Why Music Belongs in Every School (Tony Mazzocchi, President of Kaufman Music Center)
Also available on: Apple Podcasts · Spotify
Tony Mazzocchi, President and CEO of the Kaufman Music Center, shares how a career that started with trombone and freelance performance unexpectedly led to teaching, higher education, and arts leadership. We talk about building purpose, why music should be part of every student’s education, and why human creativity and connection may matter even more in the age of AI.
Key Takeaways
Purpose is not always something you suddenly discover. It can develop over time through your skills, values, responsibilities, and the problems you care enough to solve.
Going all in on something can teach you skills that become useful far beyond the original career you were pursuing.
Music education develops much more than musicianship. Listening, leadership, discipline, collaboration, and creativity can carry into almost any path.
Strong arts programs need more than good teachers. Leadership support, meaningful time during the school day, and proper resources all matter.
As technology becomes more accessible, the human using it becomes the differentiator. Creativity, judgment, individual experience, and connection become even more valuable.
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Transcript:
00:00:00 Building Purpose Through Music
Mike Zimmerlich: Hey, Tony, how are you?
Tony Mazzocchi: Hey, Mike, great to be here.
Mike Zimmerlich: Thank you so much for being on the show. I really do appreciate it. We’ll definitely be talking about this quite a bit, but music education has been a part of my life all my life. This is a topic that is actually extremely important to me, and it definitely has given me a lot of guidance in my life from early childhood even up to today.
I don’t get the chance to play music as much as I used to, but I still find elements throughout my life where playing music and being part of music is incorporated into what I do today. One of the things I saw you did an op-ed piece about earlier this year, and one of the things that really resonated with me was purpose.
It’s something that I really reflected on because I found that it has given me purpose in my life and throughout everything that I do. I want to know what that means to you. What does finding your purpose mean?
Tony Mazzocchi: It’s a really great question. I think the way I would not answer it is, “Find what you’re passionate about.” I know we hear that a lot, but I don’t think about it like that. It’s a little too easy and maybe not exactly how purpose works.
I’m not sure purpose is something you find. I think it’s something you build over time by paying attention to where your abilities and your values and the needs of other people perhaps interact.
Sometimes we tell young people, maybe too often, that somewhere out there there’s this singular passion they’re supposed to discover, and once they find it, everything’s going to make sense.
I haven’t found life to work that way. My purpose has emerged from doing very difficult things, certainly getting really good at something, being useful to other people, and then slowly understanding what I’ve cared enough about to take responsibility for.
Music happened to teach me a lot about that. When you’re young, you practice because you want to become a better player. Then eventually you discover that the point isn’t simply how well you play your instrument. It’s how well you listen, work with others, contribute, lead, all those things.
So I would just tell somebody when they ask me, “What’s my purpose?” Just go do things. Get really, really good at something, at least, and help people through that. Put yourself in situations where other people depend on you. I really like to do that.
Pay attention to the problems in the world that bother you enough that you feel compelled to do something about them.
Purpose tends to reveal itself through that kind of engagement. As we talk about education, I think education shouldn’t necessarily be expected to give young people a purpose. It should [unclear] them sufficiently so that they are capable of constructing one themselves. Does that make sense?
Mike Zimmerlich: It all makes total sense, and I’m a very big believer in that myself. In fact, I’ve been an adjunct professor at the college level before, so it’s quite different than when you’re teaching middle school or even high school levels.
One of the things I’ve always been a big believer in is, as you mentioned, providing the tools for them to learn, not necessarily just telling them what they should know. It’s what they should be looking out for. How do they absorb this information? How do they interpret this information?
Being a guide for them because, especially in today’s society and especially in the work that we do, there really is no one right way to do things.
There’s no one path. In fact, I believe there’s an infinite number of paths that you can take to be fulfilled and to be successful in whatever you want to do in life. So I believe more strongly in being a guide in that particular way and showing students these are the different directions that you can go.
Tony Mazzocchi: Well, that’s what I’ve been writing about and talking about because what you just said is true now more than ever, and I think that’s because of AI.
The question upon us is, what is education for? What are we teaching students how to do? We’ve just come out of this time where we decided that doing well at a few different subjects would equal college and a great life afterwards, right?
