Mayron Cole Piano Method

In 1969, I fulfilled a lifelong dream and created The Mayron Cole Piano Studio in the living room of my home in Houston, Texas. From the beginning, I was not pleased with the then-available piano methods. There was too much focus on reading fingering numbers and too little emphasis on teaching rhythm counting and note reading. Concepts were presented too fast with practically no reinforcement in later lessons. My students were floundering. That’s when I decided to write the piano method that I’d always envisioned. I theorized that playing the piano involves three basic steps:

• The first “step” is a thorough understanding of playing/counting rhythm. I believe that rhythm is the foundation upon which all music is built. Too often, rhythm is the weakest element of a piano method!
• The second step is exploring and understanding the keyboard. This means being able to find keys on the keyboard without looking at one’s hands so that one can later sight-read.
• The third and most difficult of the three steps is staff note reading. Staff note reading involves abstract reasoning and is the reason too-young students cannot read notes and resort to reading fingering numbers in those “other” methods.
  
  All of my piano teaching material follows these three basic steps of learning!

At first, I taught my students private lessons only. But, like so many other piano teachers, I soon began to tire of teaching the same concepts over and over to one private student after another. I also resented the time my students were taking me away from my own children. So, I began placing some students with the same piano-playing abilities in small groups and teaching all of them at the same time. Surprisingly, the group piano classes created an unexpected surge in enthusiasm and lesson preparation by the students. And, I could easily see that the group-taught students were becoming stronger musicians than my few remaining privately-taught students. Their rhythm counting and sight-reading skills were superior in every way! In the fall of 1974,THE MAYRON COLE MUSIC CONSERVATORY was born!

Between 1974 and 1984, I slowly realized by experience that I could write new compositions to specifically teach a new piano concept for each lesson. The students learned much faster than before! That encouraged me to write more and more until there was literally a closet full of lessons. Lessons that didn't work and compositions that were disliked by my students over these years were discarded. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but those first group piano students were also testing all of the music for the many thousands of students who would eventually study from my books. So many students wanted to learn with my piano teaching method that the conservatory had to be moved from my home to a commercial building in 1982. The company was incorporated as a "C corp." in 1984 under charter number 7231549-0 from the State of Texas. The Mayron Cole Music Conservatory, Inc.® subsequently became one of the largest privately owned music schools in Texas.

Because of my success, other teachers began asking me if they could purchase my teaching materials of ensemble music, practice music, performance solos, theory games, rhythm taps, theory fun sheets, music history lessons, orchestrated accompaniment disks, operettas, and summer piano programs. The first books were not sold until the spring of 1988. In all of the intervening years, the proven, successful lesson plan has not changed. My books are different from other piano teaching methods in FOUR very significant ways:

• This is the first piano teaching method to enter the market after 10 years of development by trial, error, and improvement using "real" students in a "real-time" teaching situation. The very first book to be sold had already been used to teach many hundreds of students at my Conservatory.
• This is the first piano teaching method that was developed from the very start to teach piano students in groups. Other methods were developed originally for "private" lessons and later modified for teaching in groups. The reason for this is that there were no electronic pianos until the Baldwin Electronic Piano became available around 1980, followed quickly by the Roland keyboards and others. Until this invention, it was not possible to play a group of acoustic pianos together because they had to be perfectly in tune, because of significant space problems in most teaching studios, and because of the cost of acoustic pianos.
• This is the first piano teaching method that combined in EACH lesson the new piano concepts for that lesson, original compositions written by me (or classics chosen by me) to teach the new concepts, specific re-enforcing games, group learning activities, and practice pieces to augment the learning process. Each new concept is reviewed many times in the later method books to complete the learning process. The students buy only one "textbook" of 90-100 pages instead of a lesson book + theory book + solo book + scale book + music history book + performance book where the material may or may not be related to the current lesson and will eventually cost more than one of my "jumbo books" with all of those items included.
• This is the first piano teaching method that teaches from kindergarten level to college level in sequence.