Piano & More, an Arlington-based provider of in-home music lessons, is hitting a high note. The company’s nonprofit Play It Forward program gives students from low-income families an opportunity to learn to play piano at no cost.
After founding her music studio in 2016, executive director Nicole Kovar noticed she was “reaching only a certain population.”
While local schools offer instruction in band and string instruments, they don’t teach piano. Private and group lessons can be pricey, as is the cost of buying a piano or keyboard to practice on at home.
“It became really apparent that you have to have the means to learn piano,” Kovar says. “If you don’t have the means, then you don’t have a chance. It’s become this instrument for people who are well off.”
That realization didn’t sit well with her. In 2018, Kovar launched a piano sponsorship program that later became Play It Forward. Partnering with Title 1 schools where at least 40% of students come from low-income families, Piano & More connects aspiring music students with music teachers, regardless of their ability to pay.
Of the studio’s 10 instructors providing piano, guitar and voice lessons at students’ homes throughout Arlington, Falls Church and McLean, two to three currently participate in Play It Forward. Right now, five students are enrolled in Play It Forward, three at Randolph Elementary School in Arlington and two at a school in Falls Church.
“A lot of these kids stay in the after-school programs within their school, so our teachers go there and teach them after school—a 30-minute lesson every week, just like any other kid having class with us,” Kovar says. “We supply them with all the resources: books, games, stickers, motivational resources.”
After a trial phase of one to two months, piano students who show a commitment to continuing with the instrument for at least a year receive a keyboard they can use to practice at home.
So far, 10 students have gone through the program. Participants have access to the same extracurricular activities as paying students—including recitals and more.
“Most studios have recitals, but what they don’t have are other ways to practice your skills in the outside world,” Kovar explains.
To that end, Piano & More has also teamed with local restaurants such as Busboys & Poets in Shirlington, Westover Market & Beer Garden and TNR Café in Courthouse to host open mic nights where students can perform. “They get to play just like a normal artist would when they’re first starting out,” she says.
Piano & More also takes students to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to see the National Symphony Orchestra, and to a local recording studio where kids can record their music and watch a sound engineer edit it.
The Play It Forward program is funded through donations and grants from the Arlington Community Foundation, the Robins Foundation and Arlington County Public Schools.
For paying students, the studio offers a membership model with monthly fees that cover lessons lasting 30-60 minutes, depending on a student’s age and ability.
“We are a small studio. We have around 100 memberships right now,” Kovar says.
Although free lessons are offered to qualifying students of all ages, Kovar says the ideal age to start learning piano is between 5 and 8.
Music education supports cognitive development, she explains, and playing piano is “like boosting your brain on steroids. You have to create so many new neurons on both sides of the brain because you’re learning fine motor control. You have to learn to control all 10 fingers…and your eyes are reading two different clefs at the same time. There are very few activities that can do what piano does to the brain.”
The act of creating music also supports mental health. “Music is the language of emotion,” Kovar says. Pianists enter a flow state—a form of meditation that slows the heart rate and breath. “It can change your mood. It’s powerful enough to break a negative thought pattern.”
A former piano teacher herself, Kovar says her current focus is on recruiting instructors and building momentum behind Play It Forward.
“We have to get the parents involved…to help encourage their student. We get the music teachers involved and keep them accountable, so we develop this little support system around the students,” she says.
“It’s remarkable to see them not knowing anything and then they’re with us for a couple years, and now they’re playing classical pieces.”