:
Posture & Position
The first steps to learning any instrument, regardless of which genre or style of music you wish to pursue, is to build good habits on how to sit, place your hands, and use your body to make sounds come out of the piano in the least stressful way.
Refer to our beginner's piano guide for full details, but here’s a quick summary: keep your feet flat on the ground, sit on the edge of your bench so that your weight is on your feet, not your thighs, keep your back straight, your shoulders relaxed, your elbows bent at about a 95-degree angle, and your wrists relaxed.
Scales
The next step is to learn how to play scales. All of classical music is written in a key, i.e. a set of notes that sound good together from which to choose from, and learning your scales is the double whammy of learning each key as well as starting the process of disciplining your fingers. There are no shortcuts to it – the only way to get those fingers ready to play the complex movements required for challenging pieces is to play ,000 notes a day with your scales and other exercises. You wouldn’t expect to run a marathon without at least running a mile, would you? The kind of fine motor movement that piano playing requires are novel motions that your hands have not done on this scale before (unless you play other instruments, but even so), so it is important to train your fingers. Other exercises that we recommend are the ones from Hanon, who wrote down 60 of the most useful exercises to get your fingers in line to play classical music.
Learn to Read SHeet Music
Meanwhile, you can use the other time you spend practicing learning how to read sheet music. Before the advent of recording music, the only way to know what a piece sounded like, and to learn it, was to get a copy of the sheet music, and learn it from there. Classical musicians know how to read sheet music. It is an essential skill. Like reading is to speaking, so is reading sheet music to playing music, especially classical music, which you want to reproduce as close to the original intent of the composer as possible.
Reading Sheet Music:
The best way to learn sheet music is to just start playing pieces. Great easy pieces to start with are Bach’s Prelude in C major, Chopin’s Prelude in E minor, or Satie’s Gymnopedie #1. These are good to start with as they don’t take a lot of knowledge of technique which you won’t have yet, and they are good introductions to several styles of piano and composers in classical music.
Though there are other ways of writing down music, the reason western-notation style sheet music (the one you see most commonly today) is so successful is that it is a very succinct and easy to read way of notating all the information one needs to produce sound. This includes the pitch of the note, the duration of the note, the volume at which the note is played, the articulation (all connected and flowing, or all separate and distinct), all in one small package. For example, the image below shows some notes:
Sheet Music Symbology
As you can see, there are five horizontal lines (called the staff) that span across the image, which is broken up into equal sections (called measures) by vertical lines (barlines). The symbol at the beginning of the horizontal lines is called a clef, in this case a treble clef, which tells you how to read the notes. Since it is a treble clef, you know all these notes are an F, since they occupy the same spot in the staff – the one just above the first line. (There are other clefs, but I won’t go into them here).
The numbers right next to the clef symbol are called the time signature. Time signatures tell you how many of each note are in each measure. In this case, it states that there are 4 (top number) quarter notes (bottom number) in each measure. It is read kind of like fractions, so if you are familiar with those, this should look pretty familiar to you as well. The identity of each note is written above it. So the circle with no stick (called a stem) is a whole note, which is always four quarter notes, so it is the full measure in this case. The next note, which is a circle with a stem, is a half note, consisting of two quarter notes, so there are two in each measure. The pattern continues.
Another piece of information that is not included in this image would be displayed above the Treble clef. This is the tempo marking – a piece of information that tells you how quickly the piece is to be played in beats per minute (or bpm). Sometimes it is an exact number (such as quarter note = 60bpm), and sometimes it is an Italian adjective, such as Largo (for long, meaning slow) or Andante (for fast).
Reading sheet music is difficult for beginners as there is a lot of information one is getting all at the same time, but once it is mastered there is no more succinct way to relay the information. And the only way to master reading sheet music is to keep reading and learning more material, and solidifying that connection in the brain that automatically connects this information to sound. I am sure you are familiar with the phenomenon that you cannot look at a word without reading it – the same phenomenon occurs in music quite quickly once you practice reading sheet music every day.
ClASSICAL PIano — Beginner’s Level:
Okay, so you are starting to get familiar with reading sheet music, and you no longer feel like you are struggling against your fingers every day – rather, they are starting to do what they are told, and muscle memory is allowing you to do things you once found very difficult almost automatically. What are the next steps?
First, a little music theory. There are several kinds of composition structures for classical piano pieces, the most common ones of which are called sonatas, preludes (sometimes paired with fugues), and etudes.
Sonatas
Sonatas are a specific kind of composition that has a very strict form, consisting of an exposition, in which the theme is introduced, a development, in which the theme is developed, or even changed, and a recapitulation, in which the theme is repeated, and only changed slightly from the beginning to end the piece. Sonatas are most common in the classical music period and come in various difficulty levels. Some of the easier ones include Beethoven’s 19th or 20th, or Haydn’s Hob.XVI:1 Allegro, or Mozart’s 1st or 16th. Sonatas are great because they are very complete-feeling pieces and are good examples of how to take simple thematic elements, usually only consisting of a measure or two of melody, and develop them musically.