This hyper-specialization came into education where, “I’m going to be really good at this one thing.” Now I would argue that we have to be good at many things and certainly develop all of our possible capacities that make us very much human, engage us to the fullest potential, so that we can utilize this technology instead of the technology utilizing us.
That’s where the arts play a huge role, and music plays a huge role. So back to purpose, this is where I live and breathe right now, but that’s not anywhere where I thought I’d live and breathe 15 years ago.
00:06:00 From Trombone to a Music Career
Mike Zimmerlich: So let me ask you this. We’re going to go way back. You mentioned before practicing as a child. What instruments did you learn how to play? What were your instruments?
Tony Mazzocchi: I was a trombone player. All in on trombone.
Mike Zimmerlich: Okay. I was a trumpet player, so we’re in the brass family. It’s all cool.
Tony Mazzocchi: Well, we’re there. We’re there.
Mike Zimmerlich: I like how you mentioned that purpose is something that is a progression. When you were younger, did you find it?
For some people, they’re just going through the flow, right? It’s like, okay, I’m taking music because I have to take an instrument, or my parents are telling me that I have to practice and so forth.
Then there are some others that, at a very early age, are like, “No, this is what I want to do. This is what I want to do with my life. This is my purpose.”
Did you find that earlier on, or were you still trying to discover what you wanted to do?
Tony Mazzocchi: Well, both, I think. I started trombone in public school, and when I first started playing at a very young age, fourth grade, I happened to take to it pretty well. Some people would say that was natural talent, which I don’t necessarily believe in, but we can get to that.
I was pretty good at it. Because I was pretty good at it, I got more attention than others, especially as a trombone player. If you remember in band, everybody wants a good trombone player.
Mike Zimmerlich: It’s true.
Tony Mazzocchi: That kind of attention was very important to me at the time, very important to me socially and emotionally. So I stuck with it.
There were several times in middle school where I wanted to quit. I really enjoyed visual art. I enjoyed sports a lot. Back in the day, it wasn’t too cool to play in band, so I was getting a lot of pressure from my friends.
There was a lot going on, and luckily I had a few people who wouldn’t let me quit.
Then in high school, it started to become a little more of my identity. But I didn’t know that I really wanted to possibly go into this as a career almost until my junior to senior year.
Even then, I wasn’t sure what that really meant, but I knew that I loved doing it and I wanted to do it and explore it to the nth degree.
Even when I was in college, I thought about doing other things. Even when I graduated and was performing at the professional level, I thought of doing other things.
When you think about these split seconds in your life where it could go one way or another, I shudder to think where I would’ve been if I had decided to go on to do something else.
I had opportunities to have a life outside of music quite a few times, and I chose not to do that. But it was close.
Mike Zimmerlich: It’s really interesting because you did go specifically to a school that focuses on music. You went to the Manhattan School of Music and got your bachelor’s and master’s there.
It’s interesting that you still weren’t sure if you wanted to pursue music or not. Usually, most people will get a degree in science or engineering or something that they know, especially at the time, was very versatile and could get you lots of different job opportunities.
But you were so steadfast in getting a degree in music, even though you weren’t sure if that was actually going to be the path for you.
Tony Mazzocchi: Yeah, that was a very intentional decision that I made at the time. I did not know if it was the right decision, but I did know this: if I went to a school, especially a university with a music school in it, where there were all these different things to do and all these different things to explore, I was going to get caught up in doing a lot of different things and not finding where my full potential was as a musician.
The reason why I went to a music conservatory, which really scared me, was because I did not like being around and did not feel comfortable around people who were all in. They were like, “I’m doing this. I love nothing else but this, and this is what I’m all about.”
But I knew that I had to immerse myself in that environment. I had to in order to find out if I wanted to do it or not, so that I could say, “Look, I dove headfirst. Now I know that I want to.”
After my sophomore year there, I said, “Wow, this is so intense and this is all anybody thinks about, and I think about a lot of different things. Maybe I should go do something else.”
But a few things happened and I stuck with it. That was the way I went about it. I knew that about myself, that it would’ve been dangerous if I gave myself too many opportunities at that age.
Mike Zimmerlich: It sounds like there’s something to be said about having focus, right? It’s an interesting balance between having a particular focus and, again, finding that purpose.
I think there’s also a difference between purpose and focus because finding your purpose may take a while and progress and change and adapt along the way.
