School of Rock goes electro at Bancroft Elementary School, where the Modern Music Makers lay down their own beats. Christopher Paré learns why kids are the future of music, and how some people don’t like it one bit.

At the end of Hearts of Darkness, the 1991 behind-the-scenes documentary companion to Apocalypse Now, director Francis Ford Coppola stares into his wife’s Super-8 camera and predicts that one day, “Some fat girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart.” Talented as he was, in 18th-century Vienna Mozart only had certain means of making music at his disposal. But what if he had today—what would Wolfgang have done with a sampler? Or a drum machine? Or software for recording and mixing multi-track compositions? Then there’s the accessibility factor: what if these tools had been cheap, plentiful and available to everyone? “Anybody—anybody—who has a computer and can use Garage Band… can take any recorded sound and turn it into music,” says Columbia University professor Dave Soldier, who piloted a music project for kids at the Amber Charter School in New York City’s East Harlem. “The odd thing about that is how it doesn’t even seem weird anymore.

But six years ago you couldn’t do that. It’s changing so fast that we don’t even realize it.”
In Richard Linklater’s School of Rock—and the subsequent unrelated documentary Rock School—kids discover their inner Sid Vicious or Freddie Mercury. But why stop there? As David Shaw and Bianca Brandt-Rousseau discovered, kids can do more than just play music—they can produce it. Eat your heart off a plastic lunch tray, Amadeus.

Kids’n’Play

Shaw, a graphic designer and DJ [and occasional Naked Eye staff member – Ed.] hailing from Thunder Bay, had just left his day job when the idea for Modern Music Makers presented itself. “It was something in the back of my mind when I quit,” he tells me. “I was doing the same thing day after day, and not feeling as if I was using my creative energy for anything good.”

Around the same time, a friend at Bancroft Elementary School in Montreal, Quebec, had started an after-school program for kids and was looking for ideas. Shaw remembered Dave Soldier and his school project, called Da Hiphop Raskalz. “I look at this guy, who’s volunteering and doing what I think looks like the most wonderful thing you could possibly do. Here’s how people are spending their time—where are my hours going? It’s ridiculous.”

And so Modern Music Makers was born. With Brandt-Rousseau, Shaw modeled his version closely on Soldier’s Raskalz: students (five to ten years old) are divided into groups of four (give or take), and given the means to make their own songs from scratch. Explains Shaw: “Each group got a drum kit with a certain number of sounds on it—bass, melodies and some effects—and they each had a different palate of sounds to work with.” The means and materials at their disposal were limited at best, but that’s the beauty of the program: anyone can conceivably scrape together the minimum kit to pull it off. For Modern Music Makers, this consisted of a malfunctioning point and-shoot DV cam, some primitive green screen effects, a small laptop, a microphone, a soundcard, a midi keyboard, and an instrument from each kid’s bedroom. The real constraint, says Shaw, was time. “We had one hour a week to work with four groups of kids. The maximum [time] each one would get with the technology was 15 minutes. That’s not a lot of time to generate ideas. Luckily, the programs we used are good for doing stuff on the fly.”

Sound + Vision

Dave Soldier’s formula is no secret. On his website, davesoldier.com, he describes his methodology, offers tips on making the best use of time, and lists what equipment he uses in the process. Says Shaw, “We looked at it as a good template to begin with, and went along with what technology we had available and were comfortable with.”

For his contribution, Shaw—a self-taught video editor—saw an opportunity to connect the dots, and introduced a multimedia component to Soldier’s original idea: music videos. “Being able to put that technology in the kids’ hands and have them work with it and realize they could create a video, create a song—you could see that disconnect being broken down.” Each band—The Disco Dragons, Pop Princesses and M.E.E. Rock Stars— set to work in search of a sound. Shaw and Brandt-Rousseau recorded tons of tracks, and then in post-production peeled back the layers that didn’t work. “What we’re really proud of is that the songs themselves are constructed out of all different elements,” says Shaw, beaming. “It’s all things that the kids chose, and it’s pretty amazing to understand that pretty much everything you’re hearing is 100 percent from the kids’ brains.”

The experience was a total revelation (…) To View the Full Article, Turn to Page 174 of Naked Eye’s Autumn 08 Issue