Cornish College of the Arts

at that time, she had been teaching music in Seattle for 14 years. In 1915, the school was known as The Cornish School of Music Language and Dancing. Cornish would go on to serve as the school's director for its first 25 years, until 1939. The Cornish School of Music began its operations in rented space in the Boothe (or Booth) Building on Broadway and Pine Street.
As Cornish developed the idea of her school, she initially turned to the Montessori-based pedagogical method of Evelyn Fletcher-Copp, but turned at last to the progressive musical pedagogy of Calvin Brainerd Cady, who had worked as musical director with John Dewey as the latter set up his seminal progressive educational project, what is now the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. Conceived by Cornish as "an elementary school of the arts—all the arts—with music as its major subject," the school initially taught only children, but it soon expanded to functioning also as a normal school (a teachers' college) under Cady. Within three years it had …