Today we’d like to introduce you to Klondike Steadman.
Hi Klondike, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
My wife (Wendy Kuo) and I started Orpheus 23 years ago because we were looking for a more collaborative and supportive teaching environment for ourselves and our students. We began with just ourselves and 5 friends teaching 40 students all together and have grown to two locations (one on Far West Blvd and one in Cedar Park) with over 800 students. We have performed at Carnegie Hall, Kennedy Center, Paramount Theater and many other high profile concerts. We specialize in collaborative learning and performance with our primary concerts each year being called the “Friendship Concert”.
We base everything we do on our 4 values: Collaborate, Create, Play and Create. So we focus on creative, playful and engaging approaches. When we say “Engage” we mean both materials that students are excited about, but also engaging our world. So we do a lot of community service with our music from playing at Retirement Homes to doing musical fund raisers such as our annual “Theo’s Practice-a-thon” which has raised of $30,000 to fight pediatric cancer as a way of honoring our student Theo who passed away from cancer 4 years ago. https://www.orpheusacademy.com/practiceathon.html
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Ha! I suppose no small business has a smooth road, but it sometimes feels like nothing but bumps. The pandemic of course was absolutely insane for a business based on in-person experiences. We are an extreme outlier in the music education field in that all our teachers are employees and have access to benefits such as 401K, Health Insurance, Paid Time Off, free lessons for themselves (on a different instrument) and their family, and many many forms of additional training and support. Most of our teachers are on a monthly salary so they do not experience financial hardship if they lose students. Offering these benefits helps us create a supportive environment for all the teachers and is a big reason why we have many teachers who stay with us for decades, but it is extremely difficult to manage these benefits as a small business.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
Personally and as an academy we are very focused on expanding the repertoire and learning experiences of our students to include often neglected or overlooked composers and communities. We invest in commissioning composers from these communities to write concert music that I personally premier and record and also a great deal of music that our students can perform.
We have pioneered a database for collaborative music for young students called the Student Chamber Music Project. This was featured at a presentation for the Music Teachers National Conference about 20 years ago at its launch, but has now culminated in hundreds of works that have been commissioned, found through research, composed or arranged by our faculty and, with a most recent performance at KMFA, premiered a series of works that were created for our first ever International Composition Competition in which the British composer was flown in from London to coach the students in preparation of the premier.
How do you define success?
Several Ways:
Students loving music and being filled with the joy of creativity
Teachers feeling supported and inspired to do a great job teaching
Staff that love working at Orpheus and believe in the mission and experiences we are providing students
Effective and efficient systems that allow for a sustainable and joyful functioning of our community
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.orpheusacademy.com/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/OrpheusAcademyofMusic
- Youtube: @OrpheusAcademyofMusic
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/orpheus-academy-of-music-austin?osq=Music+School&sort_by=date_desc#reviews
