What's a Blackball?: A Wired Q&A

Why electronic music?
Do at risk-youth and correctional inmates really need to play synthesisers?

Yes.

Why?

Contemporary, mainstream music is called "pop" for a very good reason. While current musical trends may seem disposable and insubstantial, they represent the music that most people listen and relate to. Yet music education is based on traditional models: classical instruments and content, sight-reading, theory and drilling.

So?

We're missing a precious opportunity to reach out the marginalized with the music that means most to them.

Isn't electronic music technology bulky, expensive and hard to use?

Yes, which is why Blackball proffers regularly-scheduled classroom workshops with hands-on access to instruments and equipment, along with a fun, interactive immersion in the methods, technologies and origins of electronic music.

How does Blackball work?

• Blackball began as a summer day-camp session at The Toronto Kiwanis Boys' and Girls' Clubs. Once-weekly after-school sessions are currently taking place at TKGBC.
• Sessions are designed for up to 12 clients, with plans to expand to 2-4 after-school weekly sessions and 1-3 weekly summer day camp sessions.
• Program delivery is "out of a car trunk," allowing Blackball to operate in multiple sites.
• In 2016, Blackball will develop workshops for inmates in provincial and federal correctional facilities.
• Blackball is 100 per cent donor-funded and free to all clients.

What is the impact?

Clients get:

musical smarts while navigating complex technology;

a taste for creative collaboration;
the self-esteem and confidence unique to the experience of musical performance and
transferable skills training unavailable elsewhere.

Blvckbvll is incorporated under the Canada Not-for-profit Corporations Act as of 29 September 2015.

Blackball: Unplugging Electronic Music.

As a cultural phenomenon, electronic music has hit its stride.

In 2015, computer-driven sequences and samples dominate the web, the airwaves, the dance floor and film soundtracks as never before and DJ-Producers are as famous than movie stars.

Yet, behind the hype and glitter is an authentic and protean art form. For every hot DJ, there's an innovator, an iconoclast, a rule-breaker. There are mentors, disciplined practitioners, genre-benders and passionately devoted listeners and fans of every age, everywhere.

When Robert Moog developed the first music synthesizer at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Centre, he probably did not envision the stranglehold his invention would take on contemporary music.

An art form practiced by huddled figures in dark nightclubs seems an unlikely agent for social change. To its detractors, EDM isn't much more than that annoying thump from a passing car, or worse: the childlike backbeat for a stream of Hip-Hop profanities, the empty heartbeat of the discotheque—a repetitious soundtrack for hedonism, indulgence and excess.

Blackball was created in the belief that electronic music is a vibrant musical and cultural force with enormous potential for empowering, inspiring and teaching.

In London's grand age of gentlemen's clubs, to be "blackballed" was a one-way ticket to disgrace and obscurity. 

Blackballing electronic music could mean its salvation.

This is a-still evolving, multifaceted art form, with millions or even billions of followers. 

Now is the time for electronic music to be taken back to its birthplace—the classroom.

† http://djzimmie.com/2013/09/05/end-of-djing/