 |
Alizon Lissance, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT : Harmony Department"I want my students to leave my classes with a heightened awareness of the inner workings of music, an embracing of the left-brain stuff, a desire to explore harmony and color. For the writers it's a no-brainer. There are a lot more singers here at Berklee now, and I really encourage them to play the piano. I hope my students come away with an openness to use the tools that we give them in their own writing and arranging."
Read More |
Craig Macrae, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT : Harmony Department"I have long had an interest in Central Asia. In Portland, Maine, where I was working as a musician during the eighties, there were a lot of Iranian and Afghan refugees. I taught myself enough Persian to volunteer in refugee resettlement. Later, as I was finishing my master's in jazz guitar, I was short on gigs one summer, and applied for a government fellowship to study Uzbek language. I got it. One thing leads to another—I went for a doctorate in ethnomusicology. So that's how I ended up putting my interest in music together with an interest in Central Asia."
Read More |
Rick McLaughlin, Assistant Professor
DEPARTMENT : Harmony Department"There's a really beautiful universal language in the way that Berklee thinks about harmony. Not every kind of music operates in the same way that we teach the language, but the tools of understanding harmony at Berklee make it possible for a student to say, 'This note in this context is either right or wrong, a good or bad choice.' It gives students the ability to make the transformation from whatever kind of music we're talking about today to whatever kind of music they go on to explore as artists."
Read More |
Stephen Rochinski, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Harmony Department"There are so many people in the world who would love to be here, but can't. So the online school fills that vacuum. I teach a couple sections of the Harmony class online. The students are generally older, quite bright and experienced, but it runs the entire spectrum of beginners who don't know a quarter note from a 25-cent piece to people who are working professional musicians but who never had a lot of the basic foundations of harmony as they were coming up. The online school helps to bridge that gap."
Read More |
George Russell Jr., Professor
DEPARTMENT : Harmony Department"Music is harmony and melody. It's like a vocabulary. Without a vocabulary, it's difficult to speak. You can do it, but it sounds like you don't know what you're saying. As a player myself, knowing harmonic theory gives me a lot of security. I know two plus two equals four. I don't have to guess."
Read More |
Mike Scott, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Harmony Department"To show my students a practical use for this, I give the example of a singer I occasionally back up on piano at Sunday brunches. She's 50 years old, and at 9:00 a.m. her voice is a whole step lower than it will be an hour later. I have to play all of her tunes a whole step lower. If I didn't have the ability to think in representational terms, instead of literally, it would be very difficult to do."
Read More |
"One of the best classes I ever took here was with Mitch Halpins, his Nonstylistic Improvisation Concepts Ensemble, which was just incredible. It takes the stylistic thing away, so you are sort of stripped down to who you are or what you can offer. You have to be fully present to the other people who are there with you, to enter into this sacred space which has never come before and will never come again. It's just such an amazing concept, but you must be willing to really open yourself up to that, to receive and not just transmit only."
Read More |
William Silvio, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT : Harmony Department"One of the things I try to do is make a somewhat complicated subject seem easy. I think a lot of students tend to get intimidated in theory-type classes. In some ways, it can be mechanical and abstract, and I try to bring that musical element into the classroom so they can see the relevance of what they're studying. Another thing I try to do in the classroom is get the students to have some fun. There's no reason that music theory has to be a drag. We can learn and have fun at the same time."
Read More |
Daniel Ian Smith, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT : Harmony Department"Given all the constructs we have to deliver, it would be easy to walk into class and throw a list up on the board. But I'd rather start with a piece of music and ask, 'What colors do you see? When you hear this section, what does it feel like?' I want to start with that tangible connection and then say, 'Okay, now let's look at the chords, or the relationship between the melody and the harmony.'
Read More |
John Stein, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT : Harmony Department"Music is an interesting thing. Much of music is emotional. It's human expression, and you can't teach that, of course. And you can't teach artistry. You can only teach the craft of music. But the actual material that I teach—the nuts and bolts—is something that, once you internalize it, you can use it to create great art with. Every moment of my music-making includes the material that I teach. It informs what I do intuitively to a great extent."
Read More