New Tampa Resident Wins 2025 Royal Conservatory of Music Award, First to be Honored from Florida

A New Tampa resident has brought home one of the highest honors in classical music education, the 2025 Royal Conservatory of Music (RCM) Award and becomes the first Floridian with this honor.

For over 30 years, Mary Wendelken, founder of Wendelken Piano Studio, has been shaping Tampa’s music community. Her busy studio tucked in New Tampa has produced hundreds of young pianists who’ve gone on to earn top scores, medals and scholarships through their RCM exams — the same program that just honored her work.

In 2003, she joined a small group of six American teachers invited by Scott McBride Smith to help plan what would become the Royal American Conservatory Exams, making her school the first and only RCM center in Florida for almost fifteen years. By 2016, her studio was officially named an RCM Founding School, one of only a few in the United States.

Since 2004, Wendelken Piano Studio has been the local hub for Tampa Bay’s RCM examinations. Generations of students of all ages and levels have passed through its doors, earning first-class honors and first-class honors with distinction, earning state gold and silver medals for scoring the highest in their testing center and in the state.

In addition to the RCM curriculum, which serves as the cornerstone of Wendelken Piano Studio, the students excel at the Florida Federation of Music Clubs annual Festival and State Competition, winning numerous first and second-places yearly in piano solo, piano concerto, duo, trio and vocal musical theater, as well as composition. Many of the students go on to major or minor in piano or vocal performance at colleges and universities around the country.

But what stands out most is the legacy of consistency is the three decades of high standards, creative growth, and quiet perseverance. “People would be amazed if they knew all that music lessons do for us,” Wendelken said. “We are rewarded with improved cognitive skills, improved neuroplasticity and problem-solving skills, discipline, and my favorite by-product of music training - laser focus - which is essential in this world of online distractions and lowered concentration. But we don’t study music for any of these reasons; we play music because it helps us express our emotions and speak to others through our heart and our emotions are what make us human. Through our music we engage in the storytelling of our soul.”

Her own story reads like a symphony of resilience. A graduate of SUNY Purchase studying with concert artist Tung Kwong-Kwong and with postgraduate studies at London’s Royal Academy of Music under pianist Piers Lane, Mary trained through a direct teaching lineage that traces back to Beethoven himself.

Wendelken has taught piano at Pace University in Chinatown, Manhattan, in London and Birmingham, England and in the late 90s at the University of South Florida. She maintained select private studios in New York City, London, and Birmingham, England. For local families, though, her piano studio remains the heartbeat of it all. It is a space where Tampa Bay’s next generation of musicians continues to find its voice.

“Music connects us,” she said. “And when students start to believe in that connection, that’s when real magic happens.”

Wendelken Piano Studio offers an upper-tier program for the private training of students of all ages and levels, including adults and professional-level students, as well as hosting RCM examinations, prepping for state and national competitions and university auditions, and private instruction in New Tampa. For more information, visit tampapiano.com.