Curiosity first. Technique grows from joy.
I'm Joanna Bernat — a pianist, composer and author. For over fifteen years I've taught children and adults, written music for the page and the stage, and published more than sixty music education books and a growing collection of original piano pieces.
My teaching grew out of a simple belief: that every learner deserves a method that meets them where they are. I never wanted to be the teacher who handed out dry exercises and waited for scales to be perfected before anything interesting could happen. From the very first lesson, music should feel like music.
Composing has always run alongside teaching. The pieces in my Beyond The Time and Pastel Dreams collections grew out of early-morning sessions at the piano — small musical stories that I hope connect with players the way they connected with me when I wrote them.
Writing books followed naturally. I realised there was a gap between the very first piano pieces and the intermediate repertoire that most method books skipped over. The Simply Notes series tries to fill that gap — step by step, with coloring pages, folk songs, original pieces, and a great deal of patience built into every page.
