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Emma Mamayeva has been teaching and performing piano for more than 30 years. Born into a musical family, she was trained from childhood in the finest musical institutions of Moscow, Russia. She received a Master’s degree from Moscow Conservatory and went on to a distinguished career in music pedagogy and performance.
As a teenage girl and later as a student
in Moscow Conservatory, Emma developed a
love of blues and other contemporary music
popular in the West. Sheet music for popular
songs was not available in the Soviet Union,
so she taught herself to play these tunes by
ear. This experience, coupled with years of
teaching beginners, led her to refine a
simple technique for playing left-hand
accompaniments to popular music. Over and
over she observed students who were starting
to become bored and frustrated with
classical training develop a great
enthusiasm for playing the piano when they
learned the simplified left-hand
accompaniments she had devised. Since her
method was so successful with generations of
students, and since no other such method
seemed to have been published anywhere, she
decided to share this fun and easy approach
with others.
Emma believes that in teaching children,
it's important to build a broader
appreciation of music. For this reason she
ends the lessons of her younger students
with a musical story--one of the great
classics of ballet or opera. Over the years
she developed a manner of telling the
stories of these classics--Sleeping
Beauty, Romeo and Juliet, Ruslan and Ludmila,
Carmen, The Nutcracker and others--so
that her young students became deeply
engrossed in these tales, which she related
as she played excerpts from each work. All
of her young students look forward to this
part of the lesson, considering these
stories to be a great treat.
The popularity of these stories and the
eager anticipation with which her students
awaited each weekly installment prompted
Emma to create a series of books, the
Scherzo Classic Musical Tales. These books
combine beautiful illustrations by
Ukrainian-born painter Ivan Bratko, exciting
retellings of these classics aimed at
children from ages 5 to 12 and simple piano
arrangements of the best known themes
associated with each episode of the ballets
and operas. This series will begin
publication in 2003.
Emma came to the United States in 1992.
She and her family live in Springfield, NJ.
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