Liberal Arts
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Henry Augustine Tate, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Liberal Arts Department"My job, I tell my students, is to be their guide, to help them articulate what they already know. For me, that's what the process of education is—it's the act of leading out. So I tell my students to think about a symphony. There is going to be an introduction, or an 'entry' in painterly terms. The leitmotif in a musical composition is a 'directional' in a painting. And then we have major movements, which carry the viewer's eye around the composition and lead us to a finale, which we call an 'exit.' When showing my students the importance of color and why we have to be careful about color, I'll say, for example, 'Red is almost a D major. You put that in the wrong place, and your composition will fall apart.'"
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William C. Banfield, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Liberal Arts Department"You can't know where you're going unless you know where you are, and where you came from. When you put those three things together, you have the best formula for making a successful impact on your craft and on the world of music. When students start to sense all the connections, you can see the 'aha experience' in the eyes. It's in the questions they ask, it's in their performances. It's a spirit."
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C. Pat Pattison, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Liberal Arts Department"Our curriculum takes what I call the Nautilus approach to songwriting. You isolate the muscle and work on it. Everything about the major, at least at the beginning, is about isolation. The first step is to separate the lyric component from the music component. Which isn't to say that we talk about melody without talking about lyric, or lyric without melody, because often you can't separate them. . . . Of course, we try not to lose the focus that this is about creativity. We try to emphasize as strongly as possible that all these technical tools we teach are simply in the service of the ideas and emotions that you're trying to convey."
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Victor Wallis, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Liberal Arts Department"I'm very concerned to keep up with as many dimensions as possible of what's happening now. I have a sort of listserv-an email list of people to whom I send items about current politics; for instance, an analysis of Obama's appointees in the economic realm. I've had an academic career in political science. I edit the journal Socialism and Democracy. The latest issue has a special focus on immigrants. I also write for Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, theMonthly Review—which has a pretty wide international circulation. So I keep busy!"
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Pratt Bennet, Assistant Professor
DEPARTMENT : Liberal Arts Department"I can bring to students a long life of experience of rejection and failure and success as completely interconnected pieces of a puzzle to show them that everything they're doing—conversations they're having with their friends, experiences they're having on break, meals they're having with people, strangers they meet—can inform their creativity."
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Lori Landay, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Liberal Arts Department"In Language of Film I give students a three-part project. Their first assignment is to write an original screenplay of a scene or short-short film, and write a paper about it. Next they storyboard their screenplay and write a paper about that. In the third assignment, we improvise a scene and shoot some footage, which they edit together on their laptops; then they write a paper about editing. Students learn about how people make choices, and film scoring students gain insight into the directors with whom they have to communicate. It's probably the most exciting thing I've done at Berklee."
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Gary Miller, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT : Liberal Arts Department"You get students from all over the place. Last year we were talking about Occupied France during the war, Vichy France. Do people collaborate, do they resist? I had a student who was French, and his grandfather faced that very question. As I recall, his grandfather was terrified. Once we were talking about the '20s in Germany, where there was hyperinflation. The government was printing ever-larger denominations, like one trillion marks. A student brought in a whole bunch of this money. We were passing it around and looking at it."
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DJ Hatfield, Assistant Professor
DEPARTMENT : Liberal Arts Department"What it means to be a good musician is more than technical proficiency. One of the things I think we can really offer is time to reflect and work through what it might mean to be a musician in contemporary society. Not all of us talk about music in our classes, and that's because a lot of what it means to be a good musician goes beyond music: it has to do with what it means to be a thinking person. I'd like to think of what we do not as a supplement, but as something that can really add to the ability of our students to think about where they can go as musicians."
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Ross Bresler, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT : Liberal Arts Department"Art history is a required course at Berklee, and it's just human nature for students—who are here to study music—to wonder how it's relevant to them. But within a week or two they start to realize that at the core of it, what all these people were doing—whether thousands of years ago or just last week—is exactly what they're doing now: figuring out how to channel their passion and curiosity into creating something."
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Joseph Coroniti, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Liberal Arts Department"Given the competitive nature of the music industry, students need to speak and write articulately. Writing about literature and drama helps them with their lyric writing and their ability to promote themselves as music professionals. Thinking critically about other art forms teaches them to connect with others and to discover and express new ideas."
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