About Ebony Music
Esther Cohen writes:Over many years of piano teaching, I have used a huge range of material and have developed clear ideas about what works and what doesn't. I have found that it doesn't matter how colourful the pages of the book are. What matters is how colourful the music is. Children respond to music which is witty, meaningful, attractive to an audience, dynamic (a feeling of movement, action), and is physically enjoyable to play. (I always compose at the piano – I need to know how it feels, and how it will lie under a small hand.)
Stories and pictures are a child's way of both understanding the world and its wonders and communicating to others his response to that. I want children to discover that music also can enhance their view of life and afford them another avenue of communication. Even the simplest beginner's pieces can be expressive, paint pictures, tell stories. Long before a child has the conceptual maturity to understand and express abstract ideas through music, he can apprehend, respond to and interpret music which depicts the world he experiences in all its richness.
Creating my own teaching material included from the outset not just the piano course and the music I composed, but also a personal selection from the entire literature for keyboard. I welcomed this opportunity to find, select and assemble books of pieces worked well pianistically and were popular with pupils. With trial and error, and endless feedback from working with pupils, the selection has become more refined. I have made CD recordings of the books the pupils use as an aid to accuracy in the early stages of learning new pieces (and not in any sense to provide definitive interpretations). To have all pieces systematically and comprehensively fingered is a real time saver in lessons. The range of pieces I have selected, edited and printed has been within the constraints of copyright, but a good mix of style, period and pianistic demands are covered. There are many familiar and popular pieces, but a good number of lesser known gems have been slipped in.
