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“Tonight, you are making rock ’n’ roll history! This concert is about you! You are all rock stars!” It’s January 24, 2003, and a small army of teenage musicians from Lakewood, Ohio, is mentally psyching itself up to take the stage at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. Rock violinist Mark Wood (cofounder of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra and manufacturer of the electrified Wood Violins), the composer-performer-inventor who’d helped form this young strings-based group at the request of Lakewood music teacher Beth Hankins, addresses the nervous, electric-violin–clutching assemblage—which has just been christened the Lakewood Project—and proudly pronounces them to be the first-ever high-school rock-and-roll orchestra. As the young musicians prepare to make their official world debut before a crowd of 2,000 waiting music fans, Wood reminds them that the stage they will be standing on has already held the likes of Pete Seeger, Aretha Franklin, Pete Townsend, Bruce Springsteen, the Neville Brothers, and hundreds of other rock and soul legends. “Now it’s your turn!” Wood exhorts them. “The most important thing is to connect with the audience, have lots of fun, show them your beautiful, unstoppable energy—and go kick butt!”

For Wood, who had been pushing the educational merits of electric strings for years with little positive response from the music-teaching community, the night is not just the culmination of a months-long effort to turn a bunch of young musicians into a first-rate, fully electrified, rock-and-roll orchestra. It is more than just the proof that he’d been right, that by fusing the power of rock to a declining high-school strings program, young players would be transformed from reluctant rehearsers and half-hearted music students into amped-up, adrenalized ambassadors for the pleasure and sheer joy of playing the violin. For Wood, who has gone on to start over 30 similar rock orchestras in schools across the country and whose methods are now embraced by Juilliard, Berklee, and the American String Teachers Association, this night marks the beginning of a revolution. “The nuclear bomb has been dropped! The revolution has begun!” he says from his home in New York. “What’s so cool is that after ten years of me doing this, ten years of having strings teachers go white with fear when I proposed using rock ’n’ roll to excite young musicians, ten years of having doors slammed in my face when I’d show up with my electric stringed instruments, I am now working with education programs across the country, in San Diego and New York and Alabama and Michigan. These are electric orchestra programs that involve not only string players, but also choir and band, so we’re addressing the entire spectrum of musical education, and we’re doing it to a rock ’n’ roll beat.

A cadre of rock orchestra players is changing the face

of string playing

By David Templeton

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“I’m telling you, it’s a full-scale revolution, the next step in the evolution of the music-education system!” Wood, with his Electrify Your Strings music program (named as one of the top ten most exciting music programs at the Grammy Awards two years ago), is not the only energized educator working with schools and students to incorporate electric instruments and modern music. But he surely ranks among the most passionate promoters of the burgeoning School of Rock generation. Talking to Wood about kids and music is like talking to a tent evangelist about the power of faith. He is on a mission, and to hear him talk, it is a sacred mission, an effort on which the future of music in America may depend.

