Arts This Week: Henry Stillerman Junior Capstone Project “Cascadia”
By Sage Tanguay
Coco Ahn 00:01
You’re listening to WTJU Charlottesville. Monticello High School junior Henry Stillerman is producing his junior capstone project on electronic synthwave music and sharing it with a wider audience. Henry’s album, Cascadia, is out on all streaming platforms. For art this week, we spoke with him.
Henry Stillerman 00:18
I’m Henry Stillerman, I go to Monticello High School, and I’ve been working on an album for the last eight months for my junior capstone project, and I’m really excited to be putting myself out there.
So our junior capstone project, it was started by my language arts teacher, Mr. Eliason, and he’s challenging us to find a field that we’re interested in for a career in the future, and experimenting in that field, reaching out to others of experience in that field. I grew up playing guitar. I used to play a little bit like on the Downtown Mall and then some local youth shows. And as quarantine hit, I kind of started to become more introverted, so I stepped away from performing, and kind of put myself behind the scenes. And that’s kind of where I found audio production. I just really enjoyed it, because it allowed me to still be involved in music, but not be the main focus. I mean, I think all this new technology just makes it so much easier to make music and so much more accessible for everybody.
I did all of it on my computer. My grandparents bought me the this, like $200 laptop last year, and everything that I’ve done has been on it. I’ve obviously, like, had installed a bunch of programs, but everything has been digital synthesizers on my computer. And yeah, it’s all unique. It’s-no loops used. I do all the mixing and mastering myself, and that’s what I really dove into during this project, was really learning how to do it all myself.
To make the actual tracks, it really didn’t take that long to put together. What I realized later was just how complicated like the mixing and mastering process was. I mean, there’s just so many new features that I hadn’t learned yet that I had to implement into it to make it able to be listened to on platforms like Spotify or Apple Music. You know, all I had was my AirPods to connect to the computer, and then I’d export it and I’d play in the car, and it would sound completely different. So, you know, those new features just allowed the music to sound the same on all speakers.
I really feel like I mastered the art of putting myself out there. I sent over, like, 120 DMs to artists on Instagram, and I only got five, max, back. And the ones that I did get had amazing advice for me. Phil Anderson was one of them. He has like 20 million streams on Spotify, so that was really cool. He does score for movie trailers, as well as his own classical compositions. And he gave me some great advice about the mixing and mastering process, which is something I was really new to, so seeing how he was able to implement that into his songs really helped me out.
I really feel like this capstone project gave me the excuse to put myself out there, and really just allowed me to try something new. I definitely see myself, like, with the career in audio production in the future, whether it’s behind the scenes or just like personal work. I really just enjoy having a personal project that I’ve been invested in. And I’ve worked behind the scenes on, like different artists, like work before, but it really just felt good having something personal that I could work on.So the album’s called Cascadia. It’s kind of an electronic album, so there’s no lyrics or anything. If you’ve ever watched a show like Stranger Things, or played a video game like Minecraft, it’s kind of like the music you’d hear in the background of those. You can just look me up on whatever platform you use. Henry Stillerman, and the album name is Cascadia.
Arts This Week is supported by the UVA Arts Council and Piedmont Virginia Community College. PVCC Arts presents a rich array of dance, music, theater and visual arts programming. Learn more pvcc.edu