But in order to find that purpose, you have to be at least focused in some areas because if you’re doing too many different things, then you’re not going to really dive into it and truly experience what it’s actually like if you’re just dabbling.
It’s an interesting balance between those two things.
Tony Mazzocchi: It’s very interesting, and I imagine that it differs by the person.
I know it was great for me because I could argue against myself and say the one thing about music conservatory that I think is changing a little bit now is it did not necessarily give me all of the tools that I needed to be doing the work that I’m actually doing right now.
I meet a lot of students who are embedded in conservatory. I love it when they call me and say, “What’s nonprofit leadership like? How do you do that? And how do you do all of these things?”
My answer is, “Baptism by fire, baby.”
But the fact is that it doesn’t necessarily need to be like that. It is quite complicated, but I think at the nucleus, doing something and engaging with it with all of yourself, with all of your might, as long as you understand that you are also developing qualities that you need for other things, is the sweet spot.
Mike Zimmerlich: I do want to talk about post-graduation because there were several years there that you weren’t really doing too much in music and you ended up doing other things. You even mentioned yourself that there were a number of times where you had opportunities come to you that were not music-related at all.
Tony Mazzocchi: Well, yeah. When I was in my master’s, I had a few opportunities to play professionally as a freelancer, and that really juiced me up. I was like, “Oh my gosh, there’s a light at the end of this tunnel. There’s something going on.”
Of course, I was taking orchestral auditions at the same time. That wasn’t going so well.
But I saw that there was the potential to make money playing the trombone post-school. The only problem was that those opportunities were few and far between, especially right after school.
So I went back home. I lived at home. I was a bartender. I went to bartending school and became a really good bartender, actually, and really learned how to engage and talk with people there.
I took on odd jobs. I worked in some restaurants. As a matter of fact, somebody asked if I wanted to be elevated into managing a pretty nice restaurant, and that was this one point where I was like, “Uh-oh.”
Bartending scared me too because at the time it made a lot of money, and the other bartenders owned their own bars, and it was this world.
I said, “Okay, this is amazing, but I’ve got to get out of this world.”
Luckily, I got called to go on a tour with a ballet company, as a trombonist, not a ballet dancer. It was a multi-month tour. It barely paid anything, but I took it because I knew that was going to get me back into the music scene.
Then I was able to build up a pretty successful freelance career on top of that.
But boy, I had so many odd jobs. It was unbelievable.
00:15:00 The Unexpected Path to Teaching
Mike Zimmerlich: So tell me how it came about that you started teaching in public education.
It sounds like your trajectory at the time, outside of the odd jobs, was still music performance at a professional level.
Was there a particular time or moment? Did the opportunity come to you, or did the realization come that you’d really rather go into education instead? How did that all come about?
Tony Mazzocchi: No. Zero realization.
I was living in Los Angeles. Trombone took me over there along with a girl. I was starting to really establish myself as a professional trombonist in L.A., but I really just was not very happy there.
I wanted to come back to New York. I thought that perhaps my friends would get me subbing on a Broadway show or doing something like that because, at that point, I was a trombonist, and I couldn’t come back and bartend again. That wasn’t going to happen. I’d rather stay in L.A.
A friend of mine called me. He was at a barbecue, and he said, “Hey, I’ve got somebody here. I don’t know if this interests you.”
Long story short, there was a principal who wanted to get this band program going at her middle school, a Title I middle school in Marine Park, Brooklyn.
She said, “Look, you want to come be a band director?”
I had never done anything of this sort. I did not have an ed degree. I actually thought it was a joke.
I said, “Well, how long do I have to think about this?”
I’ll never forget, she said, “Twelve hours.”
Mike Zimmerlich: Twelve hours?
Tony Mazzocchi: Yeah, that was it. It was 12 hours, and I had to move to New York and start in a week because it was the end of August.
Actually, it was this time in 2001. My first day was supposed to be 9/11.
I was with my roommate in L.A. and I said, “School band director? What the hell?”
He says, “Look, do it for a month and get back on the freelance scene.”
I came back. Real long story short, I did it for 10 years.
It changed my life. It changed my worldview. It changed my purpose. It was one of the most incredible things that’s ever happened to me and one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done with my life.
I had no idea that would ever be the case.
That’s how it goes, right? That’s how it goes. It’s really extraordinary that that happened. Extraordinary.
