Meet Charles Szczepanek

Today we’d like to introduce you to Charles Szczepanek.

Thanks for sharing your story with us Charles. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I grew up in the Chicago suburbs. When I was about 12 years old, a fortunate meeting with a local music teacher led to appointments and auditions for pre-college music programs at both Northwestern University and the Wheaton College Conservatory of Music. From age 12 through 17, I studied music at the Wheaton College Conservatory with Dr. Daniel Paul Horn alongside his undergraduates in the program. I was regularly invited to be a part of “studio class,” and many weekdays you could find me driving (or being driven) from high school to the college across town either for lessons, class, or just practice time.

Those 5 years were highly formative, at least as much so as my collegiate and graduate life. I was regularly thrown into circumstances where I was not only challenged musically by students with many more years of study, but I also had to quickly adapt in social situations with people 4 to 6 years older than I and in a very different place in their life. During this same time, I developed an interest in technology and especially in audio recording. My last year attending high school at Benet Academy, I was appointed director of the volunteer Mass Choir. I’d consider that my first management position. The attention of over 100 singers needed to be captivated by my presence and words. There were plentiful opportunities to learn planning, group communication skills, various musical skills, and how to improvise when things didn’t go as planned in front of a live audience of over 1,000.

After taking many successful college auditions, I moved to the Phoenix area in 2005 to pursue a Bachelor’s Degree in classical piano performance from Arizona State University. During my first year of college, it became apparent that the music students had few options when it came to hiring an affordable studio or engineer to make a high quality recording… and students needed new recordings all the time: for recitals, for entering competitions, and for taking auditions for graduate level music programs. I saw the need that so many friends had, and after having quite a terrible experience hiring someone else for my own recording project, I promptly decided to open Winding Road Studios, an audio production company which I still run today. Through friends and family, I was able to raise $5,000 to buy just enough equipment to get off the ground. For years after, nearly every dollar the studio made was reinvested into the company. I made hundreds of student recordings during my Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees at ASU affording me first-hand experience in audio production. More importantly, I learned basics of business, customer service, and how to be sensitive to the variety of personalities and cultures the world is filled with. During this time, I continued honing my main craft as a pianist under the guidance of Robert Hamilton and a mentorship with Paul Harvey Jr. I became a prizewinner in the Bosendorfer International Piano Competition when I was 20 and a prizewinner in the Jacob Flier International Piano Competition when I was 21.

Fast-forward to 2011, I graduated with my Master’s Degree and promptly took a job in Fountain Hills directing the music program at Church of the Ascension. Like my first year of college, it didn’t take long to see that Fountain Hills was hungry for a different type of entertainment than what was being provided. There were some interesting shows around the town, but if someone wanted to see and hear highest level classical artists perform, they needed to make a 30 or 45-minute drive into Tempe or downtown Phoenix. Many people just weren’t doing that. I founded the Arts at Ascension concert series to bring that level of artistry to the Fountain Hills and North Scottsdale community, but I also wanted to go further. Music, regardless of the type or genre you like, is written, recorded, and performed to make us feel, to make us connect with one another, to heal emotional wounds, to inspire us, to give us joy, to help us reflect… the list could go on. While a live concert can definitely provide for those needs of the people in attendance, it also has the ability to reach further. Through ticket sales and sponsorships, Arts at Ascension raises funds for local music education at St. Matthew School in inner-city Phoenix. There are many studies that show how music education benefits brain development, has a strong correlation with better testing abilities, improves both verbal communication skills and cognitive ability especially in math, and increases self-discipline. But so often, music education is the last area to receive academic funding and is the first place funding is cut when the well begins to run dry. Arts at Ascension helps to combat that lack of funding. During a time when most arts programs are struggling to stay afloat, Arts at Ascension is not just self-sustaining but has also raised over $50,000 for music education during its first four years of operation.

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
The biggest, and I think ongoing struggle is the constant need to know what people are looking for before they can tell you and maybe even before they know it themselves. In the recording and producing environment, this is manifested by: knowing how firm or gentle to be as I coach an artist through a session and taking time to research the artist, their tastes, their prior projects, their desired soundscape, and who they worked with before and why they didn’t repeat their business.

At Arts at Ascension, it’s about knowing my audience demographic and programming events that both meet the mission of the organization and also meet audience expectations and wants. In both of these cases, “reading” people wrongly can have severe repercussions. It could potentially cost an artist thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in the recording studio, or at a concert event could negatively impact future ticket sales which doesn’t just hurt the concert series but also really hurts the students for whom we are raising money. One event alone impacts thousands of lives. It’s really important to get it right before you have time to get a response, positive or negative.

