A delicate balance: a study of the professional lives of piano faculty in higher education.

My mind often returns to an exchange I had with a student colleague some twenty years ago. It was a glorious June day in New York, a splendid day for celebrating graduation from the Juilliard School. Amid the festivities following the ceremony, my pianist friend said somberly to me, "You know, now that we're not going to be in school anymore, we may have to learn to get by on just five hours of practice a day." As my professional life and personal responsibilities have changed in these intervening years, I began to wonder whether I was the only one who was in fact seldom getting those "five hours a day" and was having trouble fitting teaching, practicing, writing, studying and personal responsibilities into a twenty-four-hour day. This curiosity led me to develop a survey that I circulated among 800 piano faculty I attempted to send it to every full-time piano in the country. Only piano faculty were surveyed because pianists are under much greater expectation to perform without score, although this issue currently is under heavy debate. Ultimately, 158 pianists returned surveys, and their responses form the source data for this article. Respondents included faculty at all ranks and all types of institutions, small to large, public and private, university, college and conservatory.

What Do Pianists Do in an Academic Position?

What tasks do piano professors perform in the course of their jobs? Respondents were given the following selection of tasks to describe their positions:

a. Teach applied lessons

b. Hold a regularly scheduled performance class

c. Hold an irregularly scheduled performance class

d. Teach courses in the piano area (group piano, pedagogy, literature, accompanying)