The most important event in my life as a pianist and musician has without any doubt been meeting and studying with Edna Golandsky. For so long I struggled with my relationship to the piano that life had become a rather difficult affair, since so much of who I am is related to my being a musician. Playing the piano was and is the single thing I have wanted to do best in this life. Some of my piano teachers were well-intentioned individuals with things to offer, others not so well-intentioned with very little to give. The result has been a life of misunderstandings and physical struggles at the instrument.

My experience with Edna Golandsky has been very different. She constantly teaches me that my problems at the piano had nothing to do with lack of ability or talent, and all to do with lack of knowledge. Knowledge about how the mechanics of the body work, how we coordinate movement so the result can be a fluidity reachable by most of us when properly taught. Edna has opened a path for me to look at music-making in a way I had never done before, in a way I could never have done before.

When you properly begin to understand how tone production works, how to time your movements so the result is a tone that will say what you want to say, you start listening to the music in a completely different way. Edna’s teaching has guided me down a path that has often been emotional as I have began to understand and unravel so much of what makes the body work in terms of coordinate movement. The moment when you experience a sense of fluidity and ease at the instrument as a result of her intelligent teaching can be so liberating as to overwhelm you at that instant. It is a wonderful experience that liberates more than your technique, it liberates your soul.

I now look forward to learn and play pieces I never thought I would ever play. I look forward almost in amazement as I see myself doing things at the instrument with an ease I never thought possible, unless you were born a prodigy. And a prodigy I was not. I had to work as hard as anyone else to achieve a level of playing that would allow me to stay in the business. I now realize you don’t need have been born a prodigy to experience truly virtuoso playing, you only need to be properly trained.

Edna is a wonderful, insightful teacher and a warm human being. I look forward to many more years of continued study with her, as there is still much more for me to discover at the piano.

Rafael Cortes
BM, MM, Peabody Conservatory, Fulbright Scholar

Chairman Piano Department
Turtle Bay Music School
New York City