This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Well, hello. What's up? Welcome to "Sign Us From School." My name is Chris Guillebeau. Thank you for tuning in today. Welcome as well to Throwback Thursday, also known as "Where Are They Now?" It's our weekly segment where we take an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved since we first featured them.
And we have had a string of really interesting updates. Last week we heard from the creator of Just My Type, a creative bookbinding business based in Missoula, Montana. Other recent episodes have highlighted a guy who runs pizza tours in Chicago, as well as two sisters who work together as auctioneers. Now today, in our latest exciting feature, we'll hear from Sarah Sherman. She's the founder of Mozart for Munchkins, offering concerts and musical experiences for kids in the New York City area and beyond.
It is a really cool project. Sarah is also a professional pianist in her spare time. We last featured her on episode 1080, 1080. Musicians tune up classical concerts for families. So a lot has happened since we first featured her.
She's been through a pandemic, among other things. I mean, maybe you have as well, but we'll look at it specifically in the context of this story. Let's hear from Sarah. I'll come back at the end with a quick wrap-up. [Music]
My name is Sarah Sherman.
I am the founder of Mozart for Munchkins, and I was last on Side Hustle on episode 1080. And I say it's my hustle because music is my life. I'm a pianist first and foremost, and Mozart for Munchkins started from that love for music. But before that, I was teaching piano lessons, and still am teaching piano lessons. And Mozart for Munchkins came from performing when I had my four month old daughter and brought her to a concert I was doing with the Chelsea Symphony, a soloist, and she was the only baby in the audience.
And when I asked friends why they were bringing their kids, I said, oh, what if they cry? What if they need a diaper change? What if, what if, what if? And I said, well, I get it, but there needs to be something for kids, for really young kids to experience live performance. And when I started to look around, I realized the opportunities, especially for the three, six and underage, wasn't really there.
It was still expecting kids to sit with their hands folded. So Mozart for Munchkins started with that want to share music. And from there, we had one concert in December, 2017. And then we had two concerts in December, 2018. And now here we are in 2022 and two years into a pandemic, and we're still sharing our music with kids.
And the teaching piano lessons hasn't gone away, as I started Mozart for Munchkins, but it's changed and it's adapted the way that I teach and think sometimes it's made me a better teacher. I listen in different ways than I would have before I had the experience of working with kids of really young ages. And each part of sharing music with an intensive way of private lessons versus experiencing the energy of a concert with a room full of a hundred people and their kids and their toddlers coming up and wanting to bang on the piano, they're really different. And they each fulfill a part of my life really differently. During the pandemic, we took our musical programming and really fine-tuned it to best reach audiences.
So what we did well beforehand, we like to think that we're doing even better now. Our concerts are more interactive. We know how to get the kids up and moving to Bach. We know how to encourage them to clap along to Beethoven or to learn dynamics with their bodies in a way that we hadn't mastered pre-pandemic. So we use those five months for that.
And then in July of 2020, we were like, okay, let's see, let's go outdoors now and see what we can do. We also had some live concerts at another music school downtown, and we launched a nonprofit during the pandemic, you know, as one does. And with the nonprofit, we've had a lot of special concerts where we've been able to reach audiences in a way we didn't know were possible pre-pandemic virtually. So we virtually went into homeless shelters and into family justice centers and to virtual concerts for families for free. We also had through the nonprofit, our first Juneteenth Jubilee, where we closed down a block of the West Village and celebrated Juneteenth.
And it was a beautiful celebration with tap dancing and poetry and music. The advice that it gives someone that wants to follow in our footsteps is to really love what you do, to persevere and to adapt and to emit your own faults. The past two years have been really humbling and caused me to look inwards at times to realize what I could do better as the owner of the company to reach my employees and to make sure that the business is something that isn't just a business at the end of the day, it's this living, breathing thing that I believe in so much. And I want to make sure meets the quality that I believe in. So I think sticking to your beliefs and also admitting your own faults, 'cause we all have them, whether we want to or not, but to listen when there's a problem and adapt, adapt to the problems, adapt to the changing environment, adapt to the needs of the people that work with you at all times and don't lose that fire of why you're starting something to begin with because that has carried me through two years of a pandemic where a time's down and our audience is still greatly affected and with no real end in sight for the kids under five.
[Music]
Awesome, I want to say a quick thank you to Sarah for sharing her updates with us, really appreciate that. And listeners, I encourage you to check out the website motesartformunchkins.com, just as it sounds, Mozart for Munchkins. Sarah is also an accomplished professional pianist who has performed at Lincoln Center and all over the world. In fact, I listened to some of her performances while working on this episode. You can hear them for yourself at sarahleilashurman.com.
Let me know what you think and who you'd like to see featured from our archives of more than a thousand stories. If you've got a question or an update for us about your hustle, sidehustleschool.com/questions. Thank you once again for tuning in today. I hope you'll subscribe, follow, come back for more. My name is Chris Guillebeau, you're listening to "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the Onward Project.
