29 Years of Melody Makers: A Letter to Our Students, Families and Faculty

My name is Dan Cortazio. I took over as Director of Melody Makers earlier this year, and I am, by some distance, the newest person in the building.

I picked up the flute at 7. Drums and guitar through my teens. Played in bands, recorded an EP, and at 17 I had my eye on a music degree in Australia.

I also started coding in my teens, alongside the music. The plan was to go to New Zealand first, improve my English, then continue to Australia for music university.

New Zealand had a different idea. Within a few months I had a good web development job, a work visa, and a couple of my own websites that had started to take off: content properties growing in traffic and earning revenue from advertising. The plan changed.

I stayed in New Zealand for 2 years, long enough for the websites to outgrow the day job. Once those businesses could pay for me to live anywhere, I did. The next 20 years were spent running everything from a laptop, in more than 60 countries. The wider group of online businesses I co-founded today employs over 100 people. And music never quite left.

In northern Thailand and Laos I sat in with a Manouche jazz band, the gypsy-jazz tradition Django Reinhardt made famous, and played with them off and on for a stretch of months. In every country I visited I found a way to play. Music was the most reliable language I had, in places where I had none.

In 2026 the detour ended. After 20 years away, music is the job again. This time as the person running a school, not as a kid playing in one.

Music is the thing humans share when nothing else lines up.

It connects strangers in a temple, a cathedral, a mosque, a Sunday service, a wedding, a kid's birthday party, a Saturday concert. Babies whose parents do not yet share a single common word will calm to the same lullaby. A worship choir. A drum circle. A street musician outside a metro station. Every culture I visited has its own version of the same thing.

The science backs up what every musician already knows.

Harvard Medical School research found that children who begin music training before age 7 develop a measurably larger corpus callosum, the bridge between the brain's two hemispheres. Northwestern's Nina Kraus showed musicians' brains encode speech with sub-millisecond precision that non-musicians never reach. Nobel laureates are 2.85x more likely than average scientists to have arts hobbies. Cybersecurity teams are full of musicians, because reading a score and reading network traffic are the same brain skill.

We have an example of that in our own building. One of our longest-tenured students, 18 years through piano, guitar, drums and art at Melody Makers, walked out of here and into a cybersecurity role at First Abu Dhabi Bank. Music school built her brain. Music school is building hundreds of others' brains right now.

That is why I am here. Music is the thing I would have studied if I had not taken the detour. It is the thing every human culture has converged on. It is the thing that is actually building the brains of the children walking through our studios in Dubai. Running a school that does this for the next generation, in a city I now call home, feels like the best possible use of the next 20 years of my life.

Plus there is a student of ours called Jerusha. Earlier this year she represented the UAE at the World Championships of Performing Arts in Hollywood and came home with 8 medals, 2 world titles and a $15,000 scholarship from the New York Conservatory of Dramatic Arts. She is one of thousands. The school has been turning out students like her since before I picked up my first guitar.

In 1997 Melody Makers opened its doors with a motto that is still on the wall:

Perfection is our goal. Excellence will be tolerated.

We are now one of Dubai's oldest and most established music and fine arts schools. KHDA-approved. A Registered Exam Centre of Trinity College London for Western music, voice, speech, drama and communication. ABGMVM-affiliated for Indian classical dance through Bharatanatyam and Kathak.

The numbers I keep coming back to are not the financial ones. They are these:

10 to 15 years. That is how long students stay with us on average. Our longest-tenured student stayed 18 years.

10 to 16 years. That is how long most of our teaching faculty has been with the school. Several of them since the early 2010s.

Many of our current parents were students here themselves.

In the modern services world, those numbers do not exist. They are not normal. They are why this school is what it is, and they are not something a new director can manufacture or accelerate without breaking what makes it work.

My job, as I understand it, is to keep the institution intact and grow what can be grown without disturbing the rest.

A school is its teachers. So this section is the most important section.

Suchitra Prabhu was Director of Melody Makers for 15 years, and continues with us today as Director Emerita and Senior Advisor. Many of the long-term student relationships, the community service tradition and the standard of teaching trace back to her direction. She has stepped back from day-to-day leadership, but she has not stepped away. I cannot overstate how much I am here to learn from her.

On the piano and keyboard floor: Jun (Abescar) Base, Head of Piano Department, with us since 2010, holder of the Licentiate of Trinity College London. Carah Magadan, Head of Faculty, with us since 2011. Chamindri Rathnayake, since 2013. Chandima Jayamini, since 2023.

On strings, guitar and drums: Christopher Racal, Supervisor of the String Department, with us since 2010. Dipesh Subba, since 2016. Kenneth Verdun, since 2019.

In dance and voice: Akshay Kumar, Choreographer and Dance Instructor since 2016. He runs Western dance, Bharatanatyam, Kathak, Bollywood and folk choreography. Communication and speech & drama sit alongside.

In the art room: Madhusudhan P.K., heading Arts & Crafts since 2010. Pencil, charcoal, watercolour, acrylics, oil, Indian ink. Children as young as 5 and adults in their 50s working in the same room.

And the team holding the centre together off the studio floor: Uday Manohar Prabhu, Operations Manager since 2010. Rekha Kunder, on the front desk since 2007. Kashmira Jagada, in administrative support since 2008. Ram Bera, Office Manager and PR lead since 2009.

The combined tenure of this team runs into the hundreds of years. That is what 29 years actually looks like.

I want to be very clear about this for the families reading.

