Time for a new Poll.

What about just plain old starting lessons at age 5 or 6 with the piano teacher lady who lived up the street?

I don't understand the first two options starting with "Yes".

And there is a correct way to write the above sentence.

Scott

Opps Corrected. It was an enharmonic spelling

These, no matter what my opinion, are certainly arguable. At least, that is what I have experienced. So if you agree with the statement as a result of your early training, you may select it. The 3rd "Yes" statement was changed (dropped the "yes") as it wasn't about opinion.

Monica,
Use the most important and influential teacher you had until you were 18. Folks, can you just imagine Monica when she was 18?!

I didn't learn any of that before 18. Most of the theory I learned was in high school band. But then, I only had about 3-4 years of piano lessons in my childhood, so I guess I'm strange. My first teacher (age 7-8) essentially taught me how to read music. My second teacher (16-18) had a Steinway in her house, but an upright for her second piano. And she didn't teach me much in the way of theory. She was a performer, but she was over 80 by the time I began lessons with her, and past her performing years. She accompanied me when I did the Grieg concerto 3rd movement in a local competition, and she couldn't keep up with me (which is saying something since I didn't play it too fast), but my mom said it was the other way around when she did the Grieg (all three movements) in high school (she had the same teacher).

Okay, I've just voted. My first teacher had one grand piano in her living room. Her son, who was my age, was learning to play the cello and as we each progressed, I accompanied him a few times in recitals. My second teacher had a piano and also a harpsichord that he built himself and let me play sometimes. That was pretty neat!

My grandmother was a translator for the Royal Bank of Canada branch in Havana, Cuba. She loved English. She use to recite a saying replete with homonyms, that went like this:

If you want to write wright right,
then you have to write wright "wright;"
because if you write wright "rite,"
then you don't write wright right, you write it wrong.

Is that why you make so manny speling mistaks

^ The same thing also happened to me, the only difference is that it only took me a year to take piano lessons when I was a kid since I was not into it yet. But when I was already around 17-18, the interest of learning how to play piano grew in me so I took lessons again. My piano teacher then was a pianist from a church and I did learn a lot from her. But I stopped when I was finishing up my thesis back then.

Exactly. I've just voted but found I could only tick the bottom two boxes. Any of the stuff listed that one might have learned, I would have learned at music class in school, not as part of piano lessons.

I had 4 piano teachers. In chronological order they were my mother (who had had some musical training but not in performance or in teaching) started me off when I was 5, but there was only so far she could take me. From age 9 I had my first "proper" piano teacher, Maria the daughter of the "mystery Catalan composer" and violinist I mentioned some weeks ago, Joan Massià, and of his wife the pianist Maria Carbonell; she came to our home, at first twice a week, and within a year she had me giving my first "public recital" as part of a pupils' concert organised by her mother. When we moved to Canada (Edmonton) I had lessons, from age 12, with a guy called Robert Pounder who taught at the local music academy (not the aptest of surnames for a pianist). Finally from age 15 I was at boarding school in Germany where I had lessons with Franz Alfons Wolpert, who was also the general music teacher at the school, and was also a composer and musicologist. I have had no piano lessons at all since leaving high school.

An interesting fact about Wolpert is that he had developed a method for chord classification because he did not think much of the one by Hindemith. Wolpert's system recognises only 15 different types of chord (or 18 if one counts two-note "chords"). I might expand a bit on this method in a new thread.

I'm intrigued by the statement that there is a (and by implication only one) correct tonal method for writing chromatic scales. What is it? Is it the one which minimises the number of accidentals necessary, taking the prevailing key signature into account? What if one is temporarily in a key which is not reflected in a change of key signature?

Funny!