If you want comfortable arrangements that a beginner will stand a chance of being able to make it through, you have go to back to hits from before 1965 or so. That's what I've been doing myself, but to a lot of people that's not too different than asking them to play something from 1765.

0) Someone already came up with a classical piano repertoire that perfectly increases in difficulty from "Primary" to Grade 10, in neat, progressive steps. If you look for sheet music for that Adele song, I guarantee you you'll never find a version that's appropriate for each of those levels. You might find several versions, each somewhere in the middle of that range, but no one will spend the time to interpret "Someone Like You" in eleven different ways--from an 8-bar melody up to some 15-page virtuosic piece--and then repeat that for every other song in the top 100. Can't even crowd-source that effort due to copyright.

1) You're vastly overestimating what a complete beginner can do. Remember, these are normally 5 year old kids with barely enough motor control to hold a pencil properly, no concept of beats or rhythm, etc. Pop music is usually easier, but it still takes years to work up to that Adele song. "What about adult students?" Adult students are even worse for quitting things early because it'll still take months to play anything remotely interesting and there's no one forcing them to continue. Proof: note how many adults will join and then quit the gym between New Years and February 1st because they're not seeing results quick enough.

2) To build on the above, piano has the shortest possible path to making in-tune sounds. Think how long it takes to learn to play even a single note on an oboe. You need the many lectures on posture and finger position--not to mention tons of boring practice!--just to stop squeaking.

3) How do you go about teaching Adele without explaining note names, how counting works (fractions!), and all the associated music theory? "I play, you copy?" That's not considered good music education. Kids get decent at rote memorization of finger patterns, and then plateuau at that (very, very low) level.

4) Beginners already start with "fun" music like Old McDonald, London Bridge, etc. Most of it is lame, but then again, kids might find recently-mainstream music like N'Sync lame too. Fashion moves pretty fast. On that note, copyright/royalties on modern music are a pretty good barrier to just playing whatever you want. (And improvising or playing "by ear" is a complete non-starter. That's the kind of thing you attempt after years of experience, not as a beginner.)

5) Trust me, teachers are intimately aware of the fine balance between motivating their kids with fun repertoire and actually teaching them something. Vocal teachers probably work that fine line the hardest since every pop song is fair game.

6) Pop songs in addition to classical repertoire is fine; not a single music teacher will object to this. My mother held three recitals a year (popular, christmas, classical) and kids held free reign over repertoire selection in two of the three (and the third was mostly a "trial run" of the pieces they'd have to play anyway for their upcoming piano exams). Pop songs as a replacement for classical repertoire is not fine. Adele wasn't thinking about teaching you anything about fingering or expression marks when she wrote her songs. On the other hand, Chopin/Liszt/Czerny/Debussy/etc. were writing with exactly those concerns in mind when they wrote their Etudes (read "studies"). They're written to be lyrical and interesting, but also to focus your practice towards a specific, technical challenge (perhaps one etude is just about fast arpeggios for the right hand, another etude for long trills with the weak fingers of the left hand, etc.)

7) Along the same lines, "classical" education isn't just Classical-era music, like Mozart. Good teachers want to expose you to lots of styles. Yes, every pianist has to play Bach--even if you hate Bach--because it's instrumental to learning about polyphony. But somewhere in that repertoire book there'll also be jazzy music, latin music, cinematic-style music, etc. written by still-living composers (although probably not as modern as Adele). In RCM books you'll find that kind of thing in sections 'D' and 'E'.

8) And yes, nobody likes scales, but drills are drills; you just have to accept that some parts are laborious and annoying. Athletes spend time running between plastic pylons and sweating it out at the gym because you can't efficiently build fundamentals just by playing games. You need a good mix of performance and practice. If you're only looking to "have fun", you can just stick to pick-up games with your friends (or teach yourself how to strum a few guitar chords), but if you're taking professional lessons in something there's an implied expectation that you're there to improve.

Obviously music is there to be enjoyed. And I'm certainly not claiming that traditional music education can't be improved. I just wanted to make the point that teachers already try to balance motivation with other goals, and that no activity worth doing is "all fun, all the time".

>" Adult students are even worse for quitting things early because it'll still take months to play anything remotely interesting

Do you think adults should start with Piano at all. I know you can come up really cool sounds music in Ableton within months. There are plugins which make sure you are always playing in key. You can even use those pad things with chromatic layout, which is much more logical, and do fun stuff like pitch bends.

> piano has the shortest possible path to making in-tune sounds.

prbly true for traditional instruments. I would start with a computer or an iphone app. No lectures on postures needed.

>How do you go about teaching Adele without explaining note names

Even kids can tell if something is 'going up/staying the same/going down' . Give them the root note and let try to replicate it on the keyboard. Let them come up with their own 'system'. Don't ruin their natural curiosity of discovery by telling them note names and stuff.

