About Ebony Music
Esther Cohen writes:My aim, when I started Ebony Music some years ago, was to create, select or devise as much as possible of the material I used in my piano teaching and present it in the clearest possible way. From the first I have been fortunate in having a number of teacher-colleagues prepared to use my publications and pass on to me their reactions and teaching experience. Some found their needs catered for completely and precisely. Others used Ebony Music selectively, preferring materials from other sources for some areas of their teaching.
I identified several distinct categories among the materials I used in teaching. First, I wanted a Piano Course which was versatile enough to be adaptable to the whole range of beginners, from pre-school children, to early teenagers, or even adults, and which incorporated my approach with very young children.
As my pupils approach the end of their work on the Piano Course, I introduce them to standard classical repertoire and to contemporary piano music. For the first category, I selected pieces from a vast range of piano repertoire for a series of eight books (Introductory through Level 7) called Music for piano. I edited the pieces from urtext sources and typeset them (actually my husband does the computer work for me) with the aim of maximum clarity on the page. I was very keen that as much work on the fingering of pieces would be done at this stage. Fingering in all Ebony Music publications is, therefore, a priority – consistent and comprehensive.
My books of pieces, usually with a single theme for each book, are my contribution to contemporary piano teaching repertoire. They are written in varied twentieth century idioms and include some books of jazzy pieces.
Recognising that children have a feeling of playing "real" music when they play music that is already familiar to them, or music that they have heard in the real world outside of their piano lessons, I have arranged little collections of Christmas carols, Hebrew songs, folk songs and Scots songs in versions ranging from melody-only versions to pieces of moderate difficulty. But most are fairly easy, because it is in their first years of playing the piano that children are most interested in playing this kind of music.
After several years of using the different Ebony Music series, I thought it would be useful to combine the different styles of music I gave my pupils into single volumes. The outcome of this was a 23-volume series (Music for piano - Choice) which begins with the ‘Piano Course’ (vols. 1, 3, 5, 7) and contains graded pieces in classical, jazz, folk and contemporary styles through all levels to around grades 7–8. ‘Choice’ has been created in order to offer a wider range of styles of music, of roughly the same level, within each single volume and all are accompanied by an audio CD recording of all the pieces in each book.
Piano lessons include, at some stage or other, work on scales and theory (of music reading and writing), so I have produced some workbooks which cover all the requirements of the Associated Board's grade 1 theory syllabus. That just leaves (in this quick survey of the categories of Ebony Music) CD recordings of the Music for piano and Piano music by Esther Cohen series; and there is a list of supplementary repertoire – a selection of pieces that many pupils want to play – which I have edited to the same criteria as the Music for piano series."
