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Arnold Friedman, Chair
DEPARTMENT : Composition Department"I want to open up more possibilities for my students, more doors for their creativity. The first few weeks of counterpoint seems totally the opposite of that. It's very typical to hear complaints about how there are too many rules. But the result of experiencing that kind of discipline while creating music—having to be creative within a very narrow set of parameters—is that later on when you're free to do whatever you want, you still have this very disciplined method to apply to it."
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James Smith, Assistant Chair
DEPARTMENT : Composition Department"The courses in our department give students the nuts and bolts that will give them a real leg up. When they walk out of Berklee, they can also do arranging, orchestration, transcription—a world of things to keep them in the business while they're still waiting for that one song that becomes the big one. The more tools they've got, the more ways they have of staying in the profession."
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Rick Applin, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Composition Department"Love of music is our common bond in all my classrooms. With the education majors, it's love of teaching as well. In my tonal harmony course for education majors, we role play in our third hour: I become a high school student with the rest of the class, and one of the class members teaches. I show my students that you can maintain a certain degree of informality that is nevertheless infused with a sense of respect for the institution, for the teacher, and for the classroom."
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Larry Bell, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT : Composition Department"One of my teachers told me that you can always get more money, but you cannot always get more time, an idea that emphasizes the importance of time management, particularly for musicians. If 80 percent of life is showing up, the other 20 percent is being on time. It is no longer true that an artist is given much latitude because of his or her talent. The aspiring composer's capacity to deliver on deadline is part and parcel of that person's ambition to succeed."
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"These courses are really all about learning how to account for everything you write. I think it's important for students to take the strict rules we give them and refine their music in that way during class, so that when they approach the music they want to write outside of class, they're going to have just as much control over it. When I compose music, I don't think about all the rules I was taught in my classes, but with every single note I have some awareness of why I chose that particular pitch and that particular rhythm."
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"The main thing in teaching composition is to create an atmosphere in which the natural gifts of the students flourish. That atmosphere depends, I think, upon the ability to enter the world of students' compositions—to let go of your own style when you look at your students' compositions. Whenever any composer, no matter what the age, brings me a composition, as I start to play it, I forget about my own musical world and my own musical style. For that moment, I enter the mind of that person to such an extent as to be able to look at this composition as if it is mine."
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Beth Denisch, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Composition Department"My job as a faculty member is to teach students new skills and how to access resources that will help them find their own voices. Through exposure to new musics, and through modeling and experimentation, students experience which materials, styles, and techniques resonate within them and they then 'make it their own.' I think Berklee students have more of an opportunity to do that than students of other schools where they may be exposed to less varied styles of music."
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Marti Epstein, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Composition Department"To graduate, students have to have a portfolio of pieces and-very important-they have to have a certain number of these pieces performed. Because one of the aspects of a composer's training is, how do you get people to play your music? So we try to get them to start doing that right away."
Read MoreRonny Feldman, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Composition Department- B.F.A., Boston University
- Conductor and cellist, Berkshire Symphony Orchestra, Boston Conservatory Orchestra
- Member, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Boston Pops Orchestra
- Recipient of two ASCAP Awards for Adventuresome Programming
- Conductor of performances with the Boston Symphony, Boston Pops, St. Louis Symphony, Rochester Philharmonic, and Quebec Symphony
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Scott Fessler, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Composition Department"In the composition courses I teach, we're dealing with a body of knowledge that dates back a couple of centuries, so I try to show the connection to more recent compositions. 'Over the Rainbow,' for example, fits into an eighteeth-century European structure almost perfectly. After we analyze it in class, I make the point that it's one of the most commercially successful pieces of songcraft that has ever been created. We start talking about why that's true, and that its elements, in terms of organization and melody, are also true for a Beatles tune or a piece by Bach. Those all have universal elements of construction that are effective and timeless."
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