From Prodigy to Pedagogue: How Tessa Ying Reimagines the Piano Lesson

For pianist and educator Tessa Ying, technical mastery was never meant to be the finish line — it's the starting point for something more personal: helping students find their own voice through music.

According to Brainz Magazine, Ying's musical journey began at age four in Brookline, Massachusetts, and carried her through training programs in Singapore, England and the United States before she completed her formal education at Berklee College of Music. She credits the discipline instilled by Singapore's exam-focused curriculum with giving her the technical foundation to later explore more experimental creative territory.

That foundation now underpins her teaching studio, where students work toward certification through the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music — one of only five exam boards holding Ofqual accreditation in England, with results that translate into UCAS points for UK university applications. Ying says close to 90% of her students achieve distinction-level scores across both performance and theory. Her student Alan Huang has drawn particular recognition, taking Gold and a Technical Mastery Prize at the 2024 Global Genius Music Competition and a Third Prize at the Charleston International Competition. Huang describes the coaching relationship as low-pressure but effective, saying Ying selects repertoire that plays to a student's strengths while still pushing their range.

Rather than confining her teaching or her own performance to a single genre, Ying moves fluidly between classical staples by Bach, Beethoven and Chopin and material drawn from film scores, K-pop and pop radio — including music from Studio Ghibli, "Running Up That Hill" and "Golden." Her reasoning: genres share more than they diverge, all functioning as vehicles for the same emotional expression. That thinking carries into her next project, AfterGlow, an electronic downtempo piece built around acoustic piano.

Production work has become a second focus of Ying's career. In 2025, she recorded audio and video for pianists Chia Ying Lee, a semifinalist at the Boston International Piano Competition, and Carl Di Casoli, second-place finisher at the 2025 Oberlin Competition, capturing a program that included Saint-Saëns, Bach, Liszt, Ravel and Rachmaninoff. Those recordings helped Lee advance in later competition entries, including at Oberlin.

Ying's reach also extends into community arts work. Through Arts for Learning Massachusetts, a nonprofit serving underserved schools, she has directed spring musical productions involving more than 30 young performers, leading rehearsals and vocal coaching for a 2026 staging of "Finding Nemo" after the previous year's "Aladdin." She also produced a recital series, The Art of Piano, at Boston Steinway dealer M. Steinert & Sons, where 24 performers took the stage across two showcases on a 7-foot Steinway Spirio, playing a program spanning classical repertoire to contemporary film music.