Nellie Cornish

Nellie Centennial Cornish (1876 - 1956) was a pianist, teacher, writer, and founder of the Cornish School (now Cornish College of the Arts) in Seattle, Washington. She was influenced by the pedagogical ideas of Maria Montessori as well as Calvin Brainerd Cady's ideas about teaching broader values through music education.Martha Graham described her as "a small, round, plump little lady with the dynamism of a rocket". She founded the Cornish School in 1914 and served as the school's director for the next 25 years. Within three years it had enrolled over 600 students, and was the country's largest music school west of Chicago.

Her middle name reflects the year of her birth, the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the United States of America.

Born July 1876 in Nebraska, she grew up first in Arlington, Oregon and then in Blaine, Washington, as the daughter of the town's first mayor, lawyer Nathan Arlington Cornish. In her early teens, she lived about half a year in Portland, Oregon, where she studied piano under Ebenezer Cook, a teacher of strong local reputation. Shortly after, her father's fortunes and her mother's health began to fail. Her parents moved to Spokane, Washington, where her mother died two years later; Nellie stayed in Blaine much of that time, teaching fourth grade although still in her teens. Her father remarried to a woman she did not like, leading to a break with him. In her early twenties, she gave music lessons and did other tutoring in northwestern Oregon.

She moved to Seattle in 1900, and took a studio in 1902 in the Holyoke Building (the center of Seattle music instruction at the time), which gave her a chance to meet nearly all of the city's leading music teachers. In 1904, she traveled to Boston for the summer to learn the Evelyn Fletcher-Copp's Montessori-influenced method of teaching piano to young children. From this, she evolved her own technique of teaching.

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