“Step Forward,” the debut track from Eleven, a Penn musical duo featuring Karis Stephen and Blue Bookhard, doesn’t sound like something composed in a dorm room fueled by ramen and Red Bull. Instead, there’s a kind of sheen to the minimalist beat and intentionally disaffected delivery. The track is polished, tidy, and professional.
That businesslike air is no coincidence—Stephen and the group’s manager, Caroline Ohlson, have embarked along a path that has brought vocational music industry training into the Penn curriculum. Music videos are their homework; Donald Passman’s All You Need to Know About the Music Business is their textbook. And they might just be changing the way music is studied at Penn.
Rising juniors, the pair describes feeling something missing in the university’s liberal arts curriculum earlier in their academic careers. They could learn about music history and music theory in coursework, but the business side of things was absent. Internships at record labels (Interscope for Ohlson and Rostrum for Stephen) filled some of the holes, along with participation in the Wharton Industry Exploration Program. But an independent study supervised by Dr. Guy titled “Music Business and Music Industry” catalyzed their hopes for tangible skill-building for careers in media industries. Stephen and Bookhard’s group, Eleven, emerged as the perfect project to build a music industry brand from the ground up.
Eleven was an anniversary before it was a band—Stephen and Bookhard had met in a class at the Annenberg School for Communication at Penn and began dating and writing music together soon after. Their anniversary is November 11. Stephen, from Tyler, Texas, felt what she described as a dilemma—a desire to produce creative work but not having the space within her studies to do so. A chance meeting with Ramsey during office hours helped create this collaboration.
“When I teach History of American Music, it’s always been from the vantage point of musical entrepreneurs and musicians and how they interact,” Ramsey says. Those interactions helped build the infrastructure of what we call American music going back to the colonial period. What students see is that I also participate in the business as a musician in real time, and sharing those experiences with classes opens up that space for them. Although I’m not teaching a course specifically about the music industry, it is animating a lot of what we talk about in the class. Students see that, and I become a resource for them. That was the case with Caroline and Karis.”
Meanwhile, Rhode Island native Ohlson was working to create an individualized major titled Arts Entertainment and Popular Culture to further pursue her dream of eventual work in Hollywood. “How do I bring Los Angeles to Penn?” she asked, recruiting Guy and estimable colleagues Peter Decherney and Anthony DeCurtis as her advisors for the new major. It’s an option afforded to any Penn student, but Ohlson is the only student who has been able to persuade the committee of her preparedness and its relevance. “The fact that they found value in what I proposed says something,” she says.
Ohlson is not wrong: Across the country, many music business programs are emerging that teach undergraduates the ins and outs of careers in the music industry. To date at Penn, this has taken place on various official and unofficial organizations, including the Undergraduate Media & Entertainment Club, Opia Films, and the Kelly Writers House’s RealArts @ Penn internship program, plus Bookhart’s The Collctve, a network of DJs, producers, filmmakers, photographers, writers, and artists that produces events that feed Penn’s underground creative ecosystem. But what is missing is a curricular commitment to an expanded understanding of what the study and work of music is. “There are spaces at Penn to perform,” Stephen, a member of jazz and pop a cappella group Counterparts, which produced John Legend, explains. “But to do it seriously and professionally, that doesn’t really exist yet. There needs to be more of a dialogue on campus around this stuff.”
“There’s a potential to collaborate across schools here in terms of the School of Arts and Sciences, Wharton, Law, and Annenberg,” Ramsey explains. “There are different ways that each school thinks about the music industry and there could and should be courses listed jointly for students to look at the business through a variety of lenses. With a strong entrepreneurial turn in the music industry these days, students want to learn about it.”
For Stephen and Ohlson knew each other personally before becoming business partners—they are sisters in the same sorority and sit on the panhellenic executive board for the university. They also both played the oboe as children. Moving from friends to business partners as rising seniors has presented some challenges—Ohlson jokes that she’d like to lock her artists in a room for a day to give them no choice but to produce more work—but the collaboration has helped them both learn more about the many sides of the business. Ohlson has kept the group on task throughout 2017 as they hit their goals including the release of the “Step Forward“ video and a Listening Session in April, plus a performance at Spring Fling. Stephen also contributed a hook to a Penn video featuring student rapper Kayvon Asemani.
Bookhard, who just graduated, is also a performer—he’s the drummer (and the only male participant) for the women’s sketch comedy group Bloomers and produces on the side, using Maschine and Logic software to write the beats for Eleven. Usually, Bookhard produces the beats with Stephen stepping in to compose lyrics and melodies to pair with the instrumentals; they cite fellow duo Marian Hill as a major influence to their process and sound. They plan to have a four- or five-song EP recorded at Turtle Studios available soon, and will be appearing at the Karoondinha Music & Arts Festival this summer, sharing a bill with Chance the Rapper, John Legend, The Roots, and a host of other major acts.
“What we wanted to do with our music was cross and break genre boundaries, which is something we learned about in Dr. Ramsey’s class,” Stephen jokes. “Our R&B songs will still have jazz influences and the jazz songs are R&B influenced. And even though our pop single sounds one way, lyrically it draws upon themes from many areas. Genre can be a box, but we wanted to work outside of it.”
That outside-the-box thinking is what has made the space for them to pursue this project in the first place, though they are hesitant at the suggestion that their example will lead to large-scale sea change at Penn. “It’s still going to be about individualized pathways and work,” Ohlson believes. “But hopefully we can inspire others that it’s worth putting in the time and we can keep pushing, even if it’s on our own. And it’s also realized what a cool creative network there is at Penn already—all of my friends are talented in singing, writing, producing, filming, marketing, or whatever. Being able to tap into that network makes me feel like I have more of a home.”
“I can only hope that we’ll have some impact on Penn to help inspire more people to forge their own path and do what they want to do,” Stephen says. “There’s very cut-out paths for people to take here, but I’m fine with being misfits. It’s kind of like the best thing!”
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