'The overwhelming feeling is gratitude': Funderful World of Music owners set to retire after 32 years of music lessons

May 11—As the sound of piano keys and children's voices flooding her studio reach their decrescendo, a hard lump of gratitude swells in Pam Garland's throat.

A matriarch of music education for 32 years, Garland's studio, Funderful World of Music on Gainesville's West Avenue, is set to carry its final tune May 25 as she and her husband and business partner, Tony, enter retirement.

Tony and Pam, a lifelong pianist, launched the school in 1991 in the shopping center across from Target on Shallowford Road, where they conducted piano and voice lessons for seven years before building their facility on West Avenue, which is under contract and slated to house a dental practice.

The couple have four children of their own, but through Funderful World of Music, Pam — who's been called everything from Mary Poppins to Mother Goose — has been a sort of universal mother and grandmother to roughly 20,000 children between ages 4 and 12 across Northeast Georgia.

Those children and their parents have traveled from as far as Cleveland, Dawsonville, Jefferson and Winder — and, in one case, Douglasville — for their weekly lessons over the course of the music school's six-year program, which is "cloaked in fun and games, movement and dances, so the children are learning almost as a byproduct of fun," according to Pam.

"I don't know that we had a grand vision at that point in time (when the studio doors opened)," Pam said. "I just knew that this was the way that children needed to learn music."

Her approach derives from the International Yamaha Music Education System, which was considered "cutting-edge" when Pam encountered it in a workshop decades ago, as its methods took a more holistic, flexible approach than traditional music lessons and were based on "understanding the developmental stages of children and customizing the approach to meet them where they were," Pam said, "whereas traditional lessons are pretty much, 'This is the way we do it.'"

"It just ignited a fire (in me)," Pam said. "I sat there and went, 'This is the most brilliant approach to teaching children music. We have to do this.' It's a very holistic approach toward music education. It saturates the child from the top of their head to the tips of their toes."

Parental involvement is another distinction between Funderful World of Music's programming and traditional lessons.

According to Pam, parents participate in the classes alongside their children as active learning partners.

"It's almost like getting two lessons for the price of one — the parents are learning right along with the children, so there's an awful lot of bonding," she said. "It's building this really warm, wonderful, nurturing connection between them that they're not having in any other place in their lives."

"Over and over again through the years, parents have told her how much, without her even knowing it, things that she has said and done have helped them become better parents," Tony said.

'I feel very maternal toward them all'

In addition to the six-year program, which students begin at age 4, Funderful World of Music also houses a Kindermusik program for infants to 18-month-olds, a toddler program for 18-month- to 3-year-olds and a pre-keyboard class for 3- and young 4-year-olds.

Many of the Garlands' students have graduated knowing how to both read sheet music and play by ear — the best of both worlds, according to Tony — and gone on to perform in band, chorus, drama and theater.

And sometimes, those children grow up to have children of their own to enroll in Funderful programs.

"We have reached thousands of children giving them their first introduction into music," Pam said. "The whole goal of those programs was, 'This is their first experience or exposure to music, and we want them to fall in love with music.' The thing that I have emphasized to all of my teachers that I have trained to do these programs is: If you make the children fall in love with you, they will automatically love music."

While the array of photos on the studio walls suggest Pam has done just that, perhaps the Funderful's most remarkable accomplishment was in 2001, when Pam heard American radio personality Delilah Rene using her platform to raise funds for Liberian refugees in Buduburam, Ghana, to have clean drinking water.

"I just felt this little nudge — 'Let's see if our kids can do something to help them,'" Pam said. "Mostly, I was looking for a motivation to keep the kids practicing."

Pam also asked Rene's organization to send the school photos of some of the children they were helping, which were placed on each student's instrument so that when they sat down to practice, they had "a reason to practice beyond learning the music."

Through practice incentives and sponsorships, the students collectively raised $15,000, a feat that still brings tears to the Garlands' eyes two decades later.

As Funderful World of Music prepares for its final spring recital May 19-20, Pam has also spent hours vetting music instructors across the region via phone and email to find placements for each of her students when the doors close.

"I feel very maternal toward them all," she said. "I'm feeling that more right now — I'm feeling a real protectiveness."

While she likens the impending goodbye to having her heart ripped out piece by piece, Pam also counts herself among the luckiest people alive.

"The overwhelming feeling is gratitude that we've been able to be a part of this magic," she said. "I'm beginning to realize this (studio) is a unicorn as I'm trying to find places to help our children transition to piano lessons (elsewhere) — there's not anything like it anywhere that I know of in the state of Georgia. This is so much bigger than just learning how to play an instrument or learning how to read music — there are so many collateral benefits happening here."