A note before we begin: this one is personal.
There is a version of my musical life I rarely talk about — the one where I was doing everything right and feeling almost nothing.
I was trained well. I worked hard. I earned the degrees, studied with the teachers, stood on the stages. From the outside, it looked like a life built around music. But somewhere along the way — gradually, quietly, in a way I didn’t even notice until it was already true — I had stopped singing for the music. I was singing for the applause. For teacher approval. For the next level, the next milestone, the next performance. The love that had drawn me to singing in the first place had been slowly buried under the weight of achievement.
I didn’t realize it had happened until everything stopped.
COVID brought the world to a standstill, and with it, my performing life. And then came grad school’s end, and the slow, honest reckoning that followed. In that quiet, I finally heard what I had been too busy to notice: that I had become a performer of music rather than a lover of it. That I had learned to perform for others what I had once felt for myself.
That realization broke something open in me. And out of that opening, Reverie was born.
Artistry Before Achievement is the first of Reverie’s three pillars, and it’s the one that most directly reflects what I lived through — and what I am determined to do differently for my students.
Achievement-first teaching is everywhere in music education, and it is often invisible because it masquerades as high standards. It looks like: only celebrating a student when they win a competition or nail a performance. Always moving on to the next song before honoring the fact that something small and real was just discovered. Measuring progress in trophies and certificates rather than in the quiet, private moments when a student finally hears themselves. It looks like teaching students to play for an audience before they’ve learned to play for themselves.
I know what it feels like to be shaped by that approach. And I know the cost.
Artistry, in the way I mean it here, is not about being exceptional. It is about being present. It is about singing a phrase and noticing what it does to you. It is about a ten-year-old discovering that a slow breath changes everything, and sitting inside that discovery for a moment instead of rushing past it. It is about an adult learner finding, maybe for the first time, that their voice has its own beauty — not despite its imperfections, but sometimes because of them.
When I teach this way, I am not lowering the bar. I am raising it toward something that actually matters. A student who achieves without artistry can win a competition and still be empty afterward. A student who develops artistry first — who learns to be inside the music before they learn to show it to others — carries something that lasts.
That is the musician I want to help create. Not the one who performs well for me. The one who still loves singing at sixty-five because music was always theirs.
This is why I didn’t go back to performing after the world opened again. Not because the stage no longer called to me — it does, in its way, and that chapter may not be finished. But because I found something more urgent: the chance to teach what I had learned the hard way. To give my students the journey I wish I had been handed.
Every lesson at Reverie is, in some small way, me getting to live that journey again — this time, the right way. Through them, I find my way back to the love of it.
That is what Artistry Before Achievement means to me.
And it is the heart of everything we do here.