“The most important music of the 20th century is the Beatles, Elvis, Zeppelin, Santana, Miles Davis, John Coltrane. Those are the people who composed the music that touched the soul of America,” he says. “I don’t mean to put down classical. Classical is vital and beautiful music. I still listen to Brahms’ Second Symphony and get goose bumps. It’s not the music that’s lacking, it’s the way we’re teaching it. It’s always a shock to me that so many young string players don’t even know what a wah-wah pedal is, they aren’t aware you can plug a violin in. “You know the cliché about how kids who take up the violin might start playing it in third grade and then drop it by sixth grade because it’s so boring?” Wood continues. “We’ll it’s not music’s fault, but we really do lose a lot of kids [as string players] at the junior-high level. When I go in there with my instruments and music, suddenly the kids make the leap from practicing five seconds a day—which they’re forced to do against their will—to practicing hours a day and the parents can’t shut them up. Because they’ve discovered echo, and flanging, and wah-wah pedals, and improvising—none of which exists in the classical European way of teaching stringed instruments. At least one string teacher agrees. “Since these kids have started playing rock with Lakewood Project,” says music director Beth Hankins, “their relationship with their instrument has completely changed. I’m not kidding. The violin has gone from being their enemy to being their life partner. They are suddenly interested in musical history! They are interested in what was going on when Shostakovich was writing his symphonies and Stalin was meddling in Shostakovich’s art. These kids eat it up! It’s unbelievable! Most of these students came into this program loving music, and now they can’t imagine a day without it! And all because of Led Zeppelin.” One half of all the seniors playing in the Lakewood Project intend to go to conservatory and make music their career. According to Hankins, every single one of the graduating Lakewood Project students who goes out and auditions for the regional youth orchestras ends up getting in. She credits the students’ ability, but especially credits that something extra, call it the “rock star strut,” that they carry with them, having been part of something as powerful and exciting as a rock-and-roll orchestra. “Playing rock ’n’ roll teaches a lot of things that other students aren’t getting,” she says. “They learn stage presence, they learn to memorize all the music, they have incredible hearing and vastly improved pitch, and they have an ability to maintain a steady beat and play with the beat that’s better than most kids their age.” Any music that kids are wanting to play is good music,” says Dave Hercock, strings teacher at Cinnaminson High School in New Jersey, where rock ’n’ roll has only recently begun to make its mark on the public-school music program. “As I’ve been saying a lot lately, I don’t care what you think of rock music personally, if kids are liking it, and kids are playing it, then it’s doing its job.” Hercock met Wood at the 2003 ASTA conference and, impressed by the stories Wood told about electric strings and rock ’n’ roll resurrecting strings programs in various high schools, Hercock resolved to bring the power of rock to Cinnaminson. It wasn’t easy. “It took a little while to convince people that this was not a bad idea,” he laughs, “and then the only

“I don’t care what you think about rock music personally, if kids are liking it and playing it, then it’s doing its job.”

- Dave Hercock

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ones I was able to convince were the folks at the Elementary Level Home and School organization. They invited Wood to New Jersey to present a school assembly and to make the pitch for a student rock orchestra with electric strings. That assembly took place in March. “After having generated huge enthusiasm with the assembly for the elementary schools, we arranged for Mark to come back on June 2 of this year and do a show with the kids, with a view to raising enough money to buy some electric instruments and actually forming what we now officially call the Strings of Cinn,” says Hercock with a chuckle. “As soon as word spread that we would be doing a rock ’n’ roll show, I had kids from second to 12th grade step up wanting to be involved. We ended up with over 200 performers including every music teacher in the district, who performed onstage with the kids.” According to Hercock, after the show, faculty members across the district were so excited by what happened that they’re supporting expansion of the rock-education program and can’t wait to put together another rock show. “The concept of a rock orchestra is virtually a can’t-fail project,” Hercock says, “because everyone loves the music, and the kids, who were excited from day one, have been so excited by what happened that I keep hearing stories about how these kids are suddenly practicing for hours at a time, doing blues scales, improvising, even composing their own music for the first time ever. It’s a miracle. I had more support from the administration than I’ve ever had before, something of a rare thing in itself, given that we got them excited about a string-music program.” One of his next goals is to purchase a number of electric violins—most probably the Viper model that Wood designed and manufactures—and have them on hand at the junior high for kids who’ve been playing violin for years but want to switch to a “cooler” instrument. “Junior high is full of kids who just started learning how to play the electric guitar, who just started playing the bass,” Hercock says. “With electric violins at their disposal, the previously uncool violinists will jump from playing an ‘old-fashioned’ instrument to playing a super cool [electric] instrument. Not only playing it, but because they show up with several years of violin training, they will actually be playing it better than any of the so-called cool kids play their guitars and drums. They’ll instantly be at the top of the school totem pole, and for a young string player, that’s really saying something.” Another major sign that rock music was having a profoundly positive effect came when students in the Cinnaminson schools submitted their annual end-of-the-year essays describing what makes them feel they’ve been successful. For the first time ever, many of the string players wrote that playing the violin, or viola, or cello made them feel successful. “We’ve never gotten that in previous years,” Hercock says. “I think it goes back to what I said at the beginning—and I say this as a classically trained musician. I no longer care if these kids are starting out playing Beethoven or starting out playing the Rolling Stones. I don’t care whether you play an acoustic

