The VH1 Save The Music Foundation has announced a program that will provide financial aid towards electronic music creation, production training and recording for school children.
The J Dilla Music Tech Grant, named after the late, pioneering producer, will be available to state-educated high school students in America, in line with the foundation’s ethos that ‘every child deserves music’.
The primary aim of the grant is to incorporate nontraditional instruments into music education. Schools receiving this help will also be given an equipment package containing computer hardware, software, books and instruments.
Executive director of VH1 Save The Music Foundation, Henry Donahue, personally announced the launch through Twitter, explaining that the program will be “bringing gear and instruction to schools around the country on the fundamentals of electronic music production, DJ’ing and beatmaking”.
In sharing news of the grant, Donahue also drew upon a 2014 Kanye West quote, where the rapper questioned, ‘We gotta make music and think, ‘If Dilla was alive, would he like this?'”. Through the foundation’s Twitter page, the director concluded, “schools wanted to see a music education program that reflected the way people make hip hop, when we started talking about people who could be the ‘patron saint’ of this program, it was clear that J Dilla was the one”.
The grant has been developed in partnership with Arizona State University and Pharrell Williams’ collective i am OTHER.
