NASHUA, NH – Historically renowned German composer Ludwig van Beethoven once said: “To play a wrong note is insignificant; to play without passion is inexcusable.”
It’s that same sentiment that prompts Mike McAdam, director of North Main Music, to urge new and prospective students to bring the songs they love to their first lessons.
“We may not start playing them immediately, but we’ll start working on things to get us there,” said McAdam, who launched the instrument and vocal school in Nashua just over 20 years ago.
“It becomes kind of a contract at that point where you brought in the song, and it’s not like I stuck you with some horrible music that you don’t want to play.”
The business’ name is a vestige of its original location in the city’s downtown, where McAdam launched the school as an independent, one-man venture straight out of graduating from Boston’s Berklee College of Music.
North Main is now located in a commercial complex on Charron Avenue, after a 2015 move, and serves students primarily across Nashua and several neighboring New Hampshire and Massachusetts communities. It has roughly 225 students and is comprised of 15 instructors of various disciplines, including piano, violin and saxophone lessons.
Beyond the music
McAdam began recruiting the other teachers in 2007, who today help coordinate other programs beyond typical one-on-one instrument lessons and music recitals, among them a musical theatre group, bands and music performed acapella.
Shying away from what he perceives as the formality of recitals, McAdam instead opts for North Main students to produce the shows in which they perform. That way, they can develop skills McAdam strives to instill in them involving leadership and management, beyond the scope of programming smaller music schools might often.
He said he sees these skills contributing to North Main’s students building friendships and learning from one another, beyond what regular music instruction can provide. He estimated about 70% of his student body is youth.
Some of this is seen through the school’s annual “Sizzlin’ Summer” contest, where students produce music videos of songs they’ve learned at North Main and of song covers they’ve learned on their own, sometimes working with one another on the same project.
“I kind of want North Main Music to be like the YMCA of music studios, where you have a community, you have people that know each other and you have people that are collaborating on things,” McAdam said.
School alumnus Ryan Brooks Kelly, one of the first students McAdam welcomed to North Main in its early years, is one example. Entering the school at age 12 with “a guitar that dwarfed him” at the time, McAdam recalled, Kelly went on to form a band with fellow student Jilly Martin. As they grew up learning alongside one another and aged out of the school, the two pupils formed a two-person country band, Martin and Kelly.
“That was definitely like a ‘proud papa’ moment for me,” McAdam said of the musical duo.
It’s a story that ties into one of McAdam’s favorite aspects of the school’s shows, that being they’re a measure of students’ development: “I’ll have a student who I don’t see that often … and then I’ll hear them perform six months later, and I’ll be like, ‘Oh wow, that person has really progressed a lot,” he says.
Early years
McAdam’s pride in school attendees’ musical growth hearkens back to his self-taught roots in the drums and guitar, which he said he picked up in his mid-teens — “really late for looking to get into music.”
Born and raised in Queens, the director didn’t grow up in a musical family, so his foundational knowledge of instruments came from a friend’s brother who was attending Berklee College during McAdam’s adolescence.
McAdam’s early days with music were the birth of his own years at Berklee, where he enrolled after his family moved to Nashua in the late 1970s. It was late in his education at the college that the beginnings of what soon became North Main took shape, when he was taking a course on private music instruction that taught students how to run a music school.
“At that point, like a lot of upper-semester Berklee students, I wasn’t sure what I was I was doing,” McAdam said. “But I had people invariably approach me about doing private guitar lessons even though I’d never formally done it before.”
Motivated by this, McAdam started his own home-based class-time operation, but the participants continued to climb until he became a Berklee graduate, upon which time it made sense for him to seek a Main Street space to accommodate his volume of clients.
Despite all the school’s growth in the years since then, McAdam has aimed to keep the same draw he feels he had in 2003: customizing music lessons to the individual rather than giving a predetermined flat curriculum for each level of knowledge.
“We’ve had a lot of success just meeting people where they are,” he said.
Creating opportunities
Beyond bringing in more teachers over time, that approach has also opened doors for McAdam to add a recording studio to North Main’s offerings after its move to Charron Avenue — helping students track their progress — and become an attractive program for adults wanting to learn music. The school sees students ranging from 5 years old to in their 70s taking group lessons with others their age or solo.
COVID-19 presented a challenge in how lessons would be delivered, with McAdam recalling 2020-22 felt like he and the teachers who remained were “keeping the place together with duct tape.” However, the infrastructure in place allowed the school to adapt, and it took up online courses 10 days after announcing its closure. By now, almost all students are back in person, though the option for remote classes has allowed a select few to continue learning after moving from the area.
Most recently, McAdam has been working with the NH Department of Education to open opportunities for high school students to receive class credit for taking lessons at North Main, made possible by a program introduced in 2018 known as Learn Everywhere NH.
“It’s very much a program in its infancy right now as far as with us,” McAdam said. “We have it renewed for the next five years, so … I’m excited about that for the future.”
It’s one incentive he hopes will allow North Main Music to thrive for another decade as music lessons remain more freely available than ever via the internet and social media.
“I always joke with teachers and ask, ‘Who’s your biggest competitor?’ and they’ll go to think of a local business,” McAdam said with a mirthful grin. “No, it’s YouTube. So, what we have to do is continually convince people why we’re more valuable than going online.”
These articles are being shared by partners in The Granite State News Collaborative. For more information visit collaborativenh.org.