Traditionally, only about 1 to 2 percent of piano students reach diploma level, the highest credential in the instrument's classical training world, and it takes roughly 12 years to get there. Payam Khastkhodaei's students reach it 96 percent of the time, and they do it in about four years.
According to CBS News, which reported on Khastkhodaei through its 60 Minutes program, the 32-year-old son of Iranian immigrants runs a piano school out of a converted home in Bothell, Washington, a suburb of Seattle. His teaching staff is made up entirely of his former students. Lessons run between $75 and $100 per session, and students range from preschool age to high school.
The method starts well before sheet music enters the picture. Young beginners see numbers written directly on the piano keys and are given numbers to play rather than notes to read. The goal in those early stages is coordination, not notation.
"They're not reading notes. They're not even sometimes looking at sheet music. We're playing a game. And it's fun for them," Khastkhodaei said.
Sheet music comes eventually, as students work through the curriculum's 18 levels. Along the way, they learn to play songs they actually enjoy, and they also learn to compose original music. Delara Rahmatian, a 12-year-old student, recently performed her third original composition. Khastkhodaei said composing is central to the experience, not an add-on.
The broader philosophy is built around engagement before technique. A 4-year-old might start with nursery rhymes. A child of 6 or 7 might move on to movie songs. By age 10, a student might be working through music from their favorite video games. Khastkhodaei compared the approach to how English literature might be taught if students were given more freedom to choose what they read, while still being held accountable for mastering the fundamentals.
"We're not forcing you to learn specific songs," he said. "We're forcing you to learn the techniques, but in songs you actually like."
He is also skeptical of early classical instruction. He argued that formal theory, introduced too soon, narrows rather than opens a student's relationship with the instrument.
"Classical theory tends to strip the joy," Khastkhodaei said. "It makes everyone play the same way."
To illustrate how mood shapes music, he demonstrated at the piano by playing the same notes while projecting different emotional states. Happy, sad, anxious. The notes did not change. The music did.
"It's the same notes," he explained. "But it always has a different variation based on my mood and my feelings in that specific second when I'm play."
The method is expanding beyond Bothell. Hadi Partovi, the co-founder and CEO of code.org and the father of one of Khastkhodaei's students, has drawn parallels between the Payam Method and his own platform, which has introduced coding to hundreds of millions of students worldwide. "One is, we don't teach coding with ones and zeros or, you know, angle brackets and semicolons. We teach it with blocks and dragging and dropping to make it easier," Partovi said.
Khastkhodaei placed second in a state-level piano competition before his students began winning competitions across the country. He now tells skeptics to simply try his approach once before judging it.
