Seven students meet daily in the Walker Fine Arts Center’s music laboratory to produce electronic music. “The boys come from three countries — South Africa, Scotland, and the United States,” Wallace says. “They bring varying levels of experience to the group and spur one another to great composition.”

Electronic music forms the basis for most pop and rap songs, and producing it requires more than musical skill. Students operate computer programs like Logic Pro, Ableton Live, and Massive to create and perfect their compositions. Cameron Clark ’17, who is visiting this trimester from Michaelhouse, a senior boys’ school in South Africa, has been working with these programs for several months. “I had an urge to get musically involved,” he says, “but even though we had a piano in my house, I never took lessons. That meant the only way I could make music was to use a computer.” Since he first downloaded a free trial of Ableton Live last December, he’s produced about twenty songs and plans to try his hand at multiple electronic subgenres.

Cameron’s countryman Chizembi Sakulanda ’17, who is visiting this trimester from Hilton College, had plenty of music training as a child. “I got bored with classical music when I got to high school,” the young pianist says. “I was always a fan of pop music, though, so when I heard about the electronic music class, I wanted to take it and learn more about how my favorite music is made.” Wallace Hornady calls Chizembi’s knowledge of popular music “encyclopedic.”

On Saturdays, the students share with each other something they’ve worked on during the week, often prefacing their demos with the refrain, “I was just messing around.” The pieces range widely. There is a “love song” that English-speaking Union student Iain Leggat ’16 composed of premade loops over which he and Wallace improvise lyrics. That piece stands in contrast to the percussive rap sounds of Mason Roberts ’18 of Durham, North Carolina. Daniel Trengove ’17 is working in the Kwaito subgenre popular in his home country of South Africa where he attends St. John’s College; while his piece plays, Chizembi pipes in with a whistled melody. Guy, a piano and saxophone player from Farmville, Virginia, shows off a piece comprising original loops he recorded by playing them on the computer’s keyboard. Braxton Clark ’18 of Columbia, South Carolina, had his interest in electronic music piqued when his Introduction to Music class came to the lab during his third-form year.

Though layering loops of rhythm, harmony, samples, and melody via a computer program might seem to the boys like “messing around,” far more is going on in this peer-to-peer teaching collaboration. The class learned about the history of electronic music from James Bailey ’12, and each boy follows his own syllabus. They get and give each other lessons in music theory, keyboarding, and the science of analog sound production. Even more important, says Wallace Hornady, “The boys are collaborating and benefiting from cross-pollination across continents and across forms. They show up everyday self-motivated to work.”