I teach people in their seventies and eighties. It goes well, routinely, and I want to be precise about why rather than encouraging, because encouragement without detail is not much use to anyone.
Let me start with what is actually different.
What changes
How long a new physical habit takes to settle. A movement that a twenty-year-old owns after three days may take a week or two. This is a difference in rate, not in outcome — the habit forms, and once formed it is as reliable as anyone's. What it means practically is that the number of repetitions matters more than the length of the session, so short daily practice beats long occasional practice by a wider margin than it does for a younger beginner.
Reading small print on a page at arm's length. This is the most common real obstacle and it is almost always mistaken for a musical difficulty. If the notes are a struggle to see, everything downstream — rhythm, hand position, confidence — degrades, and the student concludes they cannot read music. Enlarge the score. Most editions can be photocopied larger, many are available in large print, and reading on a tablet lets you set the size yourself. I have watched this one change transform a student's playing in two weeks, and it has nothing to do with music.
Stiffness first thing. Hands that have been still are not ready to play. A short warm-up matters more than it does at thirty — a minute of slow movement before the first piece rather than starting cold. If something hurts, that is a question for your doctor and not for a piano teacher, and I say that plainly: pain is information, and it is not the kind I am qualified to interpret.
How many things you can hold at once while playing. Sight-reading a new piece while also counting aloud while also watching your hand is a lot to run at the same time, for anyone, and the margin narrows with age. The answer is not to try harder. It is to do those things one at a time and then put them together, which is what good practice looks like at any age and merely becomes non-optional here.
What does not change
Your ear. Seventy years of listening is seventy years of musical understanding that a ten-year-old does not have. You know when a phrase has ended. You know when something sounds unresolved. You have opinions about tempo. Children acquire that slowly and you already own it, and it is by a distance the largest single advantage anyone brings to the instrument.
Your ability to understand an explanation. I can tell an adult why the arm delivers weight and the finger only directs it, and they can apply it the same afternoon. With a child I demonstrate the same idea for a year.
Your capacity to learn to read music. There is nothing about reading notation that requires a young brain. It requires repeated exposure, which requires the notes to be legible, which returns us to the point about print size.
Whether the result is worth listening to. This is the one people quietly doubt, and it is the one I am most confident about. The playing of an older beginner who works sensibly is frequently more musical than that of a faster younger one, because musicality is mostly judgement, and judgement is the thing you have most of.
How I would design the practice
Fifteen or twenty minutes, most days, rather than an hour twice a week. This is the single highest-value structural decision, and it matters more here than at any other age.
Warm up before the music, always. A minute. Slow movement, hands separately, nothing you have to read.
Enlarge everything. Score, and the light on the music desk. Then judge your reading.
Hands separately for longer than you think is necessary. Not because the coordination will not come, but because putting hands together prematurely is where the tension gets learned, and unlearning tension is the slow part.
Pick music you actually want to hear. Nobody at seventy is building a career, which means the only reason to spend the time is that the sound is worth having in the room. That is a better reason than most people practice for, and it tends to produce better practice.
The thing that stops people, and it is not what they think
In my experience older beginners almost never stop because it was too difficult. They stop because they decided in advance how fast it should go, measured themselves against that, and concluded they were failing.
So set the expectation properly at the start. In the first year you can reasonably expect to read simple music in both hands, play pieces you recognize, and understand what you are doing rather than copying it. That is a realistic year, it is a substantial one, and it is available.
The free course begins at the beginning and moves one page at a time. And if you would like me to tell you what I actually hear, you can send me a recording — it is free while the feedback pilot runs.