Category: Cory’s Thoughts

It’s time — past time — for artists and educators everywhere to speak up and represent their values out loud, regardless of the career consequences. I’m deeply inspired to be collaborating with artists of such creativity, courage and character on this song. But most of all… it was fun.

Students and faculty alike refer to me as Professor Cullinan, which is objectively hilarious and the primary reason I work here.

The short version is that what I get excited about, about music technology, is making it easier and more democratic for everybody to be able to use the technology.

I love rock music, and I love pop music, but I am not thrilled at how music and art has become so commercialized and popularized and fine arts music is being increasingly marginalized. I am concerned about that style of music for future generations.

That feeling of being fortunate of getting what you want to do in life, I know from my childhood, is not always going to be the case. There are going to be times of challenge and sorrow in your life, and when you get the opportunity to take a risk and do something you really want to do, you should do it. I feel fortunate to have been able to do that.

I had very interesting high school years… My brother got a brain tumor and ended up dying two years later. And my father, who was also very well known in the Bay Area, and very depressed about this and killed himself less than a year after that. So when I was in high school I had opportunity — undesirable opportunity, you might say — to look at life differently from most 15, 16, 17-year-olds. I was really inspired by my brother… He was doing what he loved at a very young age and a very high level. And I decided I wanted to do that.So that’s a long way of saying I had a series of inspirations and events that made me think, I want to reach for something really, really interesting and challenging.

When I was a high school music teacher, I had this music history class. It’s possibly the thing I’m most proud of in life because it made me realize I could do this in other arenas. I had this classical music history class elective in high school and it became so popular it was made a required freshman course. The way that happened was I learned that if you played Beethoven’s Fifth for people and talked about this amazing 4-note motif, they’re going to get bored out of their minds.But if you tell a story around it, and you talk about Beethoven and how he went deaf, and why they wrote their stuff, you can get anybody, even a 9-year-old, you want to hear it and they’ll say, “Yes!” All of that is about building drama into music, which is very easy when you’re talking about classical music because all these musicians are freaks. There are crazy stories about all of them.

We live in a world where attention spans are constricting, constricting to the point where — and I don’t even consider this a political comment — one of our two major presidential candidates has, like, a 10-minute attention span. That’s the world we live in now. And you can see why — it has to do with the internet, it has to do with all sorts of popular culture things. And I love pop culture. I would just like us to also be able to apply our minds to things that are more sophisticated and have a longer duration. There are problems like climate change that our kids are going to need to solve, and it’s not going to get solved by something where if you can’t figure it out in two minutes, we’re going to move on to something else.

My most significant early musical memories were in high school with my friend Mark Van Horn. His parents were not rich, but his dad nonetheless somehow funded a makeshift eight-track recording studio in the janitor’s room at the apartment complex he managed. Mark and I spent virtually all our time there when I wasn’t playing soccer. We wrote and recorded entire albums together in our teens, learning both the artistic and technical craft of songwriting and recording.We went deep.So Mark introduced me to the recording studio and my future wife, then he died in his twenties of a brain tumor — just like my brother. Crazy. Mark and my brother inspired much of my life’s philosophy, really — I sort of do a lot of things in honor of them — and they were two of the funniest and most naturally brilliant guys I’ve ever met. And I was hooked — on both the music and the girl.