Ken Wolff - Hitting all the right notes
As a child Ken Wolff was drawn as by a magnet to sacred music. “I wondered why all the really great music seemed to be glorifying God,” he said. “I finally started paying attention to the words, going to church, and gave my life to Christ.”
To assuage his musical ardor, he travelled to Europe to study early music and earned a performance degree in the lute at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague in the Netherlands. Wanting more, he got a masters degree in church music from Westminster Choir College in Princeton, N.J. Then he started tuning pianos and awaiting his future.
But it didn’t unfold as he’d hoped. He was making a go of it, but saw a discouraging future with a family to support. Looking for a more lucrative way forward, he abruptly switched to electronics. “I honed in on that pretty quickly because it seemed like a promising career path,” he said. “Silicon Valley was just taking off, so I had the feeling that working with computers would be a high demand job.”
Shifting from music to computers? “There is actually some relationship between music and electronics,” Wolff said. “There’s a lot of math on the engineering side and music and math have a tight relationship. I think a lot of musicians have an aptitude towards math and engineering. It’s kind of a brain pattern kind of thing.”
In 1982 he enrolled at Foothills Community College in Los Altos, CA to take math and electronics classes, figuring he could make a living in computer repair. He finished his studies in 1984, the same year Apple Computer introduced the Macintosh with its now heralded "1984" commercial during the Super Bowl. Companies such as Intel and National Semiconductor were aggressively hiring. “They were coming in and basically hiring the whole graduating class, one after another,” Wolff said. “It was like they just loaded them up in a truck and packed them off.”
Wolff accepted a job at National Semiconductor in Santa Clara working on equipment with the line maintenance group. Five years later he switched to Intel Corporation working as a supervisor at Intel’s Fab 1 in Mountain View, Calif.Over time he worked in a variety of other Intel positions involved in such issues as remote access, network security and load balancing servers. He finally came to rest in networking, where he spent the last 6 years of his career. He loved working with the highly motivated and high achieving people on the team, but as the years went on and the demands on him increased, his struggle to keep up was daunting. “As I got on towards 60 it really got to be too much of a challenge for me,” he said. “I saw the writing on the wall. I needed to downshift.” In addition, changes in his business group were confronting him with some difficult career choices.
The idea of retiring began to percolate. “But Intel is kind of a fun, challenging place, so it is kind of hard to leave,” Wolff said. “You’re thinking, what am I going to replace this with and still keep alert? I didn’t want to make just a cold turkey cut.” He and his wife also took a hard look at their finances and concluded they would need to keep pulling in some money if he retired from Intel. But there didn’t seem to be a solution at hand.
In late 2011 Wolff talked with Rick Henderson, who had just started managing a new pilot program at Intel designed to help about-to-retire employees become Encore Fellows working with non-profits. The goal is to make the transition into retirement from Intel a positive experience for the retiree, the community and the company. Encore Fellows work 1000 hours for a nonprofit over a 6-18 month period. Under the Intel arrangements, the Encore Career Fellowship recipient receives a $25,000 stipend paid by Intel through the nonprofit and six months of paid health care coverage.
Wolff was intrigued, figuring he could also get additional income from intensive options trading, a sideline which was he’d been doing successfully for years.
“When he explained the whole thing, it sounded great, a perfect fit,” Wolff said. So Henderson introduced him to Gina Cassinelli, manager of the Silicon Valley Encore Fellows Program.Cassinelli was a member of the first class of ten Encore Fellows in 2009. Crafted by Civic Ventures, a think tank and program incubator helping society achieve the greatest return on experience, the Encore Fellows program was an effort to bridge the gap between business and non-profits. “There’s a lot of skepticism and distrust between both of the sectors,” Cassinelli explained. “So Civic Ventures (now Encore.org), working with the Packard Foundation, underwrote the pilot.” The hope in the first year was that businesspeople would do exceptional work at non-profits and validate the Encore Fellows concept.Feedback from both the Fellows and the participating non-profits was so positive that non-profits, more aware of the talent pool available from business, clamored to get on board. By 2012, the Silicon Valley Encore Fellows Program expanded to two groups of 10 Fellows each.
