Keys to success?

Young piano learners at the city's Youth Center in Yichang, Hubei province, watch the teacher's fingering attentively. Provided to China Daily

Experts say focus on technique can kill any passion students have for piano.

Qiu Chenyun, a 30-year-old marketing employee with a State-owned company in Suzhou, Jiangsu province, describes the days when she was learning to play the piano as "dark and miserable".

"I had to practice three hours each day. It was so painful that I often set the clock ahead. I remember when I was practicing playing the piano, other children were watching cartoons on TV," she says.

Qiu's mother is a doctor and her father an engineer, and they wanted her to master a musical instrument

"I learned piano for four years but it turned out that I have no talent," she says.

"A piano always reminds me of those days when I let my parents down, when they would lecture me about why I could not play well and then draw the conclusion that I would be a loser if I did everything in same the way that I learned piano. That is why I seldom tell people I learned the piano when I was little."

Qiu started to learn piano at the age of 7 in the early 1990s, when an increasing number of middle-class families in China started to pay more attention to nurturing such talent in their children. It was also in early 1990s that the Central Conservatory of Music started to offer graded piano tests.

"There was a time when piano grade certificates could add points to children's scores for the enrollment examinations of some middle schools, and high schools, especially the top ones," says He Yi, 35, a piano teacher at CCOM, who is also a judge of the tests.