The teachers stay. The prices stay competitive: the kind of pricing that comes from 29 years in the same building, not from passing mall-tier rent on to your invoice. Trinity stays. ABGMVM stays. The motto on the wall stays.

The format stays too: one-to-one or small group, every student with their own instrument, mock exams before real exams, regular concerts, the in-house art exhibitions, the charity performances.

The school is family-owned in spirit even where the ownership has changed. The way to keep that intact is to leave it alone.

I owe my career to two things: music and code.

The music gave me the pattern recognition, the discipline of daily practice, the ear for whether something is working. The code gave me the leverage. Without the first I would not have had the patience to learn the second. Without the second I would not be writing this letter.

The world the children walking through our doors today are growing up in is moving even faster than the one I grew up in. AI is rewriting which jobs exist by the time they finish school. The trades that pay best at 18 in 2032 will not be the ones that paid best in 2012. A child who can sit alone in a room and put 10,000 hours of deliberate practice into something will always have an edge over a child who cannot. The only question is what they practise.

Music remains the foundation. It is the longest-running compounding asset in human history and we are not going to stop teaching it. But the same long-arc, mentor-led, deliberate-practice model works for coding, for entrepreneurship, for AI literacy, for prompt engineering, and for the broader set of future skills the next generation needs as much as a violin.

Fluency with AI is the new literacy. The students who finish school in 2032 will spend their working days collaborating with models that did not exist when they started. Knowing how to write a clear prompt, how to verify an answer, how to chain models into a workflow, how to spot when an AI is wrong, all of that is teachable, the same way a scale is teachable. We teach it the same way too: slowly first, then well, with a teacher in the room.

A 12-year-old who learns to ship a Roblox item, price it, market it, and respond to customer messages is doing what kids did with lemonade stands a generation ago, except the digital lemonade scales infinitely and pays in real money. A 14-year-old who can sit at a piano for 90 minutes can sit at a Cursor terminal for 90 minutes, prompting an AI agent through their first real app. The underlying skill is the same: stay still, work hard, listen to what is wrong, fix it, repeat.

We are not adding these classes because they are trendy. We are adding them because the same long-tenure faculty model that has worked for piano for 29 years is the right way to teach them. Practising founders. Practising operators. Practising builders. People who use AI every day to ship real work. The kind of teachers I would have killed to have when I was 12.

On top of the new programmes, there is a small list of operational moves the school deserves at this scale.

Online classes for students outside Dubai. We already have students dialling in from across the UAE, India and Australia. The same teachers who have run our Dubai studios for 16 years can teach a child in another emirate or another country with no loss in quality. We want every Indian, Filipino and Sri Lankan family with a piano in their living room to be one Zoom away from a Melody Makers teacher.

More UAE branches. The teaching model works. The curriculum works. The exam pipeline works. There are catchments in Dubai and the wider UAE where families currently drive 45 minutes to reach our studio. We can shorten that drive without thinning the quality.

Better tools so the front desk, faculty and parents spend less time on logistics and more time on teaching. Most of what makes a music school feel chaotic to a parent is fixable software, not faculty.

That is the entire growth plan. There is no clever new product. The product is already 29 years old and works.

None of this happens without more teachers. We are hiring across the school, with the most urgent gaps on the new programmes.

If you have built businesses, shipped real software, run an ad campaign, designed a product, taught yourself prompt engineering, or have a real point of view on what kids need to know in 2030, we want to talk to you. We are looking for people who would teach what they already do, not people looking for their first teaching job.

The roles we are filling first:

Coding instructors (Python, JavaScript, web, mobile, game development, Roblox Studio, Minecraft coding). Online and in-studio. Comfortable working alongside AI tooling like Cursor, Claude and Copilot.

AI literacy and prompt engineering instructors who can teach kids and teens how to think with AI, not just type into it.

Entrepreneurship instructors who have actually built something: a real business, a real product, a real revenue line. We are not hiring textbook teachers for this.

We are also hiring across music, dance, art and communication as we grow online and into new branches.

Apply at /teach-with-us. Tell us what you have built, what you would teach, and what your strongest student would walk out knowing.

To Suchitra and the Prabhu family: thank you for what you built and for the faith you have placed in this next chapter.

To every parent who chose Melody Makers in 1997, in 2007, in 2017, in 2025: thank you. Music school is a long-term commitment. You gave us your weekends, your school holidays, your patience through scale practice. We see it. We do not take it for granted.

To every student, current and former: this place is yours. Come back any time. Bring your own kids when they are ready.

To our faculty and staff: there is no Melody Makers without you. Jun, Carah, Chris, Madhu, Akshay, Dipesh, Chamindri, Kenneth, Chandima, Uday, Rekha, Kashmira, Ram, and the wider team that has rotated through our studios over 29 years. Thank you for showing up. Thank you for caring.

To the community across Dubai and beyond: thank you for trusting a small studio with your children's creative lives. We will keep earning that trust.

29 down. Year 30 starts now.

If you have been thinking about starting music classes in Dubai, dance classes, or art classes for your child or for yourself, the easiest first step is a free trial.

A trial is one 30-minute class with the teacher who would actually teach you. No commitment. No sales pitch. You see the studio, meet the teacher, and decide.

Book your free trial here. Pick the activity, pick the days that suit you, and we will be in touch on WhatsApp to confirm your slot.

If you would rather speak to a human first, our front desk is open 7 days a week, or you can contact us directly.

See you in the studio.

Dan Cortazio Director, Melody Makers Music & Fine Arts Centre