Liberal Arts

"To musicians who are writers, the kind of practices that we do in the classroom—writing philosophical essays and short stories—emphasize the importance of literacy in writing, and this directly relates itself to musicians, particularly those who write music. And so the students themselves become literate writers. They appreciate literature, they understand it, they can analyze it, can take positions against it and on its behalf, and they, more importantly, may want to write about their own music for newspapers, magazines, websites, and many other venues."

"The supreme moment of creativity is reaching that level in which you are both entirely engaged with what you're doing and yet aware that you're in it, what Aaron Copland calls being both inside and outside a work simultaneously, as creator or audience. It's kind of an exquisite moment. Poets also speak to that, and how to combine spontaneity with form, to be both Dionysian and Apollonian. That is a supreme aesthetic question I ask students to consider, as they learn so much order and form at Berklee yet want to express their own spontaneous impulses."

"Berklee students are a very diverse group, ranging from students who are very uncomfortable with academic learning to students who really enjoy reading and writing and discussing other things beside music. I've had some wonderful writers. I'm trying to encourage the students to think of themselves as creative learners, with no dichotomy between literature and music."

"I'm always teaching history in a way that plugs in with questions people need to ask themselves as human beings. It could be issues of heart and mind, how you live between passions and hatreds, and how emotion and rationality fit together. Whether we're reading something from the Hindu Vedas or a narrative of an African slave, the issues they deal with still are relevant. People will quite regularly give me a CD of a song they've created and say they've written it as a direct result of things that we learned in class."