Mike Zimmerlich: So you taught at the middle school level for 10 years, and after that point you went on to become a director at a number of other schools.
I do want to also point out that being a public educator on Long Island is probably one of the most secure jobs ever. Just for context for those who are not familiar, especially in New York and on Long Island, they have a very strong teachers union there.
I have family members who have been public teachers, also in music, so I’m very familiar with this. You get paid very well, you have really good benefits, and your job stability is absolutely incredible.
I just want to put that into context because you had been in for 10 years and then moved on. You went to, I believe, Montclair and also Kinhaven as well.
Did that come to you? Did you feel like you wanted to continue to broaden your horizons?
Tony Mazzocchi: Yeah. Actually, even while I was teaching middle school, I was freelancing at night. I became an adjunct professor at Montclair.
I had taught at Kinhaven in the summers for a while, which was a job that was given to me as a trombone instructor really kind of out of the blue.
So I was doing all these different things.
One thing I got really passionate about when we built this incredible program in Brooklyn, and I mean an incredible band program in Brooklyn, was I went from low expectations of students from low socioeconomic families to being wrong about all of that and creating this amazing program.
When I saw what students were able to do, all students, I realized that I couldn’t just do this in this one school.
I needed to figure out how to build awareness of this myth that I felt everybody was living under, that this is just for some people and not for others.
I found that music was for everybody.
That natural talent that I talked to you about, that I thought I had, I found that almost everybody had it.
I saw this school completely transformed through its band program and everybody in it. I wanted to teach teachers how to do what I was doing.
Then I became a supervisor of the arts in a K through 12 school district, which led me to become the director of the John J. Cali School of Music at Montclair State University.
00:21:00 Why Music Is for Everybody
Tony Mazzocchi: But this really was about, how can I take the impact that I made at this school and scale this, and change people’s minds about the role of music and the arts in public education?
I thought it was very tangential when I went through the education system, and I was wrong.
I just couldn’t unsee what I saw, and I had to figure out a way to scale it.
Fast-forward to today, where we’re asking that question, “What’s education for?” Because of AI, what do we do?
I clearly can say I’ve seen what happens when schools have a profound amount of arts, and I’ve seen what happens when they don’t.
This is absolutely what the doctor ordered at this moment in human history.
Mike Zimmerlich: I completely agree with you.
I want to talk more about when you mentioned the fact that music is for everybody. I think that’s very important to dive into further because I totally agree with you.
Just because you have music in your life and you’re performing doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the direction you’re going to go as a profession.
It has so many other fundamentals that come along with it.
You were talking a little bit before about finding that purpose, which I think music can also help you find, but in ways that you don’t even think about.
To me, being part of the music program instilled things such as leadership. That was a big one.
Especially when you’re in programs like I was, marching band and jazz band and all those different aspects, there’s a lot of leadership going on.
Sometimes you are in a position of leadership yourself, especially when I was getting to the junior and senior level. But even earlier on, I had to listen to my own peers. It wasn’t even the teachers, but my own peers that I also had to listen to.
So it established in me this sense of leadership and, of course, this sense of discipline as well.
Especially with a music program, you are very disciplined because you have to practice. You have to show up.
You are engaging in something that involves others, so you have to bring your all to that because if you don’t perform well, you can potentially let everyone else down. Performing well is subjective, but you know what I mean.
You have to show up and give it your all and give it your best because this is a group effort. It’s not an individual effort. It’s a group effort.
Tony Mazzocchi: You’re right on all those counts.
When I say music is for everybody, it is for those reasons you said, the human capacities that it develops.
But also, listening to great music, whether it’s classical music or jazz, is also for everybody, and we’ve made that to be for just a few and not for others.
The enjoyment that we get is for everybody, and the emotions that we feel are for everybody.
When I found out what we did in this school could be scaled, and I looked at other schools around the nation, I realized very quickly that our public school system is built to say that it’s not for everybody.
It’s only for a chosen few. We’re going to offer it a half an hour one day a week and tell you to go home and practice. The ones who don’t, or the ones who don’t enough, aren’t talented, and the ones that do are.
And, “Why am I sending my kid to band if they’re not going to be a professional musician when they grow up?”
All of this has been baked into the cake, into the system.
I’ve said it on many other podcasts, but if we took any subject and did that to it and put it out on the margins, we’d be feeling that way about that subject.
That’s not what great societies have done throughout human history.
