Seeds of Hope
This fundraiser is full of charming pieces and creative ideas for elementary and intermediate students
Alison Mathews has done it again!
Her excellent Doodles collections, published by Editions Ferrum, were full of creative ideas to make sight-reading more interesting.
With her new collection, Seeds of Hope, Alison wanted to do something to combat the sense of hopelessness she felt about the devastating war in Gaza.
To do so, she has brought together many popular piano pedagogy composers and many Palestinian composers. As usual, she’s filled the book with lots of opportunity to get creative.
The book raises funds for two charities that help Palestinians make music:
PalMusicUK (which fundraises for the Edward Said Conservatory of Music)
Musicians Without Borders (which works to bring music to war-torn areas around the world.
What’s inside?
There’s a wide variety of pieces, many of which are inspired by rural life, ranging from elementary to intermediate level.
Many of the pieces feature Palestinian folk melodies, so there are some wonderful opportunities to explore a sound world that may be unfamiliar to some students.
Especially appealing for Piano Creativity readers is the range of creative activities (to which I contributed some ideas):
many pieces feature a prompt to make a creative change
there are several lead sheets with suggestions for how they could be played
there are several pages of prompts to get students started with their own composition
several pieces have duet or even trio parts
Julian Lambert has featured several of the pieces on his excellent YouTube channel.
(Notice how Julian adds chicken pecks in the repeat — in doing so he’s realising the creative prompt in the book.)
The harmony of “My Chicken” contrast strongly with that of the next piece, “Before The Flowers Bloom”…
…and again with the harmony of “Ah Ya Zein”, giving you a clear sense of the range of styles here!
My own piece “Chickens!” is in there. It’s a series of elementary musical fragments designed to be played in any order, so your student can use them to tell a story. The music depicts chickens running around, pecking at the ground, getting a shock, clucking contentedly and crowing. It features lovely illustrations by Tiril Valeur, who also did the charming cover artwork.
Available now!
Seeds of Hope is available as a single or studio licensed PDF download from Editions Musica Ferrum, as a single license PDF from Sheet Music Now and in print directly from Alison Mathews.