No Guitar Needed: Rutgers–Camden Students Make Music the Digital Way

CAMDEN - Almost from birth, the “millennial” generation has had digital music at their fingertips for downloading and sharing. An entire generation will never know music libraries as immovable stacks, but as sleek devices that weigh less than car keys.

Now, a Rutgers–Camden course on music composition is teaching these tech-savvy students to make their own melodic creations. Forget about electric guitars; in this class, laptops are required to rock.

In Computer Applications in Music taught by Mark Zaki, a newly appointed assistant professor of music at Rutgers–Camden, students will start the semester by reevaluating what a song even is theoretically and begin composing on a smaller scale, like for an answering machine message – an early assignment in the course.  “Music is a lot more than loops and beats and something you can dance to. I want to open students’ ears to hearing different kinds of sounds,” says Zaki, who most recently taught music composition at the University of California at Irvine.

By the close of the course students will submit their own original five-minute scores to Zaki, whose credits include work on more than 50 films, TV programs, theater and other recording projects. He has written original scores for the film “The Eyes of Van Gogh” and the PBS documentary “The Political Dr. Seuss,” which was nominated for a Peabody Award.  In addition to Zaki’s composition background, he is also a violinist.  He can be heard playing on the film scores for “Casanova,” staring Heath Ledger, and the popular anime “Kiki’s Delivery Service.” Later this month, Zaki will accompany soprano Julianne Baird, a distinguished professor of music at Rutgers–Camden, in a noontime concert on campus on Wednesday, Oct. 22.

Much has changed in music education since Zaki first learned the violin at age 4. Today students play different kinds of instruments, like the laptop, and their approach to music reflects this more immediate, digital world. “When I first learned how to compose I had to create within rule and structure, with certain disciplines I had to master. Today’s students are just as musical, but they are children of the Internet, which has helped them become really good at cataloguing things,” he notes. That ability will come in handy when the students discover the resources available in Logic and Reason, the music software programs students will use for class.

“I want to help their personalities and their music come out. Composing music will be a mirror into who they are.”

Zaki, a graduate of Rutgers and Princeton Universities, aims to nurture the musical talent at Rutgers–Camden beyond just this class by eventually establishing a recording studio on campus.

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