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 named the Lakewood Project—and proudly pronounces the musicians to be the first-ever, high-school rock-and-roll orchestra.

As they 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!”

That was three years ago: only 30 similar rock orchestras existed in schools across the country. Today, Wood’s symphonic rock movement has grown to pandemic proportions, with schools and school teachers opening their doors and arms to the leather-clad music mentor. In 2007, Wood is booked solid between the months of January and June to bring his brand of pedagogy to between three and four schools each week. “The public, the parents, the teachers, the administrators are using this as an uplifting environment. In the midst of the testing and all this other stuff these kids are struggling with at school, we are finding that the response to what we’ve been doing all these years has been really building and growing,” Wood says.

His methods have now been embraced by Juilliard, Berklee, and the American String Teachers Association. The rock orchestra maestro has also been commissioned to create a complete a score for a major orchestra that includes an electric string quartet. The piece will debut on the stage of Carnegie Hall in June of next year. One night in May he sold out 1,000 seats to a show he staged in Brooklyn, NY. Meanwhile, the North Carolina tourist board has invested thousands into a major concert series, engineered and spearheaded by Wood, meant to bring a much-needed shot of adrenaline into the state’s public school music programs. And a spot on the CBS evening news has given Wood’s music program an even stronger, meteoric boost.

Unbeknownst to the violin rocker, or anyone else for that matter, that fateful night in 2003 marked the beginning of a revolution, one that has taken close to a decade for Wood and the world to realize. “Ten years ago, [educators] were very scared of what I was doing. They really thought that I would be threatening the historical and the long, wonderful history of European-classical music, which, man, has survived 400 years. I ain’t gonna destroy it,” he says. “And of course, they realize it because once we play Beethoven’s 9th or Beethoven’s 5th to a rock beat, these kids are plugged into classical music too.”

Wood, with his Electrify Your Strings music program (named as one of the top ten most exciting music programs at the Grammy Awards three years ago), is not the only energized educator working with schools and students to incorporate electric instruments and modern music. But he surely ranks as among the most passionate promoters of the burgeoning School-of-Rock generation.