This is a new thing where we’ve taken the arts out of the school day. Great societies, the arts were just as much a part of the way we developed the whole human as anything else.
This is a new concept that’s got political winds in there and everything else, and it’s time for us to come full circle.
If we take the arts out of school at this particular point, we are doing our youngest citizens the biggest disservice that we could ever do.
Mike Zimmerlich: One of my favorite scenes in any film, have you ever seen the film Mr. Holland’s Opus?
Tony Mazzocchi: A couple times.
Mike Zimmerlich: It’s one of my favorites.
Tony Mazzocchi: They used to call me that when I...
Mike Zimmerlich: Mr. Holland? Yeah, I can see that.
For anybody who hasn’t seen it, it’s one of my favorite films of all time. It stars Richard Dreyfuss, and it’s a beautiful, beautiful film.
There is a scene, and spoiler alert if you have not seen it, where, surprise, surprise, they’re about to cut the arts programs basically out of the schools.
Richard Dreyfuss’s character, Mr. Holland, is talking about the fact that if it’s between the arts and reading and writing, the arts are going to get cut.
He responds, “You can cut basically all the arts out as much as you want, but sooner or later, these kids are going to not have anything to read or write about.”
That always rings true to me.
All those other subjects that you talked about, if there isn’t that expression of emotion or that sharing of emotion among others that you are getting in the school environment, again going back to that sense of purpose, where is the purpose?
That’s what connects us together, the arts and that creativity. Our culture is based upon this.
Even if you’re going into accounting, you still are appreciating the arts in some form or fashion. It may not be directly related to your work, but it’s still part of your life in some way.
People still need to be entertained. People still need to feel things. People will still want to go to a concert, go see a film, or go to a museum.
Those are still very important parts of our lives, and we have to have that institution in place that’s going to give children a place where they can explore that for themselves, wherever that leads them.
Tony Mazzocchi: I couldn’t agree more.
I think we’ve been in an era of, “What’s tested is measured,” right? People say, “Well, how do you measure that, and how do you quantify that?”
I think there are ways to do some of that, and there are reasons that we shouldn’t.
The fact of the matter is that some of those collaborative pieces, where you’re bringing yourself to affect the greater whole, are exactly what we need in society right now.
You don’t need to measure that. But when you see it occurring in schools, it’s loud and clear how important that is.
I say, “Look, go walk into a choir classroom.”
You have everything there for you. Excellence and equity and diversity and beauty. It’s all there right in front of you, manifesting itself in real time, in sound.
There’s no subject that can do that.
Some principals get it, and by the way, that’s where it happens. Others don’t. That doesn’t make them bad people. It just means that they’re not informed, and they’re being held accountable for what they think they’re being held accountable for.
I think we need a little more of a mandate when we talk about education policy.
I’ve been working with schools where principals are like, “Okay, we want to do more of this.”
The good news is they’ve got the autonomy to do that tomorrow. Every principal [unclear] their budget on their own without permission, for the most part. Everyone can adjust their schedule.
There are ones that do.
This isn’t a pie-in-the-sky idea. There are exemplars all around us. There’s no evidence on planet Earth that academics or anything else suffers when you add more arts into the school day.
00:30:00 Building and Scaling Music Education
Mike Zimmerlich: What do you feel constitutes a successful music program?
As you mentioned, you were developing this at the middle school in Brooklyn, but then also took those abilities and skills that you learned there into your other roles.
Is there anything in particular that you find has worked successfully for you when it comes to building these programs?
Tony Mazzocchi: Three things are kind of non-negotiable.
One is that you at least have support from leadership in saying, “We’d like to try this.”
Support from leadership, by extension, means you have support from the school saying, “We understand that this plays an important role in the lives of our young [unclear].”
That’s number one, just an overarching spirit of wanting to do this.
Number two, it needs to be equalized with the other subjects during the school day.
In other words, it really needs to be five days a week. Now, that is five times more than most places have it.
You don’t want to do that? Do it twice as much. Do it three times as much. But ideally, it is every day.
Every school system that I’ve worked in or overseen, I have expanded the amount of time in the school day for this.
Ideally, five days a week, which, by the way, sends a very clear message: reading, writing, math, the arts. It is equalized.
By equalized, the third thing is it is resourced.
And everybody says, “Well, how am I going to find the money? How am I going to find the money?”