>And improvising or playing "by ear" is a complete non-starter. That's the kind of thing you attempt after years of experience, not as a beginner.

I totally disagree with here, like a lot. Even beginners can start playing 'by ear'. Countless people have learnt just by playing by ear. you can play kumbaya by ear within couple of hours of piano instruction. Surely everyone must try to play by ear before they spent years on piano lessons.

That's fine. Music is music; do what you enjoy. I'm not saying you need to take piano lessons to enjoy music, or compose music. I'm saying you probably need to take piano lessons to (efficiently) learn to play the piano effectively.

> Even kids can tell if something is 'going up/staying the same/going down'.

Actually that's not as easy for kids as you'd think. Anyway, what you're talking about here is ear training (melody playback, specifically), and that's already integrated into every classical music program. I was talking about trying to play a complete, two-hand, Adele piece on the piano by reading sheet music. At that point you'd definitely have to know a bunch of music theory already.

> Let them come up with their own 'system'. Don't ruin their natural curiosity of discovery by telling them note names and stuff.

Sure. And for consistency, forget about BEDMAS; let's give kids the axioms of ZFC set theory and get them to just work their way on up to arithmetic on their own. (Also, parents, don't forget to pay $50 an hour, every hour, while your kid tries to discover the concept of a square root on their own.)

I'm kidding. But look, music teachers already try to push students towards as much discovery, creativity, expressivity, and musicality as the students can muster. Pop songs aren't a panacea for the motivation problem.

> Countless people have learnt just by playing by ear.

Like I said above, I didn't mean stumbling through a chopsticks or kumbaya melody by ear; I meant transcribing a full Adele song. Or anything you would reasonably hear on the radio or see in a movie.

Playing around, composing, improvising, etc. while simultaneously taking music lessons (or at least studying from a book) is great. Fantastic. I recommend that to everyone. But if your goal is to learn how to play the piano and you're trying to do it with no music theory or classical education whatsoever, you... just won't make efficient progress. I don't know how else to put it. You'll learn something, sure, but you'd learn it faster with the teacher and the teaching system.

that's fair. Not sure why parents still force their kids to learn piano, an instrument so divorced from their digital reality. Parents probably have some romantic fantasies about piano or its just lack of knowledge and availability of new style music programs.

This is nonsense. There are near-infinite varieties of non-Bach music to teach polyphony. Even the "chopsticks" song demonstrates polyphony. If you meant counterpoint instead polyphony to demonstrate the left and right hands playing two independent melodies interwoven with each other, Bach may be reasonable. It depends.

>And improvising or playing "by ear" is a complete non-starter. That's the kind of thing you attempt after years of experience, not as a beginner.

This is terrible advice. It's misguided. You can have any student at any young age explore "playing by ear" in the first 10 minutes of the first day of the lesson. When a 4-year-old preschooler listens to her mother hum a tune and is asked if he/she can hum it back... that is playing by ear! The child's ears heard the notes and the child's vocal cords hummed it back. With a piano, it's fingers instead of vocal cords. Deliberately delaying any joy of playing by ear until a later "advanced" lesson has no basis in pedagogy.

> "all fun, all the time".

I don't claim that all invested time into skill building is fun. My emphasis is that joy of the activity must be used as the gateway drug to the mundane drills and boring classical pieces. If joy means informal pop songs or the simple intro piano to Frozen's "Let it Go"... then start with that. If the student is happy and motivated, the door can then further be opened to Bach, Chopin, Art Tatum, etc.

Yes, sorry, polyphony was a bad choice of words. I'm not even talking about polyphony or counterpoint as musical concepts--you can certainly get the gist of these without years of playing Bach--I mean it more like this: they put those four part fugues in the repertoire because it's an excellent technical exercise for student pianists. It's easy to just play the notes, but much harder to bring out the melody as it bounces around the four voices, especially as it goes into the left hand and the weaker fingers of either hand, and more so when the voices overlap. In fact the whole thing teaches voicing in general.

> Improvising... is terrible advice.

Vocal call/response is different. I meant that it's a non-starter to expect a five year old (or an average fifteen year old, by the way) to listen to a random song on the radio and just improv what they hear on a piano with no sheet music. Hell, I've been playing for like 27 years and it would take me ages to transcribe by ear some random Chopin prelude that I could otherwise easily sight read (well... one of the easier ones anyway).

> If joy means informal pop songs... then start with that.

This is what I mean; you don't start with even "songs". I'm a fully grown adult. Reasonably good musician, I think. Played piano my whole life, trombone in high school, picked up flamenco guitar on my own. A few years ago I was left alone for a few hours with a clarinet; do you know what I accomplished after like 3 straight hours of practice? I could barely get through "London bridge is falling down", and I considered that an achievement.

My point is that you have to deal with the motivation problem well before you're anywhere near playing "Let it Go". And when you're ready to play a real pop song, trust me, your teacher will let you do anything you want if it'll get you to practice.