Bio

Daryl Scherrer holds a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from Arizona State University. He studied music theory, composition and performance at Mesa Community College.

He has been a singer, songwriter and guitarist for more than thirty years in various groups in the Phoenix Metropolitan and San Francisco Bay areas. He has composed for rock, pop, country, jazz and chamber ensembles. He has also served as the recording engineer on several projects.

He is the recipient of the Songwriter of the Year and Album of the Year awards from YabYum Music & Arts, as well as the First Prize for Poetry from the Cave Creek Film & Arts Festival.

As a teacher, Daryl believes that music is inherently project-based and that a music curriculum should center on the real-world performance/production of student-chosen repertoire. He also believes that music is inherently communal and that music education should emphasize the students’ meaningful involvement in real-world musical communities.

As a philosopher (albeit an amateur one), Daryl believes that music is inherently miraculous, an utterly bizarre and unlikely feature of our universe; a phenomenon which, whether an effect of the human mind or of acoustical physics itself, either system could have just as easily gone without, and which therefore exists as pure surprise, pure extravagance, pure bonus.

As a person with joys and sorrows, Daryl believes that music is inherently (if mysteriously) reciprocal, that we listen to it because in some way it also hears us, and we feel understood and healed by it. As a person with fears and hopes, he believes that music is inherently regenerative and inherently emancipatory. He believes that music reminds us of our humanity, thereby restoring it to us, and that it likewise proclaims our humanity to the world, demanding that it be restored there too.