A note from Miss Tess: This “About" page is a long, deeply personal account of my professional journey in the arts. A typical bullet-pointed list of my achievements would mean little when the studio’s purpose is to chart those difficult paths which eventually lead to success. I encourage my students to speak openly about their own learning processes, their bruises and joys each step of the way, and so I will lead by example here.
This story conveys both what I have to offer as a teacher and the obstacles I overcame to make that knowledge my own. It is a reflection on an educator’s responsibility to filter what they themselves were taught in the past, damming the trauma of outdated methods, and allowing that which inspires and empowers to flow onwards.
New studio families will see a clear picture of my strengths, weaknesses, values, and vulnerabilities. Students who have worked with me for years will find the origins of familiar lessons.
I invite you to read on if you would like to know better the heart and ribcage of Miss Tess’ Music Studio.
About Miss Tess
This is my story of inheritance, alchemy, and legacy.
This is how young Tess grew into Miss Tess.
My musical roots run deep, anchoring a foundation of great love with an abundance of talent in the bloodline. My own childhood conductor said, “Music is never finished; there is always something more.” That is also true for how we evolve through our lives. In identity, self-expression, and setting our own flight plan across this world, each generation breaks free a little more.
My great-great-grandmother, Bess, was born in November 1875 and learned piano from the nuns in West Point, Nebraska. Her daughter, Enid, a teenager in the 1910s, loved the new style called ragtime. Her father wouldn’t allow her to play those types of pieces, so Bess snuck her daughter out to where she could. Enid lived the flapper life through the Roaring Twenties. I wear Bess’ diamond wedding ring every day, a symbol of the gifts my hands inherited, with a glint of rebellion.
My grandmother, Marilyn, Enid’s daughter, taught piano lessons. “I don’t particularly like teaching; I’d rather do it,” she told me. She and my grandfather Bill met at the University of Nebraska. Two years ahead of him, she corrected his music theory homework (and wasn’t very impressed). Bill was a metaphysical Episcopalian choral conductor, and Marilyn would accompany his choirs, most notably at the organ during Christmastime for Handel’s “Messiah.” She was a music instructor at Western Nebraska Community College and organist at the First Presbyterian Church in Scottsbluff. When she began to lose her sight, she would memorize the hymns for the following week. On our last visit before her passing, her nurse gave me an envelope that had been set aside containing Bess’ ring. Marilyn couldn’t see what I was holding, but I slipped the ring onto her finger so she could feel it and know. “I have this ring now, G’ma. I will take good care of it,” I promised.
My mom, also Marilyn, flutist, and my dad, Phillip, saxophonist, met in the Air Force in Colorado Springs, 1978. They were both musicians in the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) band. The next year, they relocated to McChord Air Force base in Tacoma, I came along in 1981, and our lives continued in the Pacific Northwest. My dad was the first musician in his family. “We can play the radio,” my uncles teased. As a baby, Dad kept me in a sling next to his saxophone, and sometimes a sudden *honk* meant little Tess’ hand had grabbed a key. I remember playing in the St. Paul’s Episcopal Church nursery while Mom, who has sung in the choir the majority of my life, was in rehearsal. My parents have been a support and witness to every one of my performances. They shared their love of music with me from the beginning, as Dad would jingle a string of bells next to Mom’s pregnant belly — those bells now hang in the studio.
Baby Tess and Dad, Tacoma, WA 1982
I often talk with my students about the What and the How.
The What is the concept in itself, specifically here as music. The What is fluency in this language and mastery of this craft. It includes musical knowledge, such as sight-reading, chords, dictation, and scales. It is a connection to history through eons of songs. The What asks musicians to know themselves, how to listen within and without, how to express and persist and perform. The What is artistry, an ability to flow, to breathe, to embody. The What encompasses these myriad pieces all sounding together. It is the beating heart at the center of our work.
The How is the process of making it happen. It is the list of practical skills to actualize creative dreams. The How at Miss Tess’ Music Studio includes pricing and policies, scheduling, logistics, contracts, and clear expectations for everyone involved. The How is leadership’s communication of a long-term vision. It is organizing studio-licensed sheet music, updating Zoom, making sure the sticker box is full. It is keeping students on track with practice logs and Mega Maps and journal assignments. It is reserving performance venues, hiring photographers, ordering roses, and posting videos to preserve our many efforts. The How holds the teacher, guardians, and students accountable for their responsibilities to one another. The purpose of the How is to enable the What. It is the ribcage that protects the beating heart.
