Harmony
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Joseph Mulholland, Chair
DEPARTMENT : Harmony Department"The essence of the Harmony Department is music fundamentals as they play out in notation, chord progression, melody, and bass lines. In any other school, they call it theory. And it is theory, but it's much more practical than an ordinary theory class would be. We teach students to take apart the music they listen to and understand how it's put together. They take the music apart like a watch, see what the pieces are and what they're doing. Hopefully, the students learn from that and use that knowledge to create their own music, a watch of their own—but one that still runs."
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Suzanne M. Clark, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT : Harmony Department"We call it 'music theory' because in a sense it is theoretical until you actually put it to sound. So I try to stress in class not to get caught up in your head to the extent that it's all calculated. In the end, you either confirm or affirm your theory by listening to it and saying, 'Yes, I hear that the leading tone wants to move to do, or that fa wants to move to mi.' I want my students to develop their own ear and make connections between what they hear outside of class and what goes on inside class."
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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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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."
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David Harris, Assistant Professor
DEPARTMENT : Harmony Department
"I want my students to understand the necessity to have competent craft beyond their talent. They need to have technical skills beyond just inspiration to be successful, and to have a dogged vision of what it is that they want out of music and pursue it. As a bandleader, who do I hire? Maybe not the most creative person, but someone I know will go out there and aggressively put their mind to what they need to do."
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Lucy Holstedt, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Harmony Department"I like to be spontaneous and creative in class. For instance, I ask my students to bring in recordings they like, and I'll develop a lesson from their music right on the spot. It keeps things fresh, and it means they can personally identify with what we're learning."
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Randy Felts, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT : Harmony Department"Old tunes also come back from time to time, so I may have several recordings of the same song. In class I can play the original version and then move up to others recorded more recently. I'll put the basic progressions on the board for students to check out. Then, since I have 3,000 pieces of music with me all the time on my laptop, I can jump from 30 seconds of one to 15 seconds of another. Students hear the changes in the arrangement and rhythmic style of the same progression as it mutates through the different eras."
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Stephen Dale, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Harmony Department“All professional contemporary musicians, no matter what style they favor, should have a degree of what I call ‘harmonic improvisation’ skill. By that I mean the ability to add or change chords selectively in progressions to enhance the harmony and make the music more appealing to the listener. In my harmony classes, I cover each functional group of chords by showing how to use the chords on the spot in a free-wheeling, improvisational way."
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Rick Kress, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT : Harmony Department"Transcription can easily fall into drafting, but without hearing it, it means practically nothing. So I always integrate hearing and writing, and with the software we use, students can create bits of music, so we can hear them back and make a judgment about how it sounds. What's the melody-harmony relationship? Are the phrases balanced? Are they coherent? Is there a note that sends the phrase in a direction that is never realized? I think the more we do that without students becoming overwhelmed by the prospect, the better."
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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.'
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