Eta Cohen

Who is Eta Cohen?

Eta Cohen was a professional English author and violinist.

Cohen was born in Sunderland, to Jewish immigrants from Lithuania. She left school at age 16 and began to teach music in local private schools in Sunderland and Newcastle. At the age of 17 she was asked to teach for the local education authority, leading her to look for a violin method book series to base her teaching on. After failing to find a satisfactory book she decided to begin writing out the lesson she taught to her students. These lessons would eventually become the foundation of her own violin method series.

In 1945, she married Ephraim Smith, a businessman in the cloth industry, whose parents were also Jewish immigrants from Lithuania. Cohen had two daughters, Maureen and Hazel, born in Leeds. She was close to Max Rostal and Carl Flesch in her music career. She died at the age of 96, survived by her daughters, two granddaughters and a great-granddaughter.

Following such early success as a tutor she went in search of a good violin method and, after finding no adequete tutor books available, decided to begin writing out each of her lessons herself for pupils in 1933. These lessons eventually became the foundation for her own series of violin method books.