My What in music came naturally, the cypher to make it easy encoded in my DNA. (After many early vexations, the light bulb came on in 5th grade.) The How has created all the obstacles, the area in my career where I most needed to learn and grow. My grandfather Bill admired the author Joseph Campbell and his chronicles on the Hero’s Journey. The How was crucial to my own Ordeal.
Figuring out my own How required a heavy dose of heresy against previous generations’ core beliefs, ideas inherited from my family, my teachers, aspects of the music community and society in general. Culture is as pervasive as air, and our minds download more than we can imagine. I needed to do the work of deciding what to treasure and pass along, what to discard, and what to incinerate. This process especially related to two kinds of boundaries: the balance of give-and-take, including areas of self-worth and personal sacrifice for art, and talking openly about business and finances. Breaking free a little more and taking that first leap was terrifying, but the new How has carried me on its wings. I have much gratitude to Enid for the moxie.
Thirteen-year-old Tess, with more than a glint of rebellion, Bellevue, WA 1995
I flunked out of the music education program in my freshman year at Pacific Lutheran University where I had been focusing on choir and conducting. I think this experience can best be summed up in the words of Sara Campbell, a fellow piano teacher: "It’s not your job to fit yourself into a box. That’s a cat’s job!” The music education professor’s opinion was that I should not be teaching in public schools — and she was correct; that is not where I would have had the freedom to do my magical, unconventional, strange and extraordinary work. I transferred to Cornish College of the Arts to pursue studies as a piano major. I started Miss Tess’ Music Studio in September 2003 at the beginning of my senior year, age twenty-one. That is my relationship with piano. It has always been there, weaving between the back- and foreground, swooping in to catch and elevate.
“Miss Tess and the Cornish Ladies’ Auxiliary,” Senior Piano Recital, Cornish College of the Arts, 2004
Here are twenty-five years in one paragraph: I joined a local prominent choir when I was eight years old. I fell in love with the sound and had a deep loyalty for the conductors’ teachings right from the start. I grew up through the program, and choir integrated with my life and my identity. We toured Europe three times in my years: Norway, Denmark, Germany, France, Austria, Italy, Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania. I graduated from the choir a decade later in Rome during the Great Jubilee in 2000. I have immense gratitude for these foundational experiences, the exceptional music education, and the teachers who made it possible. While in college, I remained nearby and accompanied the youngest levels of this choir, assisted in teaching the music theory classes, and worked the summer camp. My own piano teacher, Miss Karin, was the conductor of the youngest level. In 2004, she became very sick with cancer. She spent several afternoons that summer training me to lead her choir. In the fall, we were co-conductors together. The last time I saw her, she exited halfway through rehearsal, put her hand on my shoulder as if to say “you’ve got this,” and left me with the girls. I conducted that group for the next five years, and the level above it for two more. I am forever proud of those determined young singers. Previous alumni of the choir had formed their own group while I was in college, and they invited me to become their conductor after my graduation. I led that group for ten years, in which we recorded three albums and staged elaborate performances. Those were some of the highest, most transcendent moments of art I have ever grasped. When walking a labyrinth, it opens with a single bend followed by a straight line that heads directly towards the center. That’s where I was by age thirty-three, seeing the heart and not knowing the winding road waiting ahead.
Tess and her piano teacher, Miss Karin, post choir concert, 1998
Nothing in my training had prepared me for the flip side of this stage in the journey — no financial education, no business strategies, no outline for how to make a living as a musician, no ribcage, no How. The transformation from chorister into conductor, passion to profession, included unspoken cultural and societal assumptions about working artists and teachers that are not healthy and that I personally found intolerable.
I’ve since learned to put names to my experiences, positions that are unfortunately too well-known by too many other creatives: high expectations for low pay, a part-time job requiring full-time commitment, pressures to eradicate boundaries based on the mistaken belief that doing something you love should be compensation enough. I’ve seen an organization switch between calling itself a community or a business depending on which one served its interests at the time. Having a career under a board of volunteers resulted in conflicting goals and priorities. When the scope of requested projects went beyond my contracted hours, the choir moms would respond with, “Won’t you do it for the girls?"
Eight years into working with the alumni choir, the husband of one of the women was elected president of the choir board. This man negotiated corporate contracts with labor unions, and he brought those same antagonistic tactics to this small women’s nonprofit and my own annual contract. While reviewing my current rate, he stated that firefighters didn’t even make as much per hour as I did. As the Artistic Director and Conductor, the choir was paying me $6000/year gross with no benefits. He treated my creative expertise as financially burdensome for the choir, telling me, "Let’s all just get back to the music.”
