Ian Jacoby of Laarks on Music and Arts Education

How did you get into making music, and how did arts education (or lack thereof) affect you and your music?

I got into making music pretty early in high school, probably like halfway through my freshman year. We had a fairly good jazz program at school, and I was one of those dorky guys carrying around a trombone at 6:45 in the morning. I went from that to upright bass. I got slightly cooler, but it got even harder to carry an upright at 6:45 in the morning. I went from bass to piano. It’s probably the coolest of the three, but don’t even get me started on trying to lug one of those around. It’s not happening.

Anyway, I had a couple of really great teachers in high school that gave me a huge appreciation for all things musical. Probably the best was Mr. Brown. The guy had like a doctorate in trumpet (for real, a fricking doctor of trumpet) and he’d say all these weird things to us to get us to practice. During my junior year we had some budget cuts, and they ended up terminating his position. It was total bullshit, and we were all pretty irked about it. I think that the football team had gone like, 0-10 that year and we were all just wishing that they’d fire the football coach or close the stadium or something. That didn’t happen, so to retaliate a bunch of us who played in the pep band wrote this really sarcastic song called, “If there weren’t sports, I’d kill myself,” and we’d sort of play it and roll our eyes while the jocks called us names. We were sort of jerks. Don’t get me wrong, I think that sports and music can coexist, but at my school it didn’t necessarily happen that way.

I was writing an article for a magazine called Volume One about a math professor who is trying to map out why we like music. He cited some source that said basically everything we know about music comes to us between the ages of like six and 17, like that time is just crucial to development. He believed that it was as important as math or science or whatever. I’m hopeful that as science progresses, we’re going to see that the kids humming stupid nonsense in class were actually the ones getting it right. I hope that’s true anyway, you know, for my sake.

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