Make a sound. Any sound.
As a piano teacher, I have learned that that’s a surprisingly difficult instruction for people to follow. And how they respond can tell me a lot about how they relate to their voice or their instrument.
It’s a little experiment I like to run when I run into a common problem: freezing. For some reason, many people are terrified to play piano, at least in front of me. I get it. I sometimes find it scary, too, and in my two decades of playing, I know the experience well.
I am fortunate enough to have been recently gifted a new upright piano by one of my students. Made by the Japanese company Kawai, it the most wonderful and most imposing piece of furniture I have. When it gets played, it fills the room, it shakes the walls and the floors. Playing a piano is like playing a building. (My upstair neighbors insist they do not mind). Many friends and students who come over to play it don’t usually get to interact with such a good quality one up close. It is like introducing them to a new person. They have to warm up to it. Many are hesitant. Some can hardly bring themselves to play more than two notes no matter how much I try to convince them it won’t hurt them.
There are many reasons why people might be afraid of pianos. Many adults are returning to piano after years of being apart. That’s why we are very careful about how we introduce lessons to kids—so that early experiences are encouraging rather than discouraging. The truth is, many students don’t continue playing after a few months or even years, a phenomenon sometimes called the “piano drop-out.” Kids (and adults) can get frustrated with slow progress, pressured by expectations, or overwhelmed by the complexity of the instrument. To help address this, we offer piano lessons free to adults of children enrolled in our singing programs, giving them a chance to reconnect with the instrument in a low-pressure, supportive environment.
Piano are fascinating, complicated tools and heavily loaded with many different meanings in people’s lives, good and bad, which can make them seem intense and intimidating. Pianos are quite a modern phenomenon, developed from a group of keyboard instruments over only the last few centuries, which is nothing compared to a lot of instruments, like, for example, the Persian setar. They can be associated with the elegance of symphonic halls, the intimacy of living rooms, the dusty floors of school music departments, the propriety of altars, and the darkness of bars. Most people do not own a piano. They are expensive, finicky, and difficult to move. So they tend to take on a mysterious and intermittent quality in people’s lives, like a relative they only see on holidays. Electric keyboards, of course, are more common, but they inherit the cultural meanings of pianos, and while they can sometimes be more accessible for students, I find that people still fear them.
To help people progress in their relationship to the piano, I try to help them explore that fear either consciously (verbally) or creatively (pianistically). What I find is that people’s strong feelings about the instrument are related to personal experiences. Many adults I teach are coming back to the instrument after many years apart. So many have a story about being forced to take lessons and have unpleasant experiences with it when they were kids. Experiences with schooling, musical and otherwise, can be literally traumatizing, as educational settings can provoke conflict with authority figures and anxiety about one’s abilities. Shame and resistance to learning are unfortunately common byproducts of formal education.
People walk around with this baggage. It forms a mass of unexamined background noise that has an outsized impact on identity formation. They might have no idea it has been there until they sit down for their first piano lesson with me, and I gesture at the keys and say “play something!” That’s my favorite opening move, but there is a significant chance that it will make their eyes will widen, their faces crack into an uncomfortable smile.
Some say they don’t know what to do. Some paw at the keys like furtive cats. And some simply refuse until I give more specific instructions. That’s when I say, “Make a sound. Any sound.” I’m not waiting for you to play Mozart. I’m waiting for you to decide to start playing with sound, no matter what it is, unapologetically, and open yourself up to being surprised by it, even if that means feeling silly or inadequate. When I say “play something,” I mean play with the piano like kids play with toys, intuitively and imaginatively, without expectations, and with no more complex purpose than to fill time with something unusual and joyful.
All of that is way easier said than done. I have a lot of sympathy for people who struggle with those first five minutes. It is a direct confrontation with insecurity, and perhaps one they are not totally ready for. But I do it because I believe that it is one of most important things for musicians to do. Even the very best musicians I know experience something like that insecurity. But they learn to live with it. That is what I try to impress upon people: you can learn to live with it, and in fact, doing so will open up a miraculous and infinite spectrum of possibilities that you cannot imagine or explore if you cling to fear.
Few people can overcome that kind of fear right away. It can take a long time. You may never feel like you have totally done it. I don’t think I have! But take comfort in the fact that no matter where you are along the path, you can always make the next step easier by telling yourself, “Make a sound. Any sound.” If you can make a habit out of that, you might be surprised by what you find.
Learning as an adult brings its own challenges, but it also opens up meaningful possibilities. Adults are often more aware of their hesitations—they know what feels intimidating, what they’ve avoided, and why. That self-awareness, rather than being a barrier, can actually become a powerful tool. It allows them to approach the piano with intention, curiosity, and a sense of ownership that many children don’t yet have. And while being a beginner again can feel vulnerable, it can also feel liberating: adults get to choose to learn, to return to something they once loved, or to finally explore something they always wished they had. When they allow themselves to make that first sound without judgment, they often discover that learning at this stage of life can be joyful, grounding, and deeply personal—a reminder that growth is still possible, and that play isn’t something we outgrow.