When Miss Karin had become sick with cancer, the choir community supported her with donations of food and money. Watching the circumstances of my own teacher’s illness further shaped my views about the balance of give-and-take, safety nets, and reliance. While I worked for the choirs, I only had self-employed catastrophic health insurance. I assumed that if anything bad happened to me, that community would be there in the same way. When I was twenty-eight, I developed a rare tumor in my nose. It put me in constant pain and obstructed my breathing for six months until removal. That surgery cost $12,500 out-of-pocket. The choir was under different management from Miss Karin’s time, and they declined to help me. They said that I knew the choir did not offer sick days; other than that, I received no response to my request for assistance. This experience hardened me. The dual consequences of naively trusting an organization to cover my medical needs and not protecting my own heart under pragmatic coverage resulted in fear, confusion, and exhaustion. The choir expected other parts of my life to take care of my life, but the majority of my life energy had been spent in service to them. I was permanently changed after this.
Another gem for my students is, “Know when to grit and when to quit.” This was not a life in balance, and my conducting chapter needed to close sooner than I ever would have wished. Music is a room with many doors. I walked through the one labeled EXIT and left the choral world.
Miss Tess and her Steinway B, completed October 24th, 1884
As I was burning out, Kristina Lee, another fellow piano teacher, put Kristin Yost's book, “How I Made $100,000 My First Year as a Piano Teacher,” in my hands. My gratitude to her for this single act is eternal. I had been poised on the edge of understanding for so long, ready for this moment of overdue clarity, and when it appeared all the floodlights came on. I devoured books on finance and business, read works by Suze Orman and Gail Vaz-Oxlade. The experience of watching Marcus Lemonis’ show, “The Profit,” was uncomfortable at best with his three keys to business success: people, process, and product. It was a completely new option for how to live.
Suze Orman says, “It doesn’t make sense for you to give everything you have away. That doesn’t help you and it doesn’t help anybody around you. True generosity means standing in your truth.”
I discovered Wendy Stevens' articles on running a piano studio and the eye-opening conversations by Daniel McFarlane of Supersonics Piano, Andrea Dow of Teach Piano Today, and especially Sara Campbell of Savvy Music Studio.
My own epiphanies became discussions with my students in the studio, eventually taking root as the Financial Education section of the studio library, anchoring the foundation for this new How and my own core beliefs. Talking openly about such things has become the norm in the studio, so much that my students roll their eyes and think, “There goes Miss Tess again.” I know they are fortunate to be aware of these ideas so early, and my deepest hope is that this will help protect them as they enter adulthood and their own careers.
In Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love,” Liz goes on a journey to discover her word. Every person has a word, the one that represents who they are. My word is Sustain. I knew it long before I understood why. This word is for sustainable work, for sustaining passion and imagination, a keeper of the flame while passing the torch.
A person’s Ikigai is their reason for being, a Japanese concept for our sense of purpose. This Ikigai encompasses what you are good at, what you love, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for doing. Miss Tess’ Music Studio is my Ikigai.
Here in the studio, I fuse the pieces of life’s mosaic together through lessons learned. The students and I transmute our many hours into golden treasures of music and memories. The policies are designed to honor guardians’ investments of time, energy, emotions, and tuition. The What and the How function in balance with each other. This work sustains me in body and spirit. The labyrinthine experience of walking the winding road has created a ribcage around the studio’s heart.
My own heart is scarred from those difficult experiences, but it did survive, and it now keeps previous generations’ gifts alive to circulate through future hands. I endeavor to honor each step of the way, and I am even grateful for the hellish flames of the Ordeal because my strongest self rose from the ashes. My dad practices Nichiren Daishonin Buddhism. He chants the Lotus Sutra, Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, illustrating the pure lotus, a flower whose beauty is equated with the fierce struggle to grow from the depths of muddy waters. We, too, journey through our own Underworld to blossom as our own Cosmic Dancer.
In "West Wing,” President Bartlet says, “Surely the code of our humanity is faithful service to that unwritten commandment that says we shall give our children better than we ourselves received.” My teachers, parents, grandparents, great- and great-great-grandparents have given me so much. It is all overwhelming when truly heard. I know their unending song will be part of me always. I know that one day my voice will join theirs.
Now focused on that which inspires, empowers, and takes us into the future.
Music is never finished; there is always something more.
When the cycle renews, my students are invited to stage their own mutiny against my core beliefs. I embrace this and release them to take their own leap with their own wings.
This is how the next generation will break free a little more.
This is how the story will continue.
