What Music City Sounds Like Without Music
Nashville sells itself on sound. So there’s a quiet kind of nerve in asking a room full of music teachers to sit in silence.
That’s what Fire Kite, the Franklin, Tenn., indie led by founder and executive creative director Alex Goulart, did with “Imagine a world without music…” The 2-minute film was made for the CMA Foundation’s Music Teachers of Excellence gala on Oct. 7 at the Pinnacle in Nashville, the 10th anniversary of the program and the foundation’s biggest night of the year.
One room, one shot
This wasn’t a PSA chasing reach. It was made for a single audience of about 800 music teachers, educators and artists, gathered to honor 30 teachers from this year’s class and the hundreds who came before them.
The brief: celebrate the legacy of music, honor the teachers and make the room feel it. Fire Kite’s answer was subtraction.
Then the music stops
The film opens on a concert in full swing, fans ready for a long night. Then the screen cuts to black and the sound drops out.
When the picture comes back, it stays silent. Country artist Kassi Ashton narrates a world without music: a first dance with no song, a child who never hears a lullaby, birthdays without “Happy Birthday” and famous music moments that never happen.
The silence breaks with a recorder, the first instrument a lot of kids ever play. As the melody builds, the film moves into Nashville classrooms, where local teachers are at work on the next generation.
“I don’t know that when they hired us, they knew we would make their audience sit in a prolonged, uncomfortable silence, but they did ask for something audacious,” says Goulart. “The combination of cheering and tears in the room proved it was the right choice.”
A hometown client with a stubborn problem
The CMA Foundation, the nonprofit arm of the Country Music Association, has been at this since 2006. It says it has invested more than $30 million in music education and counts nearly 4 million U.S. students who still go without it.
Music Teachers of Excellence is its most direct bet on the people in the classroom. Each honoree receives $5,000, split between the classroom and personal use.
Who made it
The recorder melody comes from Egyptian performer Medhat Mamdouh, whose beatbox-recorder act on “America’s Got Talent” has drawn 144 million YouTube views, according to the release. NYC’s Singing Serpent arranged the music, and Nashville’s JAMD Productions shot and edited.
At Fire Kite, Goulart and creative director Zach Fugate wrote it. The CMA Foundation team behind it includes executive director Michelle Kirk.
A small shop with a habit of punching up
Fire Kite, founded in 2024, has won Best of Show at AAF Nashville in both 2025 and 2026. The second came for a charity: water Labor Day spot it turned around in about a week.
The rest of the portfolio swings from earnest to gleefully absurd, including King Tut as a spokesperson for gold-investing app Vaulted. A film that makes 800 people sit quietly fits right in.
Learn more
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CMA Foundation Music Teachers of Excellence
Contact: alex@firekite.co | 917-703-9823