 On November 24, 2025, our community lost someone truly special. Mike Corley passed away at the age of 80, leaving behind a legacy of kindness, strength, and steady devotion to the people around him.
Mike built a respected and successful career in the banking industry. He was a man of discipline, the kind of person whose actions told you everything you needed to know. Even at 80, he was known to stay in great shape by going to the gym to staying active and healthy. For me, though, Mike wasn’t just a respected community member. He was part of my life long before I ever imagined I would grow up to run my own music school. I first met Mike as a child. He and his wife, Becky, were our carpool drivers for St. John’s, and it was almost always Mike behind the wheel in the early mornings, ready to take us to school. My mom usually handled the afternoon pickups, but the day always began with Mike—patient, reliable, unfailingly kind. I didn’t know it then, but that quiet steadiness was the same steadiness that would guide me later as an adult. In September of 2000, I began working for Becky at Dallas Music. Becky taught me what I didn't learn in school about being a piano teacher. But she also taught me about running a highly successful music school. When Becky had to step away from Dallas Music in the early 2010s, Mike “became” our boss. He stepped in with grace and commitment and taught us even more about the business side of the music school business. I worked for Mike until June of 2015, when he sold Dallas Music. Those years shaped me more than I realized at the time. Mike and Becky both taught me so much of what I know about running, operating, and caring for a music school. Not just the logistics—the heart of it. The integrity. The balance of compassion with standards. The belief that music is more than lessons; it’s community, purpose, and connection. When I look at Music SO Simple today, I see pieces of what I learned from them everywhere. Mike lived a life defined by dedication—whether it was to his family or his work. I will always be grateful for the role he played in my life and in my journey as a business owner. He made an impact simply by being who he was: steady, humble, devoted, and deeply good. May his memory be a blessing, and may we all carry forward some of the strength and gentleness he brought into the world.
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 I recently listened to a podcast recently from The Working Genius called The Key to Confidence, and it immediately made me think about our students at Music SO Simple. At one point mid-episode, the hosts talked about how important it is for children to understand their own “genius” — the way they naturally think, create, and contribute — and how using that awareness can build real confidence. That idea resonated deeply with me, because confidence is one of the greatest gifts we can give our students through music. In the Working Genius model, everyone has areas where they naturally thrive — where their energy and creativity flow easily — and other areas that feel more draining. For children, discovering this early helps them see that they don’t have to be great at everything to be successful. They simply need to understand their strengths and how to use them. This is very true for adults and teachers too! In music lessons, this plays out every single day. Some students love to analyze — they’re the ones who light up when learning music theory or reading new rhythms. Others are more creative or intuitive, thriving when improvising or composing. Some feel most confident performing and sharing their music with others. When teachers understand each student’s natural “genius,” they can teach in a way that builds confidence instead of frustration. A student who knows how they learn best feels proud of their progress — and that confidence spills over into every area of their life.  At Music SO Simple, we believe confidence grows from both encouragement and understanding. Our teachers intentionally connect with each student to find out what makes them tick — how they think, learn, and respond to challenge. When we teach to their strengths and gently stretch their weaknesses, learning becomes joyful, not stressful.
I believe that’s why our lessons aren’t one-size-fits-all. Whether a student is analytical, imaginative, disciplined, or expressive, we want them to feel capable, valued, and excited about their musical journey. When students learn to recognize their own strengths — their “working genius” — they gain something much bigger than musical skills. They learn that they can succeed by being themselves. And that confidence will carry them far beyond their lessons. The crazy thing? This podcast was all about confidence in the workplace — but it’s amazing how those same ideas apply to our students and young people. As teachers, we have the opportunity to use these lessons to inspire confidence in every child we teach.  Advertising can be such a tricky thing. However, I have always chosen to keep it as simple as possible. 95% of our advertising is word of mouth from our families! This is the first way we advertise and in my opinion, one of the best. And great families refer other great families. And, we love giving our families referral credits. It the gift that keeps on giving. The only "real" advertising we do is an ad in the Richardson Community Impact. Each year, our list of giving to schools gets larger and larger. And to be honest, I love it! This is our way of giving back to the school, helping to donate to the things that they need. In addition, it supports the school our students go to. At the moment, our list of giving to are:
If you don't see your school on this list & want to, please send me a donation form. Giving is important to me, even in a small capacity. And, it helps us spread the word of our amazing Music SO Simple music school.   We always begin each new year with new goals or resolutions. The past couple of years, we really have just been trying to survive and "keep normal" as much as possible. And, have you counted how many times you have said, "I'm over it!" in a week? We all are. This pandemic just keeps throwing us curve balls- once we feel like we are reaching some sort of "normal", another wave comes through. It's nice to be making history, but I think I've had enough. So, I'm going to make some goals that force me to think further than just a few weeks out. Are you ready? Ha, me too.
