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Faculty

The members of our faculty are more than teachers. They’ll be your mentors, your collaborators, and your instant list of more than 500 industry contacts. They are experienced and talented professionals in their field—and bring a thorough knowledge of music to the classroom that comes from a rich professional background in the music industry. They also bring an energy that will inspire you to push your talents and thinking beyond what you thought were the limits. You’ll find yourself transferring their influences to your ensemble rehearsals, performances, recording sessions, and gigs. In addition, the student-teacher ratio averages 8 to 1. Which means you’ll never feel like a number.

Find a faculty member

Vessela Stoyanova, Assistant Professor

DEPARTMENT : Harmony Department

"I look at theory as a tool to enrich creativity. It is a language to communicate with other musicians, using the most common terms. When I teach, I try to give students all the proper grammar and correct spelling. But they must use these tools to express themselves in their own way. If they don’t have anything interesting to say, the class is useless."

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Omar Thomas, Assistant Professor

DEPARTMENT : Harmony Department

"I use music to teach music. Music theory can be very daunting and frightening to look at, but what it represents is something that is so universal. I'm really about getting past the scary terms, symbols, dots, and lines and getting to what they represent. I'm a huge advocate of talking about not how music sounds but how it feels, to instantly make that connection."

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Stephen Wark, Assistant Professor

DEPARTMENT : Harmony Department

"Harmony and Ear Training are two of the most profound and fundamental courses in the school. Most everything branches off from those. I hope that by establishing students in different levels of harmony that we've built a foundation for them that will make them successful in anything they want to do in life."

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Michael Wartofsky, Professor

DEPARTMENT : Harmony Department

"I'd say one of the main functions of the Harmony Department is to ensure a certain level of musicianship among Berklee grads. And then, on a deeper level, it gives us the tools we need to be better writers, arrangers, and performers. I studied at Berklee for a year after already having an undergrad music degree. One year of Berklee, and especially Berklee harmony, changed the way I compose and changed the way I think about music. This system is unique to our school, and we're very fortunate to have it passed down to us. It seemed a lot more practical than the music theory I had studied previously.

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