Music School Turned to Zoom to Survive Pandemic

Danvers, MA — Coming from the Berklee College of Music, Darren Muise was pulled into music instruction in the early ‘90s. After landing his first teaching gig at a local music shop, Muise started looking into opening his own school. That was in 1995. The Music Connection has been going strong ever since.

“We’ve weathered a lot of storms throughout the last 26 years or so,” Muise said, “the biggest one being back in 2008 when people were losing their jobs, houses, everything. The first thing that would go would be something like music lessons. We took a big hit back then, and we kind of downsized during that time and regrouped, made ourselves a little smaller so we could still establish ourselves.”

For the past 10 years, The Music Connection has been humming along at a pretty steady rate. But when 2020 brought with it a global pandemic and national lockdowns, Muise’s first thought was “pivot.”

“When 2020 came, we got introduced to doing Zoom lessons,” Muise said. “That’s what we did. We said ‘obviously, we’re forced to close down our in-person lessons, but we’re going to teach online.’”

Almost two-thirds of The Music Connection’s student base expressed interest in continuing online lessons, with the remainder electing to wait until the school was back in person.

“So, we pivoted online. It worked out pretty well through that time. We survived pretty well,” Muise said. “Back in July of last summer, we actually started doing some in-person lessons. We did what we had to do to make it happen.”

Throughout that time when the school was largely virtual, even as some older students began returning to socially distant in-person lessons, new virtual students began cropping up. And at this point, with more than a year-and-a-half of the pandemic behind them, the school is almost entirely back in person.

“Personally, our philosophy is that we think it’s better for people to be in a studio setting,” Muise said. “There’s so many distractions in a home. But if people wanted to stay online, we obviously honored that. But most people have come back in. And our numbers are almost back to where they were pre-pandemic.”

Even with most students now back in person, Muise does not see the component of Zoom lessons going away.

“Now we have that option that if a student can’t make their lessons time, they can Zoom their lesson,” Muise said. “Zoom is going to become a part of the fabric of what we do in a couple of different ways.”

And though Zoom has provided an important platform for the school to pivot to and retain its connection with its students, it has not been a smooth transition for everyone.

“Probably the biggest takeaway is that the real young ones — five and six-year-olds — did not fare well on Zoom,” Muise said. “That was probably one of the biggest things we discovered.”

Despite the challenges the pandemic presented to The Music Connection, Muise found that the challenge of adapting wound up granting him the opportunity to find new ways of doing things.

“It’s created some new opportunities for us, teaching on Zoom, so that’s a positive thing,” Muise said. “It was a chance for us to reassess our business, too.”

Through this time of challenging communication and fervent adaptation to a whole new environment, Muise is grateful that The Music Connection was able to find a way to survive.

“We’ve weathered some crazy storms in our 26 years,” Muise said, “and we’re very proud to still be standing here talking about this or teaching our lessons, doing what we’re doing, seeing what the future holds.”