Here's my crazy story on my blue piano. One night, I was scrolling through Instagram and came across a Steinway & Sons post about a special Boston upright that was designed my Alicia Keys. I was stunned and all googlie eyes at this piano!! It was simply stunning. Well, it was simply stunning. I found myself thinking about it for a while- like a year. When you think about things for that long...well, maybe you need to do something about it? So, keep in mind, we are in the 2020 COVID-19 Pandemic. But, things are going really well at the studio. By February, a lot of our students are moving away from virtual lessons and starting to come back into the studio. But we were starting to be out of room. The smartest thing for me to do is to add another piano room. The only place we really had room to use was my office, and I was not really excited about that. In the past, I had taught where I worked and I would look over at my pile on my desk and think about the work I needed to do while I was teaching. I liked the separation of leaving my office to go into another space to teach. I wasn't sure how I was going to make this work, but knew I would be willing to if it was a cool piano. So, I thought, maybe a Steinway upright? This would be all mine. How cool would that be? But, as beautiful as those were, I couldn't get the Alicia Keys piano out of my mind. I think I wanted something with a little more pop! After talking with the guys at Steinway Hall- Dallas, they had a guy who painted pianos for them. He's not just a normal painter, like he really knew what he was doing to paint a piano. So, I got to work on picking out colors and putting things in motion. Once I got swatches, I took them to my office to check out the color scheme:  So, I anticipated having this piano by the beginning of April. We began moving things around at the studio. Ms. Gayle needed to have a space to work at in the front of the studio rather than in my office where I would be teaching.  The feeling of seeing the Steinway delivery truck in the parking lot was so amazing!! It seems absolutely crazy that I am this excited about a blue piano. But, we have learned a lot from this pandemic. We appreciate the little things. This piano is so fun to play and it puts off such a fun energy with my students. They absolutely LOVE playing it!! Their faces light up! I'm so thrilled with this new addition and very grateful for being able to buy a blue piano. I'm in love and I'm beyond blessed! for a little more on the colors and the "pop", check out the video below. I didn't have much of a voice when I filmed this, but I was so excited!! -Stathia Orwig So, if you follow us on social media, you've probably already seen this. For those of you who have not- you're in for a real surprise! Music SO Simple was in the Richardson Community Impact!!! Basically, out of the blue, a reporter emailed the studio asking to set up an interview with me. After the interview was a hit, he came in to take pictures of the studio and me teaching, Little Miss Sophia, my student who I was teaching the evening he came in felt like a star!! The article was about MSS, how we started, and how we were adapting to the coronavirus pandemic: Music SO Simple was named after a philosophy that owner Stathia Orwig uses when teaching music gets overwhelming.
Sophia signed a copy of the article that is now hanging in our studio. Please feel free to share the article with family and friends!! Thank you all for sharing your love of learning music and MSS!! We couldn't do this without you!!
-Stathia Orwig Well, I know I'm not alone when I say I'm a little hesitant in making big plans for 2021! Ha! But after the year, 2020, how can anyone blame us? Normally, I make my yearly goals and do what I can to make them happen. However, this year, I'm just going to be content with seeing how things go and using what I learned in 2020 to help me stay focused on the positives. In 2020, I had big plans! MSS was going very strong and I wanted to keep that going! However, our plans for the spring went splat. We had a full studio with full teacher schedules. Then, everything shut down. We had to go completely virtual. It was only going to be for a week or two, then a month, then 6 more weeks...looking around, small business were suffering and closing! I went in to overdrive last spring. There was not a chance that this virus was going to take out what I had spent years building. I know every small business was thinking the very same thing. We had some student who just completely stopped lessons because they wouldn't even try virtual. I'm not gonna lie, this made me very sad, and even angry. But, there was not a whole lot I could do about that, so I just kept moving forward. We did our first ever virtual recital and I think it was good and bad. It pushed our students on a very different level and some students recorded hundreds of times! The video thing was stressful! The good thing is that it taught them "how" to practice and all of those times of recording were "thoughtful" practicing. And I think it's great that these students wanted a great finished product! Also on the plus side is that we have a souvenir from COVID lessons.  The same thing happened through the summer, and yet it was different. Music lessons actually became more of a priority. We were not competing with camps, sports, or vacations. Because so many people were not traveling, they chose to do something they could do at home. Some signed up for the minimum number of summer lessons, but when this virus just kept spreading it's love, those people decided to stay home and take more lessons! How great is that? We may not have added as many students as we normally do during the summer, but we taught 200 more lessons than we did the summer before! I'm serious! Some started to come back in person, though many stayed virtual cause it was convenient AND it does work! Fall 2020 had me a little worried as well. Many families decided that with their kids being virtual for school that music was just too much to add. That's a lot of screen time. I get it. However, others felt it was a good break from school. So, we added more students in October and November. Our holiday recital was a little different than the spring recital. We made it less stressful by adding holiday cheer and a "fun" contest. We wanted PJs and holiday decorations, and you could feel the positively-fun energy from so many of the videos. What a wonderful way of spreading musical cheer!  So, what have we learned? No matter how overwhelmed I get with work and the business, I always come back to Music SO Simple. Simple. We've gotta keep things simple. We learned that music making IS a priority! And where in years past, private lessons are not as fun because it's not a "social" thing. Well, now, we have learned that this is a good thing (I mean, duh!)! It's something we can do on our own! As teachers, we have learned soooo much about how we communicate. No longer can we just pick up our students hands and put them in the correct place. Nope. We've got to talk through it. We are making our students work just a little harder. They have had to listen as well! But all in all, we have learned that music is just so important.