These are things that I had no idea about when I started Winding Road Studios about 12 years ago. I made plenty of mistakes and made plenty of clients upset with me. The difference is I didn’t just learn what I did wrong each time, but I also tried to understand how different approaches would have benefitted clients in different ways. That personalized approach to business is something people react very positively to.

The other large and ongoing struggle is balancing a shortage of time between all of my endeavors. To this point I have mentioned two of those: Winding Road Studios where I engineer and produce recordings for other artists, and Arts at Ascension where I Artistic Direct events and regularly perform. In addition to those things, I’m also pursuing opportunities as a performing solo pianist and freelance musician as well as launching a trio, Vocelliano with two other musicians who live in San Diego. This other work entails things like: album releases, creating YouTube content, arranging, composing, transcribing, orchestrating, being a studio musician on projects for others, and managing business related tasks for all of those. And did I mention I also work a full-time job! I’m regularly working 80 hours per week to keep the ball rolling. Being able to bounce back and forth between ideas, jobs, tasks, and creative time is difficult but something that I’ve needed to learn how to do. The shortage of time is most often what emotionally gets me down and presents a constant challenge.

We’d love to hear more about your business.
Winding Road Studios is an audio production company that specializes in on-location recordings of classical music and film scores. Through Winding Road Studios, I also work as a session pianist, arranger, composer, and producer. Of note, I arranged piano parts for and performed on recordings of Anna Graceman, a singer-songwriter who was a finalist on America’s Got Talent. Through Anna’s Spotify and YouTube streams, millions of listeners have heard my arrangements and playing. As an audio engineer and producer, I bring an understanding of classical music performance, technical execution, and score reading that is rare globally, and especially rare in Phoenix. Having experience on both sides of the microphones gives me extra insight into how performers feel during recording sessions. I’m also able to coach during the session, as well as edit later on, on a note-by-note basis with the performers: where most engineers and producers would only be able to give general feedback, I can pinpoint exact notes, words, and phrases that need attention and communicate the kind of attention necessary. All this is possible because I am first a musician and pianist.

Arts at Ascension is a concert series in Fountain Hills, Arizona that brings nationally and globally recognized talent to an intimate performing space. While most arts organizations struggle to raise enough money to be sustainable, Arts at Ascension is self-sustaining and donates about 50% of its total revenue to arts education for the underprivileged. Even though the series is only beginning its fifth year, the community has come to realize that our events are great entertainment, support a local cause, and every audience member has an opportunity to personally speak to the performers at a free reception after each event. Because of this, for two consecutive years, we have sold out our “priority seating” option to season subscribers one to two months before the season begins.

What were you like growing up?
I was a super shy kid growing up. I’d love to be a part of conversations, but I’d always prefer to listen rather than add thoughts myself. At friend’s birthday parties, you could expect to find me off doing my own thing. If anyone else was around it was usually not more than one friend. I had an early interest in music, and my parents signed me up for piano lessons when I was 4, but I also played baseball and basketball either with school teams or in the local community. In fact, up until I was 14, I spent far more hours practicing baseball than I did practicing music.

Doing well in school was always important to me, not for a high grade, but knowing that I tried as hard as I could. And come to think of it, I had that same mindset for music and sports also.

Before high school, I entered many local music competitions. By the time I was 12 or 13, I had gotten pretty used to leaving the house humming what I’d need to play in the competition and coming home a few hours later holding a 1st place trophy. I got a bit cocky. What I didn’t realize is that these *were* just *local* competitions. I distinctly remember the first event Dr. Horn (from Wheaton College) sent me to when I was 14. I walked into Ganz Hall on Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago feeling confident… like I had another one in the bag. I performed and still felt great about how I did… until I was standing in the lobby of the hall listening to the competitor after me through a crack in the doors. I thought, “Whoa, this is really amazing playing.” For the first time, I questioned how well I was going to stack up against the others. Then the ultimate stab to my ego came: the competitor finished, walked out of the hall, and I found out he was an 8-year-old boy. Nothing crushes an early teenager more than learning you got schooled by someone almost half your age. That moment, I realized the world was a much bigger place than I ever imagined, full of more talented and more disciplined people than I. It significantly changed how I approached my life.

Pricing:

• Tickets to Arts at Ascension events: $20/General Adm. $25/Priority Seating

Contact Info:

• Address: 12615 N. Fountain Hills Blvd
  Fountain Hills, AZ 85268
• Website: www.artsatascension.org
  www.charlesszczepanek.com
  www.wrdstudios.com
  www.vocelliano.com
• Phone: 480.837.1066
• Email: info@artsatascension.org ; cs@charlesszczepanek.com ; charles@wrdstudios.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/charlesszczepanek/  https://www.facebook.com/Vocelliano/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/CSzMusic
• Other: https://www.youtube.com/user/matr1x2051

Image Credit:
Studio Merima Photography
My Personal Photographer Studios

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