Look what New York City’s doing right now. It put a moratorium on AI for the year, and therefore it has a lot of checks and balances in regard to technology being purchased this year.
A thousand dollars for an arts classroom can last an entire year, whereas people are spending $25,000, $50,000 on software that comes and goes, is not improving student achievement in any way, shape, or form.
What I’m saying is, I believe the money, to a great extent, already exists.
I’m not saying that government shouldn’t fund it more, that schools shouldn’t fund it more, but I am saying that reallocating some funds can go a really long way in supporting the arts.
I’ve seen it. I’ve done it. It can happen.
Mike Zimmerlich: So let’s talk about your current role. You are currently President and CEO of Kaufman Music Center. Can you talk more about how that came about?
Tony Mazzocchi: Well, another happy accident, kind of.
I was at the Cali School of Music as the director. I loved it there, and I wanted to step back and take a breather from higher education leadership.
I had this opportunity to settle down as a professor at Cali and spend a little more time in Vermont at Kinhaven, and that was going to be my little mini-retirement.
A very close friend of mine here was a former leader of the Center. She got a job elsewhere, and they called and wanted to talk.
Of course, I wanted to chat about it even though I thought the chances were slim. I was kind of resolute about taking a break, and I actually needed to do a few things in 2025.
To make a long story short, as we were talking, I go way back with the Center. I was an usher here when I was a kid, interestingly enough.
I partnered with the Center at the Cali School of Music to create a concert series here, so I knew it pretty well.
Of course, I was fascinated by Special Music School, which is a component of the Center.
It’s one of the three large pieces of the Center. There’s Merkin Concert Hall, there’s Lucy Moses School, which is a community arts school, and there’s Special Music School, which is a collaboration with the Department of Education.
I found myself getting unbelievably excited about the place.
Clearly, it was a full-circle moment coming back to New York City and the Department of Education. You can’t even make this stuff up.
I was fascinated by the level of everything going on here and the team that was already here of just fantastic people.
That was it. I wanted to do it, and I knew it was a really important time because this is a complete arts ecosystem here at Kaufman Music Center.
We have these incredible performances, world-class artists at Merkin Concert Hall, oftentimes in collaboration with the students here.
This community arts school serves thousands of people of all ages.
Then, when you have the only K through 12 in the nation that’s a public school that infuses music like this every single day, with the most extraordinary outcomes in every single way, as proof positive of everything I believe in my heart, it was time to come here, help this place become the best version of itself, and spend a lot of time telling the world that it exists because most people don’t know.
We’re trying to figure out how to educate young people. Let me show you how we do it.
There’s no evidence here this doesn’t work.
Luckily, New York City Public Schools said, “Not only do we love what you’re doing, but we have a school in Harlem that we’d like to reimagine. Let’s reimagine it with Kaufman as the model.”
That school’s starting on Thursday, which is two days from today. So really, really excited about this.
Mike Zimmerlich: Congratulations. That’s massive. Congratulations on that. That’s incredible.
Tell me more about the Special Music School. Is that what this is all about?
Tony Mazzocchi: Yeah. So this collaboration is, New York City Public Schools provides the teachers, obviously the academic curricula, we have to abide by New York City standards, and the principal, and it occurs in Kaufman Music Center space.
Kaufman Music Center provides all of the music instruction for the students, which includes five days a week of singing, dancing, music theory, music history, and private instruction for every student as part of the school day at no charge.
When music is embedded into the day like that each and every day, not only are these students extraordinary musicians, but we attract a very diverse cohort.
Thirty percent of our students live under the poverty line.
It just came out this week, we have the best average proficiency rate in math and ELA in the city. No accident. No accident.
We have a 100 percent college acceptance rate from the high school. We have some of the healthiest social-emotional environments you can find and all of that.
Again, we’re doing this on steroids, I call it, but if every school adopts some percentage of what we’re doing, they can’t go wrong. They can’t go wrong.
Mike Zimmerlich: It’s also amazing to see that you have now come to the point where, as you were mentioning before about what it takes to make a successful program, you need to have leadership on board.
Well, now you’re in the role of leadership. You’re in the role of essentially directing where this is now going.
Tony Mazzocchi: I am. It’s a real privilege.
I really want to use this as a beacon for education.