So, for 2021, as we cannot "plan" like we have in the past, I want to keep it simple. I want to be grateful for these simple things we have learned in this past year. I want to spread as much musical joy as possible. I want to be inspired every day to keep going, and music helps me do that. My relationships with my students inspire me. If you ask any teacher what they missed while things were shut down, you will hear that they missed their students. We love what we give to them and what they give to us. If we have learned anything this past year, it's that we can't control. We have learned about the simple things in life and we have adjusted. Cheers to our 2021. May it be everything you need it to be! -Stathia Orwig This is a new sort of blog for us, but I thought it would be fun to look back at all of the good things we saw through 2020! Through the year, we probably post around 500 different posts on our social media. So, I sorted through them and have listed our Top 10 posts of 2020! Enjoy!
The title of this post sounds rather negative, almost repentant, but I ask that it not be viewed so. The problem with many people’s attitudes about learning is that it is based on the fundamental principle of improvement—which is accompanied, for some reason, by the shaming of “unimprovement”, when that is the most natural component of learning anything. It is “unimprovement” that shows just how much one knows, and “unimprovement” that teachers should care about the most. Most teachers are reluctant to address weaknesses as they are. They are afraid of hurting their student’s feelings (such a well-intentioned act of love!) I, too, am afraid of hurting my student’s feelings. I’m afraid to address my student’s weaknesses: to tell them that they are sliding backward from their goal, or that they must turn back to the fundamentals…I’m afraid because I have the same attitude as them. Mistakes are shameful. They must be eradicated or buried as soon as possible. If they are not, social consequences occur, and along with them the feelings of guilt, exclusion, even abandonment. I need to shake off this fear of being wrong. I will be wrong. I will always be wrong about something. I need to learn that mistakes are a good thing. In fact, they are the most helpful tool to learn. The more I understand my mistakes, what I’m doing wrong and why, the less I fear them. They will become friendly to me, and I will care about them and will want to change them because I love them. I’d like to practice embracing my mistakes by listing them here, for all to see. My goal this year is to become comfortable with them, then to understand why they are my mistakes. What fundamental source do they come from? What basic truth do I need to re-address? How can I keep myself from committing these bad habits? Some of my “wrongs” are listed out in the chart below, as well as my procedure for how I will work on them:
There are many other things I must improve. If anyone wants the rest of my list, I’m more than happy to share. The more I expose my weaknesses, the less I have to hide, and the more I will trust myself in my ability to improve.
For my own students (and my student’s parents), keep me accountable and tell me when I make these mistakes. Help me become a more useful teacher to you all.  When it comes to ordering music, we only shop local, and by local, we buy all of our music at Nadine's Music Manor. Nadine's Music Manor has been around since 1972. I was first introduced to her in my first days at Dallas/Music. At one point, it was my job to order music and I would call her once or twice a week to order what we needed. Sometimes, I would go get it from her store, and other times, she had it delivered to us. I developed a personal relationship with her. In the very early days of Music SO Simple, we decided to continue that tradition and order our music from her. We think it's much easier to buy our student's music and give it to them, rather than tell parents what to get. As a busy parent myself, I definitely don't want something else added to my plate! Fast forward to today: Nadine's has been a life line for us! We have had to get extra music from her because we are teaching so many lessons virtually so that we can see what our students are practicing. She almost always has exactly what we need and we are so grateful.  When things clear up in our city, it would be fun for our parents to take our students on a field trip to a "real life" music store! Remember when we used to go and pick out records/cassettes/CDs? Do you remember that surge of excitement you would get just being there? Yeah, that's what it feels like! Something that Amazon simply cannot replicate! Needless to say, that even though this may not be the best time to browse, knowing that we support our local music store means so much to me, and to her. Knowing that I can pick up the phone and ask her if she has a certain edition in stock, or where can I find a specific piece....well, that's worth so much to me.
This weird time of COVID has made me think about supporting the small businesses, like us. Know that when you see a music charge on your bill, it is the cost we pay to Nadine's Music Manor. We take no profit; everything goes straight to her. So, you too, are supporting her.
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