About Joel Jonientz

A few days ago, one of my most influential professors died of a heart attack. His name was Joel Jonientz (blog), and he was 46.

Joel was my teacher for a few projects, starting with an attempt at making a video game. His role was keep a bunch of misfit digital punks inline, and keep them on task with their delegated duties. I was a part of the music team, together with Bernie Thomas. Our job was to compose music for each level. This was pretty important since the game was based around the music, kind of like Dance Dance Revolution or Guitaru Man, where the player had to hit a button or something in-time with the music. But our game was different: it would be like Mario Bro's, a "platformer", where hitting a button in time with the music would give the player a boost to get up to a difficult platform, or some other super awesome power that would help them complete each level.

Composing the music meant figuring out how to encode the required series of 'power sounds' that would make it possible for the player to beat the level. Its like reverse engineering a puzzle, which was an incredible task and proved to be a lot of fun. I remember countless hours working with Adam Ferry -the visionary student who conceived of the game- going back and forth trying to get the right combination between a difficult rhythm and a fun playable game.

The tragic part of it is that the game never got finished. Not only did a HUGE amount of effort get left on the shelf, but it definitely left us a little bit bitter. I spent so much time working on that game, and dropped a few important classes so I could focus on my work-load (causing me to spend a few extra semesters in college). I hope that somehow we can at least get the few levels that were finished out and into the hands of the public, because that was a huge project for a bunch of inexperienced undergrads to have taken on, and it worked.

But this entry isn't about my sorry past. Its about Joel. That game never would have gotten off the ground if it wasn't for Joel's cracking of the whip. He didnt have any more experience making games than we did, but he knew how to lead, and he lead us all into a state of producing work that came that much closer to being deemed 'professional'.

I still remember Joel taking Bernie and I aside to give us a lecture on the importance of music to creating the atmosphere for films and multimedia. We watched some clips from Laurence of Arabia and Dr. Zhivago without any sound, and then with the sound, and were asked to make notes and think about how the meaning changed with the added dimension. This influenced our decision making when it came to thinking thematically, atmospherically, and texturally. It helped us create depth in our music, and go beyond just making loops and chords.

After that I was highly inspired and PORED my energy into the music. I can't even imagine how many hours is spent tweaking my sounds to fit the moods of the game, and even though I was still a novice, that project helped me produce work that was way above my level at the time. (The particular track that I linked has a funny story. When I showed it to Joel, one of the first things he said back was "you need to stop chasing girls around for a while" or something like that. He could immediately tell what was going on with me by my artistic output. You couldn't put anything past him!)

After my time ended on the video game project, I decided to further my 'Joel-time' by enrolling in his Time Based Media course. I have a background in visual arts as well as music, so I saw this course as the perfect way to start combining the two passions. But my trust in Joel's no-BS teaching style was the real reason in my decision to take the plunge. I can say now that I got a C in the class for a damn good reason: I failed to restrain my creative urges. I tried to pile every good idea I had into each work, and didn't edit my impulses down so that I could complete the projects in time. This was something I struggled with during the game project as well, but it really came to sight once this class was over. Joel never relented in trying to get me to see this, but I can be incredibly stubborn at times. Although I passed the class, I can probably say that that was because Joel saw something in my work that hinted at what It could have been had I had a year to finish each project. In the end, though, I handed in unfinished crap! But my personal failure is a great success, because it taught me a skill that Joel knew by heart: Limit a project down to the bare essentials, so that it is something you can finish. Even if you have to cut out nearly all of the cool parts, by doing this it lets you complete something in a reasonable amount of time, without dragging it out.

Don't get me wrong: Joel never said to stifle your creativity. In fact, he may never have directly taught me any of the stuff I said above, but that's what I learned the most, because its the skill I lacked the most. I'm sure Joel would be remembered differently by everyone of his students, because he was so dedicated to helping each person bring out their own demons and sleigh them accordingly. Joel wasn't my only great professor either: I studied with Dr. Michael Witgraff, who taught me a crap-load of good advice when it came to sound design, and Dr. Chris Gable, who gave me a lot of great tricks for composition and counterpoint. But they are (thankfully) still alive, so I can still praise them (and curse them) in person. Joel unfortunately has been taken from us, and WAY to early.

One of the most important things about Joel was that he was a central hub for us multimedia students. His class was like a right-of passage, because he would give you a seemingly simple assignment (make a 10 second animation), but it would end up being nearly impossible to complete within the deadline. This taught you the time management and creative editing skills that I mentioned above, along with a lot of other tricks which are so ingrained into my mind that I don't even have words for them. That was another reason I studied with him, because I wanted to be a part of the huge body of students who worshiped (or cursed) him. Some of my best friends and frequent collaborators all took his course: Everette Johnson, Mike Hoeft, Nick Tuinstra (although Bernie Thomas just worked on the game).

Loosing Joel really makes me want to reinforce the ties that link all of his students together. We all owe him so much; we can all trace a certain amount of guidance from his influential no-BS style of teaching. All of his serious students look back at his classes as essential parts of our maturation as artists. He didn't coddle us. He showed us respect by treating our work as it was: if you hand in crap, you get crap back in you're critique. Everybody knew that if you got shit from Joel it meant he saw something in you. The worst thing that could happen is if he ignored you, or passed over your work quickly during the critique. Not having something bad to say about your work meant there really wasn't anything going on in it. It wasn't worth considering.

When he had something good to say, that meant you passed the test: you figured out his hidden purpose of the assignment, and didn't let it defeat you. To me, Joel wasn't trying to produce geniuses. He was trying to produce professionals that took their work seriously, and could complete a task within a deadline, no matter what sacrifices were necessary. I didn't pass that test, but I got the perspective that I was missing something in my never ending struggle to be original.

To Joel, being and artist was a job just like anything else. It wasn't something for the elite. It was something for everyone. I'll never forget that. Because of that emphasis, he has produced a lot of great, hardworking people who got jobs right out of school. I didn't think so then, but now I see how essential that fact is. 

I'm grateful for having gotten a chance to learn so much from Joel, but I never got a chance to sit down with him and say all this shit to him. I showed him appreciation, but after I stopped studying with him, we never really talked when we saw each other around. Maybe it was because I never passed his secret tests. Maybe it is because I still struggle with them. But regardless of why, I never got to sit down and have a beer with him and let him know how important he was to me, and to a lot of my peers.

I don't believe in an afterlife, so I missed the opportunity to tell him that. I can only hope that he didn't need to hear that from me: that someone else was able to say it, or that his wife and family gave him enough fulfillment that having some punk kid tell him that him didn't matter. Either way, Joel Jonientz is gone from the world, and everyone that he touched is going to have to take a minute and recognize what we have lost, and be thankful for the guidance he gave to us.

I wrote this as a way to reconsile with my difficult past with Joel, and as a way to encapsulate his influence, so that I can look back on a definite time in my life where I learned a few valuable lessons. I hope that this might help others to remember their time with Joel, even though my perspective is one small fragment of his total influence. Thank you for reading.