Tonight, you are making rock ’n’ roll history! This concert is about you! You are all rock stars!” It’s January 24, 2003, and a small army of teenage musicians from Lakewood, Ohio, is mentally psyching itself up to take the stage at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. Rock violinist Mark Wood (cofounder of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra and manufacturer of the electrified Wood Violins), the composer-performer-inventor who’d helped form this young strings-based group at the request of Lakewood music teacher Beth Hankins, addresses the nervous, electric-violin–clutching assemblage—which has just been christened the Lakewood Project—and proudly pronounces them to be the first-ever high-school rock-and-roll orchestra.

As the young musicians prepare to make their official world debut before a crowd of 2,000 waiting music fans, Wood reminds them that the stage they will be standing on has already held the likes of Pete Seeger, Aretha Franklin, Pete Townsend, Bruce Springsteen, the Neville Brothers, and hundreds of other rock and soul legends.

“Now it’s your turn!” Wood exhorts them. “The most important thing is to connect with the audience, have lots of fun, show them your beautiful, unstoppable energy—and go kick butt!”

For Wood, who had been pushing the educational merits of electric strings for years with little positive response from the music-teaching community, the night is not just the culmination of a months-long effort to turn a bunch of young musicians into a first-rate, fully electrified, rock-and-roll orchestra. It is more than just the proof that he’d been right, that by fusing the power of rock to a declining high-school strings program, young players would be transformed from reluctant rehearsers and half-hearted music students into amped-up, adrenalized ambassadors for the pleasure and sheer joy of playing the violin.

For Wood, who has gone on to start over 30 similar rock orchestras in schools across the country and whose methods are now embraced by Juilliard, Berklee, and the American String Teachers Association, this night marks the beginning of a revolution.

“The nuclear bomb has been dropped! The revolution has begun!” he says from his home in New York. “What’s so cool is that after ten years of me doing this, ten years of having strings teachers go white with fear when I proposed using rock ’n’ roll to excite young musicians, ten years of having doors slammed in my face when I’d show up with my electric stringed instruments, I am now working with education programs across the country, in San Diego and New York and Alabama and Michigan. These are electric orchestra programs that involve not only string players, but also choir and band, so we’re addressing the entire spectrum of musical education, and we’re doing it to a rock ’n’ roll beat.

“I’m telling you, dude, it’s a full-scale revolution, the next step in the evolution of the music-education system!”

Wood, with his Electrify Your Strings music program (named as one of the top ten most exciting music programs at the Grammy Awards two years ago), is not the only energized educator working with schools and students to incorporate electric instruments and modern music. But he surely ranks among the most passionate promoters of the burgeoning School of Rock generation. Talking to Wood about kids and music is like talking to a tent evangelist about the power of faith. He is on a mission, and to hear him talk, it is a sacred mission, an effort on which the future of music in America may depend.