Right now, you cannot click on any news outlet and not see crisis in education. Student achievement is down. Mental health is really in crisis, and all of that is true.
Then we can come here and say, “This is a public school. It’s a public school, and it works.”
So let’s talk to the nation about why.
Make no mistake about it, music at the center of it is a huge reason why. Let’s try to scale this.
Of course, we are doing this at P.S. 149 in Harlem.
00:40:00 Creativity and Education in the Age of AI
Tony Mazzocchi: If every school decides to adopt a little more music and art because of this, in the age of AI, I’m optimistic that we can get back to that holistic human development as part of education that we need so, so much right now.
This is not about creating another fleet of professional musicians.
That’s not what this is about. That will be a side effect of what we do. It certainly is. We send students to Juilliard every year and beyond, but that’s not what this is about.
Mike Zimmerlich: So tell me more about what it’s about then.
We talk about the importance of the arts, but then also the change of AI. What is this now about moving forward?
Tony Mazzocchi: About developing people through music.
It is about developing the human capacities that our youngest citizens will need in order to traverse the ever-complicated and hyper-fast world that we live in.
When you think about it, when everyone has the same AI tool to use, which they arguably do now, but certainly everybody has the same technology at their fingertips, the differentiator is not going to be the technology. It’s going to be the human being utilizing that technology.
Creativity is going to be essential. The ability to see around corners.
All of these capacities that we all have, that I would argue our school system was training out of us all these years because of this hyper-standardized model that it adopted, are going to be more important than ever.
Which is why I think we do need to be far more analog in the way we teach students at the youngest ages, and then introduce technology, not the other way around.
I think that’s the moment we’re sitting in.
Other people are like, “No, no, we need more technology.”
And I say, “No, no. We need more arts. We need more human connection. We need more analog moments, and we need to really pay attention to how the brain develops and go there.”
In that answer, music has always been part of the solution and has never been part of the problem.
So that’s what this is about.
Mike Zimmerlich: I couldn’t agree more.
When I talk about AI and try to explain it to people, because there’s the concern about AI replacing jobs in general, and this is even in music, where you have services like Suno and all those other ones out there creating and generating music, or applications where even ChatGPT can help you write lyrics and all these things.
I see those as tools.
The way I try to explain it is this: AI technology now, large language models and models like Suno, that is the collective, as I say. That’s the collective experience.
It’s literally the experience of everything that’s on the internet, which at this point in time is probably the collective of the entire human experience up until this point.
So there’s that, and that’s extremely powerful.
But there’s also the individualized experience, and that’s what makes things unique because your individual experience is unique. No other person on Earth has that experience.
I liked what you said about, at an early age, making sure that they are incorporated into the analog aspect of music because I think that goes toward that individual experience.
So when they have access to all the information in the world that they can utilize at a collective level, they know how to instruct it. They know how to interact with it and how to extrapolate out of it, and also what’s useful to them and what’s not.
Because not everything that it gives you is going to be relevant or good or even accurate.
I think the technology and what it’s now providing to us is amazing, but it’s also a tool.
We still have to make sure that we emphasize that individual experience, which again comes into play in an educational system as well as specifically music, because I think there are very few things you can say are at an individual level more than the arts themselves.
Tony Mazzocchi: Agreed.
They have to be able to contribute into the ecosystem as well and create new ideas out of it.
If it’s the technology being the only thing creating the new ideas, what are we doing anymore?
Mike Zimmerlich: Yeah, it’s just going to keep regurgitating the same stuff, right?
It’s interesting because, as humans, even in music, we do that, right?
We emulate. What is it? Steal Like an Artist. Exactly.
We listen to other musicians and other artists, and we start by emulating their work, but then we find our own take on it.
That’s where the individualism comes into play. We’re not just regurgitating it out.
That’s what AI essentially is, mostly pattern recognition. It’s taking patterns.
Even though, as humans, we’re doing that to some level, there’s a difference.
It might be that I listened to this particular music and I was at this point in my life where it resonated with me in this particular way. It made me feel a certain way that I want to now convey in the music that I’m doing, whether it’s through writing that music, recording that music, or even performing it.
Maybe it made me feel a certain way, and that’s impacting the way I perform that particular piece of music because of how I experienced it at that point in time.
Technology can’t replace that.
That’s why, again, going down to that individual experience and how important that is, we need to give people the opportunity to have these different types of experiences.
