Scenes From Fatherhood

My experience as a teacher and as a parent is that kids are not only more educated, but they are also more happy and engaged when they’re actually doing things that they know are actually building real knowledge and skills and value and passion for something larger into their world.

This is a space dreamers and accomplishers come to dream and accomplish together. It’s been my good fortune to be along for the ride as their teacher, really, and to be a small part of their creations, and the dent that they then go make on the world. And I would’t miss it for anything.

We had a student from Argentina come, and then become an Audio Imagineer at Disney World. We’ve had international and out-of-state college music professors as students in the program every year. Professor Ali has come each year, and I’ve visited and seen the amazing program she’s built and grown at her own college.

If you just turn on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and say “Hey, let’s listen to this…” yes, it’s true, kids might get bored after a couple minutes. Before doing that, if you say: “There was this amazing man, Beethoven, and he went deaf, and despite the fact that he went deaf, he wrote this sixty-minute Monument To Everything — I’m gonna cry just talking about it — and he wrote the most amazing symphony that anybody had written to date, and they premiered it, and the only person who couldn’t hear it at the premiere was *him*. Why are they engaged? Because you told them the reason why he wrote music is not just a bunch of blips and notes. He was an amazing character with an amazing story.

When I was a freshman at Stanford, there was this amazing professor at the electronic music department who had literally changed the sound of music by developing FM synthesis, the engine of the DX7 and other synths you hear on almost every 80s and 90s pop recording. He graciously let me take his experimental electronic music course that was intended for upperclassmen and grad students. I had an idea for a “found sounds” piece — basically Footprint — that had a dramatic narrative I could hear in my head, and I wanted to produce it.  But there were no Digital Audio Workstations at the time, barely any field recordings, and I just couldn’t devote the time to completing it. For several decades I’ve wanted to, but it’s not a “commercial” thing so I never did in my life as a professional musician… until now.

I searched for those teaching K-8 kids in recording arts, and this result is almost no one. To my surprise, almost nobody is doing what I’m doing in regards to combined, single-event composing and recording workshop sessions. My research made me realize — more than I had — that what I was doing was an outlier. It’s important that we engage kids inthe recording arts so some of them will usetechnology to create their own art early andproactively rather than merely usingtechnology to passively and exclusively be onthe receiving end of art and technology — in mobile devices, games, entertainment. The goal ofrecording arts for the young is to make kids creators and expressers, not just passive observers ofothers’ creations and expressions.

After a week, people close to me were saying that this campaign has already failed. But we invested lots of time and money on the campaign and I would not go to bed for the remaining three weeks thinking that I gave up on this after a few days.

Footprint — and actually much of my work — is not primarily designed to fit into a genre.  I am also obstinately fighting against the modern desire for everything to be in 2-3 minute songs and snippets. I love longform things. Things with time to evolve and develop. Even my work for kids as Doctor Noize is that way — every album is a longform musical instead of a collection of singles.

Most of the things that succeed in life are just because you are too stupid to realize that you have already lost the game and you show up anyways.

The objective of this project is to produce and record a musical theatre that teaches children about classical music. Too often classical music is performed for and attended by adults. This project creates orchestral music written directly for children so that it appeals to them and in turn attracts them to orchestral music to master the ideas and concepts of classical music. My dream [is]… there will be thousands and thousands of children who are listening to classical music.