Today we’d like to introduce you to Emmanuel Fratianni & Laurie Robinson.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Emmanuel & Laurie. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
My wife Laurie Robinson and I started the school in 2005 when we moved to the North Hollywood Arts District form Hollywood. We were newlyweds and both of us had already been teaching for 15 years individually while working as composers in Hollywood. I as a tenured professor at the Montreux jazz conservatory in Switzerland and Laurie as a private instructor here in the US. We decided to join-in and started our neighborhood conservatory in our new-found community.
We first operated a studio at our house and in the first 9 months built a student roster of about 50 students. At that point given the rapid growth we decided to look for space outside our home where we could teach individual lessons as well as group classes and found a facility on Vineland Avenue. We remained there for 2 years before moving to our current school location at 5435 Cahuenga Blvd in “NoHo” where we have been since 2009.
While running the school, Laurie and I have maintained an active professional composing and conducting career in film, television video games and the concert commissions. (Laurie also runs our production company as and works as a symphonic scoring producer, and I have a position as principal conductor an international symphonic tour called Video Games live.) We quickly realized as the school grew, that we needed assistance to keep up with the high demand and brought a diversity of instructors on a part-time basis, all of them highly trained educators but also active professional musicians and performers. We currently have 5 additional instructors. Our faculty offers music lessons throughout the week individual lessons to kids, teenagers and adult students. Additionally, we have developed an early childhood curriculum for children ages 4-6 taught in a group classes on Saturday mornings; A piano for songwriters class; music theory and composition classes in individual and group setting; a group piano class for beginners, and professional coaching by Skype. Our Skype classes include a program I teach in concert with a music conservatory in Geneva and a filmmakers program in the South of France. We have a practicum every Wednesday morning by Skype where I teach the technicalities of scoring music to picture.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc. – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
I think every small business owner faces challenges on a regular basis and our business certainly had its share of hurdles. Some of the big challenges were triggered by our rapid growth and finding an affordable clean facility to host our school in a safe neighborhood. That process took a few months of searching as in 2006 there were hardly any space available in North Hollywood for a small business like ours. We’re very happy to have found a fantastic commercial landlord.
Also, the hiring of competent instructors who understand our teaching philosophy & curriculum and are willing to dedicate time to training has been at times difficult. L.A. has thousands of musicians but finding the right persons to teach our method to our students proved very difficult.
The financial crisis of 2008 has certainly had an impact, we saw a slow decline in student attendance all the way to 2013. Since 2014 we are growing again steadily, we are directly dependent on a healthy local economy. Political uncertainty such as the 2016 presidential election revealed to have a major influence on our business and we noticed a stagnation for about 3 months prior and 3 months after the election. We really prefer not to raise our rates, because it is important to us to maintain the pedagogical philosophy of our school– to be able to provide music education with broad & ecumenical access and we’ve succeed with that. You could say our master classes & recitals always represent the diverse socio-economic, multi-cultural populations in LA. There are a lot of languages spoken by the students in our school.
Addressing the generational changes and the influence of technology in people everyday lives such as social media has required of us to adjust our day to day operations and also to adapt our marketing approach with the use of social media and maintenance of our website and public image.
As a small business, it is typical to have to wear many hats, owner, curriculum director, administrator, marketing director, instructor, account receivable/payable, legal, etc.…is challenging. Not being big enough to afford the help of competent professionals is challenging and ultimately prevents growth.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
With our diverse backgrounds and vast pedagogical experience, (Laurie and I both had fantastic educations in the US and me abroad.) Which brings a fresh and unique approach to our lessons. Our curriculum allows students to discover the music of Beethoven and Mozart as well as the Beatles, Jazz and to learn movie or video game music. We understood very quickly that our approach responded to a real need among students who are suffering from the disappearance of music programs in their local schools. Our approach is comprehensive, students learn the building blocks of music through the study of applied harmony, understanding what makes the music of the masters so important and unique by the study of theory as it applies to what they play on the piano. That approach gives our students a sense of “can do” because the curriculum demystifies the compositional process. They can become creative through the knowledge they receive at our school and develop their own artistic voice by also learning how to compose or improvise.
Where do you see your industry going over the next 5-10 years? Any big shifts, changes, trends, etc.?
Music education will lie more and more in the hands of the individuals in this country as there may be less and less music education available in the public schools. We will continue seeing an expansion of private independent music institutions, that expansion started in fact after the 2008 recession and I don’t see that trend change any time soon given the potential systematic budget cuts that may becoming to the arts.
The challenge will be for parents and students to find institutions that offer quality music education and for those business owners to find a way to market their school effectively and rise above the fray of mediocre music institutions. As families get further and further away from having a daily interaction with self-made music, we’re seeing more and more clients who don’t know where to look for education. The great teachers or programs aren’t t’s not really found on yelp or google. They’re still found in the music education professional guilds. But many people don’t know about those anymore. So, we’re seeing a greater and growing disconnect from students and the education they are seeking.
More than ever it is important to inform the community about options available so that we can support a dynamic society which is in touch with itself and where the arts are part of everyone’s daily life.
What were you like growing up?
We were both totally music nerds. On two different continents at the same time. And surprisingly we were listening to the same music and doing take downs as teenagers at the exact same time… (Mahavishnu Orchestra, Stan Getz, Debussy, etc.) Laurie was doing more strings and vocals and I was doing more woodwinds. But we were both just nerdy geeky music teenagers. She in the Sonoran Desert & me in the Swiss Alps.
Contact Info:
- Address: Southern California Piano Academy
5435 Cahuenga Blvd., Suite E
North Hollywood Arts Dist., CA 91601 - Website: SoCalPianoAcademy.com
- Phone: (818) 505-6846
- Email: [email protected]
Image Credit:
Laurie Robinson
Emmanuel Fratianni
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