Thesis inspired education non-profit

Taking a cue from Wendy Kopp '89, whose senior thesis became a nationally known nonprofit organization, Christoph Geiseler '04 has turned his own thesis into a music appreciation program for inner-city children.

The nonprofit, Modern Improvisational Music Appreciation (MIMA) Music, runs an after-school program called Spinjazz. The program held its first class Wednesday.

"Music education should not be seen as a quick way to make money. It should be seen as a way to bring people together," Geiseler said.

Started last year in Trenton at the Westminister Presbyterian Church, Spinjazz has expanded to five locations in Trenton and Newark.

The lessons are structured around an improvisational jam session that teaches music appreciation and history, as well as basic collaborative music-making skills. The goal is to get people excited about music at an early age.

MIMA's Spinjazz afternoon program is staffed by 20 college student volunteers from the University and the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Once a week for 10 weeks, the students spend an hour teaching music to kids ages eight to 12.

The student volunteers are enthusiastic about the project. "Music education is getting squeezed out of the schools and it should not be so," Spinjazz volunteer Mason Williams '06 said.

Scott Burnham, chair of the music department and one of MIMA's advisers, said the burgeoning organization has a promising future.

"I think that [MIMA] will continue to grow beyond the New Jersey area. I would not be surprised if it took off along the lines of Teach [for] America," Burnham said in an email.

The Spinjazz program grew out of Geiseler's senior thesis. He had originally planned to write it on the relationship of the body politick to electronic music in Europe, but after traveling to Germany on thesis funding, he changed his mind.

"Going to Germany, and seeing how universal of a language music is, motivated me to try to relate to something more relevant to our daily lives at Princeton and growing up in the United States," Geiseler said.

He got the idea for the nonprofit from reading Kopp's thesis, which eventually led to Teach for America.

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Burnham praised Geiseler's organizational skills as critical to his founding and running a nonprofit. "Christoph has a great knack for getting people on board without getting in anyone's face," he said.

The organization took its name from the campus group of the same name, which Geiseler headed his senior year. This year, the student group is headed by Williams. It seeks to encourage appreciation for music among Princeton students by bringing musicians to perform on campus.

MIMA volunteers said they were able to apply what they learned in college to their teaching. Williams fondly recalled the time he and Michael Yang '04 taught a lesson at MIMA after a master class with Zakir Hussain, a world-famous tabla player who taught them a drumming concept involving hand-clapping and speaking syllables.

Without a lesson plan, they decided to try out what they had just learned at Westminster Presbyterian. The kids "were stomping their feet for the bass drum, clapping their hands for the snare and snapping for the high hat. Once they really got a rhythm going, we got the kids to do the equivalent on the drum kit. And those kids that were not playing were dancing to the beat," Williams said.

William has high hopes for the program's future. He said that its success lies in the fact that "the program ultimately sells itself. All of us college musicians aspire to give back."