violin or an electric violin. As long as you’re playing, it’s fantastic!” Esther Jacoby agrees. Her daughter, Katie, 15, has played the violin since she was small, but it wasn’t till she discovered electric violins that she began to see herself as a musician. She now owns one of Wood’s Viper models, for

which she saved up money by teaching violin lessons. She attends the Paul Green School of Rock Music in Downingtown, New York, has formed her own rock band with students from that school, and plays in a 20-person high-school-age string ensemble called Culmination. “She practices all the time,” says Jacoby. “Before the electric and before she started playing rock ’n’ roll, her enthusiasm for the violin had been waning. She’s had the Viper for a year and a half now, and playing the violin is now her passion. Fortunately, because it’s an electric, she can plug in her headphones and practice without the amp so the rest of us can sleep. Playing rock has definitely taken her down a different musical path than I had ever imagined.”

“Rock & roll changed my life!”

- Katie Jacoby

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Jacoby is fine with that. “I don’t mind at all,” she says. “But then, she’s playing a lot of classic ’70s and ’80s rock: Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, AC/DC, the kind of music my husband and I grew up with. We love it!” Though Katie’s high school in Hockessin, Delaware, where she will be a sophomore this year, has a strings program, she says the educators who direct it have so far resisted suggestions to incorporate electric strings and rock ’n’ roll. “It takes a teacher or leader with real vision to see the possibilities in an electric-strings educational program,” says Jacoby. “It’s really sad that so many of the local music teachers just aren’t interested in moving the strings program forward,” adds Katie. “These teachers need to realize that if they don’t keep the strings program moving forward with the rest of the world, eventually it’s going to die.” What kind of impact has the rock-strings program had on Katie? “Rock ’n’ roll changed my life!” she says. “When I grow up, I am going to be a rock star, and don’t laugh, because I am going to do it! I want to show the world that strings can rock as well as any electric guitar. I want to be part of the movement to make strings an accepted and regular part of every rock ’n’ roll band. When every rock band in America has a violinist, I want to work with symphony orchestras to get them to play more new kinds of music as well. It’s a big dream, but I’m going to work until I get there because it’s what I want to do.” For all her passion for rock, she still has a place in her heart for Bach. “I love classical music,” she says. “I still listen to it. I’m still inspired by it. A lot of it has the same technical virtuosity as Frank Zappa and progressive rock.” Asked if she’d lend her violin-playing skills should the local high school take the leap and establish a rock ’n’ roll strings orchestra, Katie says, “I’d definitely want to be a part of that! They should do it. I’m so ready to be a part of that, and I know I’m not alone.” This, in short, is what Mark Wood has been telling strings educators ever since that big night at the Rock Hall of Fame. “It’s so exciting to see a young person become so excited over a stringed instrument,” he says. “Music teachers are used to hearing how the kids actually think the cool instruments are the guitar and the bass and the drums, but I say, ‘No, no. Your violin is cool. Your cello is cool. Check out what we can do with these things.’ And then all of a sudden they’re going, ‘Wow, I didn’t know you could do that with a violin!’” Next year, Wood plans to launch an even bigger Electrify Your Strings tour, in which the Trans-Siberian Orchestra will cross the country playing concerts, conducting school workshops at schools, playing concerts with teen string players, and going door-to-door to persuade educators and school administrators to open up to the awesome might of electric rock ’n’ roll. “We are transforming the country,” he says, “and just wait till we attack Europe, wait till we go to England and France and Japan and China with this stuff. They’re going to be blown away. We’re on a mission here—an educational mission. And we are going to change the world.” For more information about rock orchestras, visit www.electrifyyourstrings.com.

Excerpted from Strings magazine, November 2005, No.133