Preludes
Preludes are a different beast. In Baroque music, the Bach preludes are always paired with a fugue in the same key. The prelude is intended to introduce the listener to the key, and then the accompanying fugue is always played after. That is where the name comes from – prelude – before. The fugue is an incredibly interesting theory exercise in which a simple melody is played in different ways one on top of the other. The challenge of playing fugues isn’t usually playing the notes, but ensuring that each iteration of the melody shines through, as sometimes two melodies are being played by the same hand, creating quite a challenge for the player, so are great exercises at practicing finger individuality. Some good ones to start with are Bach’s Prelude and Fugue No.1 in C major. The fugue is much harder than the prelude, so no worries if you start with just the prelude!
In Romantic music, preludes are just pieces that don’t use other forms like etudes or sonatas. Debussy and Chopin were masters of this craft, creating some jaw-dropping beautiful music. Good ones to start with (after the E minor recommended in the Reading Sheet Music section as a first step) are Chopin’s Prelude in B minor or A major. Debussy’s preludes are a little more difficult, and should be played when pursuing intermediate level pieces.
Etudes
Etudes are pieces specifically made as an exercise of a single technique. Most etudes written before the romantic period were dry and somewhat boring and routine, until Chopin came onto the scene during the romantic period, eschewing previous practices, and writing etudes (that still were exercises of a technique) that were absolutely beautiful, and just as worth listening to as any of his other pieces. Etudes, by their very nature, are technically challenging pieces, so there are no “easy” ones that you can start with. However, here is a good guide of practice etudes for when you start feeling like your fundamentals are good enough to start challenging yourself.
In summary, there are lots of good places to start with depending on what you like! Compositions that could be assigned by your classical piano teacher, such as nocturnes, impromptus, ballades, waltzes, and mazurkas, so just keep listening and exploring. Being able to comfortably play the pieces above gives you a good foundation to move on to the intermediate level and start taking on some real challenge.
Classical Piano — Intermediate Level:
By the time you reach an intermediate classical piano playing level, at least 50% of the pieces mentioned above should become routine and easy to play. You should know all the major and minor scales of the white keys, if not by heart, but by muscle memory as soon as you look it up. It will also help to know your major and minor chords, chord inversions, and 7th chords. Some light sight reading (playing the notes on sheet music correctly and in time after only looking at it once or twice) should be doable.
The pieces I recommend choosing now should focus on areas where you are weakest. Do you have trouble with big chords that span an octave? Choose a piece that exercises that. Do you often find that if one hand is playing something jumpy, where it must change positions quickly and accurately, you make a lot of mistakes? Choose a piece that exercises that. You have a lot more options for the pieces you can reasonably play, so choose pieces that challenge you.
If you have the available practice time, you can learn more than one piece at a time. This helps you maintain the techniques you’ve already learned and helps to bring variety to your daily practice, which keeps you interested, as playing the same piece over and over again, day in and day out, can become routine. It is important that even while learning the piece, you play expressively, so that you are not only practicing technique, but also playing with feeling. In my experience, always playing expressively leads to learning the piece faster, as I am engaging more parts of the brain.
You should also branch out into more styles of music. Your ability to read sheet music gives you access to any genre you want to play, so experiment!
Some of my recommended intermediate piano practice pieces (with links to sheet music), in no particular order, include:
Fur Elise by Ludwig van Beethoven
The first movement of the Moonlight Sonata, by Ludwig van Beethoven.
Impromptu in A-flat major by Franz Schubert
Prelude in C# minor by Sergei Rachmaninov
Clair de Lune by Claude Debussy
Etude in A-flat major by Frederic Chopin
Nocturne in E-flat major by Frederic Chopin
Merry-Go-Round of Life from Howl’s Moving Castle by Joe Hisaishi
These are just some of my (and I think the world’s) favorite pieces to play, but now that you have a little knowledge about classical music, and I’m sure have started to feel the differences in between time periods and composers, you can choose your own favorites! I recommend choosing some composers you don’t see often, to ensure you are still expanding your horizons, and are always pushing the limits of your comfort zone. This may be obvious, but at all times during your study of piano, you should be listening to music (and piano music too) to keep learning new music and finding new favorites to learn. Just like the most effective way to learn a new language is to surround yourself with it, from movies and shows in that language, to forcing yourself to do daily errands like shopping and ordering food in that language, so too should you be filling your life with the music you want to learn so that it becomes a part of you – a language that you can speak in.
Why study classical music?
There are many genres of piano music, so why study classical music?
Simply put, copying the masters is the best way to expand your own knowledge. And the 300-odd year (roughly 1600-1910) span of classical music produced plenty of masters to choose from. Playing pieces that people have been playing for hundreds of years teaches you time-tested techniques and styles, which people still use today when writing music for the piano. By studying classical music and the theory behind it, you will start to recognize similar patterns in today’s pop music, classic rock, heavy metal, really any genre you like. Nothing is formed from a vacuum, so all the music today has its roots in classical music. By learning classical music you are creating a foundation which will help you understand music however you like to play it.
More important than its benefits to your musical education, classical music is just beautiful. There is something for everyone in classical music, so just find what you like, learn to play it, and enjoy yourself. Just like our taste buds change over the years and we grow to like foods we didn’t like before, so too will our musical tastes change and develop. Learning a musical instrument is a lifelong journey, so enjoy the ride, learn lots of new things, challenge yourself, and give classical music a shot. You won’t regret it! I know I didn’t.