The music industry has changed greatly since Kaye Colangelo and her husband Joe first opened Rosehill Music in Thornwood, NY in 1988. However, their passion to provide musical education and other services for the area has not waned.
CCM: How did Rosehill Music begin, were you a lover of music or a musician?
Kaye Colangelo: Definitely on my part, love for music, I’m a music enthusiast. I played the piano as a child but my interest went elsewhere in the art world. My husband was not a full-time musician, but a working musician, and had band practice all the time at our home in town. It was very difficult to find material, we had to drive 15-20 minutes in either direction. So I had this idea to open up a record shop and that’s how it all started. We immediately started giving lessons. Guitar lessons were first and then piano and it went on from there. We’ve bent with the wind throughout the years.
CCM: Do you have such a thing as a typical day doing what you do?
Kaye Colangelo: Yes, which has changed of course, since COVID. Before COVID it was coming to work at 10 in the morning running schedules, answering emails, and taking care of orders, because we not only are an academy, we have retail to stock as well as renting instruments and making instrument repairs. So that’s what we would take care of when we would come in in the morning. I’d be here until at least six o’clock and in the early years would stay here until seven, or eight o’clock because retail was much more vital than now.
Since COVID. I get up in the morning, and I get on my computer and take care of business remotely (office work). The actual store, the retail part, and the office, we only open in the afternoon. And students start coming in after school hours and go well into the evening. So it is a bit different now and it’s actually more comfortable than always having to be here.
CCM: What have been some of the joys of having this business and then also some of the challenges for you?
Kaye Colangelo: Well, the joys for the most part have far outweighed the challenges because we’re here thirty-five years. The joys, mostly the kids, when we do our student shows that I really stress about beforehand, organizing them and you know, it’s quite an ordeal to get everything going but they always go off very well. Seeing the improvement and growth of students who participate regularly is really the biggest joy. Some of the students we have from when they’re six years old, and we’re saying goodbye to them when they graduate high school and really have a strong relationship. Also now a couple of our teachers are former students of ours, we’ve been here so long, as well as we have students today who are children of former students of ours. So that part of it is that community and bringing the music to them.
The most fun I had was at my initial shop, back then retail was normal. I sold vinyl records and CDs, cassettes, rock T-shirts and incense, and all sorts of things. That was a lot of fun. Retail, of course, after the first 15-16 years, started to change a lot because of the internet.
If you want me to go on to the challenges, the challenge is just being in business and figuring out what you have to do to accommodate the changing times. Dealing with the requirements of being in business and the expenses is difficult trying to keep your pricing to where it’s doable for people to keep the business afloat. Once we had to get rid of all of our recorded music because the industry went digital, we just had to figure out ‘okay, now what are we going to do?’ We did pretty well with that. My husband has been a great source of support and help and figuring those things out and being here all the time behind the scenes, taking care of business for me.
CCM: What would you say if someone wanted to start their own music store or music business?
Kaye Colangelo: Well, there was a time several years back when my husband was thinking about doing another venture with a good friend. As soon as he asked, ‘How many hours a week do you think I’d have to work?’ We knew right then that this was not going to work. If you’re going to start your own business initially, you have to commit all of your days and all of your thoughts into that and not expect to have certain hours, the first five years here, we were open seven days a week… I was often here from ten in the morning to seven, eight o’clock at night. You can’t look at it as ‘this is just going to be a job and I’ll end at a certain time. I’m going to close, lock the door and go home’. If you have your own business, you have to understand for the first few years at least you have to be fully committed to it.
Music is different these days, I’m sure younger people have a different view of what it is and could open something that works in today’s world. We did go through a lot of challenges when the Internet became more accessible to everyone and Amazon came into the picture. We had to adjust the retail part of our business a lot. At this point, we’re more of a convenience shop for small goods whereas, in the past, we sold everything from drum sets to keyboards to all the amplifiers and the heavy equipment and guitars… So for me to say to someone who’s going to open up a music business, ‘this is how we did it’ I don’t think that holds true… it would have to be different from my model. This model doesn’t work anymore.
CCM: So would you say a key part of being a business owner is being open to change?
Kaye Colangelo: Absolutely. You have to bend with the wind – if you don’t, you close your door. You have to say ‘okay, this has happened and now we have to do something else’. We started off in 500 square feet. Then we went to 1,000 square feet when space became available, then we broke down walls, and opened up when the space behind us where we’re sitting right now became available and continued to build a business. We quickly saw that music education was the biggest direction for us. That doesn’t ever get old. And we just continue to build more or less than studios, and it’s been great.
CCM: Are there benefits to music education even if children do not become professionals?
Kaye Colangelo: Learning music is such a discipline. I’m not a scientist, but studies show that music, especially with the young and the elderly, reaches areas in our brains that nothing else does. It enhances the child’s ability to learn anything. Number one, it gives a student a sense of self-confidence, and discipline – it goes across all aspects of their lives and helps them in school.
We don’t require a student to perform. Some students don’t have the personality, they don’t want to do it, and that’s fine but for the ones who do; getting prepared to get up in front of other people and presenting what you do, no matter what level you are, that’s building confidence in actual public speaking, socialization, and discipline.
Depending on your instrument, just taking care of an instrument, and respecting it, there are so many aspects that touch every part of a student’s growth and development in learning music. It’s something that will be with them for the rest of their lives. Not that someone couldn’t play soccer for the rest of their lives, they could, but generally, that’s not the case. Music is something where we even get adults back in, who used to play and then life got in the way and now they’re back picking up their music again… I strongly, strongly advise anyone to get their child involved in music in some way, even if it’s just for a few years.
CCM: Obviously, you hear a lot of music all the time. What are the things you listen to when you want to just sit back and enjoy?
Kaye Colangelo: Well, I have the classic rock station on in my car. I like rock, I like Southern rock, the new country. One of my favorite albums of all time is Romanza by Andrea Bocelli, so my tastes do vary I’m more of a rocker.
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