Tony Mazzocchi: Couldn’t have said it better.
I still will go to, there’s more brain research that’s gone on now in the past 10 years than, like, the hundred years combined before it.
Music and the brain, arts and the brain, and the way that we develop the brain really need to be a part of the conversation here.
I was watching that MIT study on AI usage and saw that it’s literally not engaging any of the brain when we’re utilizing it.
There’s a lot going on right now. It’s a watershed moment, quite frankly.
The education system is floundering a bit, and we’ve got to figure this out.
Again, I feel like my collective professional life has led to this moment where I need to lift up this particular organization as being part of the answer as we move forward.
Because it is.
If you want to have some hope, just walk the hallways in this school with me every day.
No joke. Just extraordinary what’s going on here with joy. With joy.
00:48:00 First Concerts and Final Advice
Mike Zimmerlich: We can start wrapping things up here. I do have a couple of wrap-up questions for you.
What was the very first concert that you ever went to?
Tony Mazzocchi: Man, when I was a kid, I did not grow up with music in the house.
When I finally was able to listen to music, my parents got a record player and I listened to it. It blew my mind.
But I was also not allowed to go to concerts, which really was rough.
I think the first concert I went to was probably, it’s not very memorable, either a symphony orchestra concert or a jazz concert.
I went to the ballet when I was younger. But I do not have that first concert experience.
The first rock concert I ever went to was Red Hot Chili Peppers, and I was already in college. That was memorable.
I was like, “Man, why wasn’t I at these things all throughout high school?”
Mike Zimmerlich: I appreciate the fact that you mentioned your first one was an orchestra, but I’m also glad you mentioned the rock concert.
I have to ask because I’m a big Chili Peppers fan. What tour was this? What year was this?
Tony Mazzocchi: Blood Sugar Sex Magik.
Mike Zimmerlich: Wow. Really old school. Wow.
Tony Mazzocchi: Yeah, that was like 1992.
Mike Zimmerlich: Wow.
Tony Mazzocchi: ’93.
But tonight, because I’m a huge hard rock and heavy metal fan actually, at the Center we’re hosting Dave Mustaine from Megadeth.
Mike Zimmerlich: Nice.
Tony Mazzocchi: I’m at a full-circle moment. I’m hoping to meet him.
So anyway, yes, I finally got some rock concerts out of my system, but I missed a lot growing up. Missed a lot.
Mike Zimmerlich: Do you have a go-to artist that you’re listening to now that you would like to mention? It could be anything.
Tony Mazzocchi: Oh man, my playlist is so ridiculous. It’s ridiculous what’s on my playlist.
Between my chief artistic planning officer, who sends me things all the time like, “Check this out. Would you like to have him at the hall?” or “Listen to this,” to me listening to my ’80s hard rock and heavy metal, there’s nothing in particular that I do.
But not a day goes by where I don’t listen to one of my favorite rock bands called The Cult.
Mike Zimmerlich: Nice.
Tony Mazzocchi: I love them.
But no, there’s always something new coming out, which is really fascinating. That is the beauty of streaming.
I’m able to just check out new things.
Nothing really comes to mind. Every single day I listen to so many different things. It’s pretty extraordinary, though.
Mike Zimmerlich: If you were only able to give one piece of advice, what would that one piece of advice be?
Tony Mazzocchi: Take care of yourself.
Take care of what you eat. Take care of how you sleep. Take care of how you exercise. Take care of what you tell yourself, that voice inside of your head.
Take care of everything you can about yourself.
It’s one of the only things you’re in control of in this life. Most things are out of your control.
So just take care of yourself.
Mike Zimmerlich: I couldn’t agree more.
Well, thank you so much, Tony, for being on the show. I really do appreciate it.
I do want to say on a personal note how much I admire the work that you’re doing.
I mentioned a couple of times how much music education means to me. It’s been a part of my life pretty much all my life, ever since I was four or five years old.
I just want to say how inspiring it is to see the work that you’re doing and how you are incorporating music into what makes sense in today’s society and continuing to do this great and amazing work.
So thank you for everything that you’re doing. It’s truly incredible.
Tony Mazzocchi: Well, that means a lot to me, Mike.
Actually, through the screen I can see while I’m talking, your eyes are lighting up.
So you know exactly because you’ve experienced it yourself. I can tell.
Thank you.