Cassinelli recalled that when she met with Wolff, he wasn’t very talkative and it was hard to draw out precisely what he wanted to do in the non-profit world. He was only clear about what he didn’t want to do. “No IT,” he said emphatically. “I’ve done IT.” She sent him a list of non-profit options to see what might spark his interest. He came back with ‘Not interested” checked on every one of them. Not willing to give up, she sought clues to his interests by asking Wolff what he’d done in school. “That was when I saw him smile,” Cassinelli said, “when he talked about the lute.”
For a music lover she had a perfect fit, Music for Minors, a Mountain View, CA-based non-profit that provides music enrichment programs at area elementary schools. Founded in 1978 in response to cutbacks in school music programs tied to passage of a California tax initiative known as Proposition 13, Music for Minors initially sent parent volunteers into kindergarten-3rd grade classrooms to deliver music lessons. Eight years ago, the Redwood City School District asked Music for Minors to put together a comprehensive music program with paid instructors for all the district’s elementary schools. That got Music for Minors thinking about what more it could do. In 2009, the non-profit brought on as executive director Sonja Palmer, a self-described “Kansas farm girl” with a professional singing career and management of a youth singing group behind her. “I told them I really like to grow things,” Palmer said. “I want to be as impactful as possible and reach the broadest community possible.” With Palmer at the helm, working with a part-time team of seven in a cramped 600 sq. ft. space, Music for Minors has grown to a $900,000 annual budget serving 7000 children to serving 17,000 and dreams of thousands more.“Our mission is to nurture in children a lifelong love of music,” said Palmer. With that as a mantra, Music for Minors has developed a standard curriculum which 100 volunteers and paid instructors deliver in 30-minute blocks to elementary schools. It’s the same curriculum in every classroom for every grade level no matter who’s teaching, which appeals to school districts seeking uniformity.
Music for Minors’ programs focus on core music education, not performances such as concerts. In the 1st grade, students start to learn physical movement and basic rhythms, such as 4 beats to the measure and vocal production. The early grades may also start singing in rounds, such as “row, row, row your boat”. The classes incorporate instrumentation in the 3rd or 4th grade, depending on the school or district. That’s also when students start learning to read music a bit more and playing recorders, which is a good introduction to most music instruments they would experience when they get into middle school.
The thought of returning to his first love was seductive, so Wolff signed on. He retired from Intel in early 2012, and is now helping Music for Minors make the whole teaching process more efficient and productive by giving all the Music for Minors instructors better access to teaching resources. “What I’m trying to do is as much as I can is equip these teachers out in the field and make life a lot easier for them, help expand the program and be sort of a visionary type looking down the road,” Wolff said.
Before Wolff came on board, instructors were given a stack of oft-used hard-to-decipher music scores and sent off to teach. Wolff is recreating the scores so they are accurate and readable and then turning the scores into an electronic format so they can be downloaded to an iPhone or laptop in various formats for use as a training tool or directly in classrooms.
“Say you are headed for a classroom,” Wolff said. “You don’t know this song, you’ve never heard it before, and you’re not a great musician. You ask yourself, how does this ‘Little Bird’ song go? Volunteers used to call up one of Music for Minors’ paid instructors on the way to the classroom and ask them to sing it over the phone. Now you can bring up a pdf score for Little Bird on your iPhone, print it from a laptop or listen to it. Now you can hear it or plug in a mini-jack and play it in the classroom.”
Wolff put Music for Minors lesson plans on the organization’s website, providing links to audio files of songs that are part of that lesson plan so volunteers can familiarize themselves with a song or let students hear it before trying it themselves. “Our educators only have 30 minutes in the classroom and we want them to be as effective as possible, so we want to be able to give them access to all of our resources as quickly as possible,” Wolff said.
“We’re talking about hundreds of sheets of music and the use of 7 or 8 different tools, such as CorelDRAW, scanning programs, editing programs, turning MP3 files into MIDI and so on,” Wolff said.
Like a preacher, Wolff still evangelizes about Music for Minors. His unbridled delight in his new life is palpable. Like a symphony, all the notes have come together.