Statistics question - How many advanced pianists are there in the world?

ZigZagStory · 2024-08-13T11:40:51+00:00

This is a back of an envelope question I saw in another forum. So no definite answer , just estimates. I hope this will be interesting for you as well....

keff

ZigZagStory Is it possible to estimate how many such pianists are now alive in the world ?

The answer is yes and it is done by taking a sample which would give you a Gaussian distribution from which to estimate the number and the probability of the number being correct. Your sample group would have to be random and include people who do not play piano as well as those that do, no matter what grade they have achieved. I am not a trained statistician but had to dabble with it from time to time.

I seem to recall one of my physics professors trying to get my class interested in statistics telling us the tale that an estimate had been made of the height of Chairman Mao by asking a large sample of people just to guess his height. Answer wasn't bad, allegedly!

PS Not aware that ABRSM has changed its name and an ABRSM website still seems to exist.

BartK

Doing a full survey would be kind of difficult. You can start by placing a lower bound.

One lower bound is the number of conservatory students in the world. I think they all need to play at least at a diploma standard to be admitted. That number might be possible to find with some research.

To estimate your percentile you could take the total number of conservatory students/graduates/alumni divided by the total number of people playing piano. It's a very rough estimate but I think it's possible to quantify.

Nightowl

This thread stirred my curiosity, so I began to look into it. I thought that a good starting point might be to find out how many conservatories/conservatoires there are around the world and a quick google revealed this web site:
[https://www.musicalchairs.info/conservatoires]

The site shows a total of 869 conservatoires, and the USA has the largest number by far - 229.

It should be possible to delve into the stats for each conservatoire and see how many piano students they admit each year, or maybe more relevant to this question - how many students complete courses and/or attain qualifications each year. That way you would know how many people "qualify" (if that's the right word) as concert pianists each year. It might even be possible to go back through historical records to uncover yearly totals going back to the start, for each conservatoire, but that would may include people that have been dead for decades (even centuries, in some cases). So, lots of work there to reach the total of concert pianists currently alive around the world, and it may not produce an accurate result.

Or maybe there's a short cut - a sort of international register of concert pianists? Someone involved in the profession might be able to tell us more.

PianogrlNW

I don’t think the OP was referring to professional concert pianists, but those who can play at a certain competency level. There are way more people who can play repertoire at the ABRSM diploma level than those enrolled in conservatories. There are hundreds of non-conservatory music performance programs at colleges and universities, plus thousands of amateurs who play that repertoire competently just in the U.S. alone.

BartK

PianogrlNW There are way more people who can play repertoire at the ABRSM diploma level than those enrolled in conservatories. There are hundreds of non-conservatory music performance programs at colleges and universities, plus thousands of amateurs who play that repertoire competently just in the U.S. alone.

Yes, I get that, which is why I wrote that this is a lower bound estimate. There are at least that many but there could be a lot more. It's hard to get figures so starting with a lower bound gives you some idea at least.

twocats

There are a ton of high-level teenagers in the world. Just in the past year I saw these students (really just kids!) play a movement from a Prokofiev concerto and a Saint-Saëns concerto at a professional level in a competition. In college I had friends who got into Juilliard but decided not to pursue music.

It's hard to say. But I'd look at local competitions as well, because high-level students are usually in competitions.

Bellyman

It's an interesting question. And I have no clue what "diplomas" or "grade levels" are. I just played, from about age 5 and never really quit. (Took some time off here and there but never quit.) Never had a piano "course" but was typically either volunteering to learn certain pieces or had certain pieces suggested to me, out of numerous books. After the first few years, they were often individual pieces of piano music, things like Chopin etudes, pieces of that nature that were just stand alone printed pieces of music. I think the last thing on my plate in "piano lessons" realm was Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto #1. Not a clue what "grade level" that might be. (FWIW, I was losing interest in classical music at the time and never did play it in a performance setting. Also, was graduating from high school and despite having a music scholarship, I wanted to do other things.) It's been a very long and winding road since.

ZigZagStory

Thank you all for your interest in my question.
I think that even with “ There are a ton of high-level teenagers in the world. “- it’s still a small percentage of the world’s population.

Nightowl

ZigZagStory Maybe I misunderstood the question. It seems that what you're actually curious about is how many people in the world play at the same level as yourself - ABRSM grade 8. I'm unsure how to gain accurate information about that, but maybe ABRSM publishes stats about how many players pass grade 8 each year? If you could find that figure for your own country, you could then use the total number of adults in your country to calculate the percentage of adults who pass grade 8 in a particular year. That would give an idea of how rare (or otherwise) a grade 8 pass is.

Some students pass grade 8 well before they reach 18, so my method is not going to be totally accurate, but I think it's probably fairly easy to find the total number of adults in a country, whereas it could be harder to find stats for each year group.

Anyway, I think passing grade 8 is impressive, an achievement for anyone to be proud of, so in your position I'd be very pleased to have reached that level of competency, regardless of how many others have reached that level.

ZigZagStory

Nightowl
This is a “back of an envelope” question , so I am not trying to get the true number , just see how other people try to estimate it.

My estimate was based on the average number of newborns around the year 2000 in my country, then asking my pianist friends how many pianists studied with them at the conservatory/university when they attended (I’m not based in the USA so there are only a few here), multiplying it by some factor to take into account for all the teens who play well and amateur adults like myself - and this gave me a rough estimate.
Of course it could be improved but I think it won’t make a big difference anyway.

This is a bit similar to the Fermi's Piano Tuner Problem : https://observablehq.com/@mrchrisadams/fermi-piano-calculator
which (according to was previously used as an interview question at Google.

ranjit

I would say the total number of piano students in the world is probably around 100 million (I've heard that there are 40 million in China alone). Assuming somewhere between 0.1% (unlikely) to 1% get to grade 8, that turns out to between 100,000 and 1 million. That sounds about right. My guess would be somewhere around 500,000.

Nightowl

ranjit So, if someone attains grade 8 level of ability, they are 1 of 1 million (give or take half a million) players at that level. The population of the world is currently around 8 billion, so taking the upper estimate of 1 million grade 8 players there are around 0.012% of the world's population who are grade 8 level.