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Mike Mason, Assistant Chair
DEPARTMENT : Liberal Arts Department"I think that the most important aspect of a Berklee student's education is that liberal arts doesn't stand apart from the music curriculum. We infuse the liberal arts with music and music with liberal arts. So, for example, students learn in a history class about where a certain music originated, but they also learn about the social and historical contexts of that place, what was going on, who were the people that lived there, and what influenced the music. Another example might be in a music criticism class, where music is played but students are taught to analyze it through a certain social or political lens. So in class, students are not only using their skills as musicians, but they're also using their skills as writers and critical thinkers as well. We try to combine very different disciplines in a very natural way."
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"History is about choices and outcomes—the ideal learning opportunity. History brings people back to primary sources. So much of our information is filtered. Newspapers, books, and television offer someone else's conclusions. We ask students to peel back a layer and look at the evidence for themselves. Often students are surprised at what they find. In the discussion that follows, we can all learn from each other."
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- M.F.A., University of Pittsburgh
- Published in local and national newspapers and magazines
"I think the faculty at Berklee are very engaged individually with the students, because a lot of what the students do is more creative, more individualized. I think people are more receptive to letting the students be a little freer. I have them do a presentation using visuals, or videos and visuals. They will often incorporate music into the presentations. They get very, very creative."
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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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"I realize that most students are not here because they want to take a science class, so I want them to see that what we're talking about in class is absolutely relevant to their everyday lives, whether or not they think of those things as science, per se. Whatever's on the news, we'll be talking about it in class. Somewhere over 4 million people have been affected by the floods in Pakistan. They're not getting food; they're not getting water supplies that are safe to drink. That starts a lot of political unrest, and that's all related to the environment. The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico absolutely has relevance in terms of seafood supplies, economic impact to the United States, etc. Hopefully we can tie all of those in and see why they should care about those things."
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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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"I incorporate music into my Spanish classes. Each student brings in music twice per semester and talks about the music and the artist. My intermediate students write a music review in Spanish; and I use a lot of musical examples in grammar lessons. I try to present music as an aspect of culture, because there is so much Latin music. The music in Cuba is very different from the music in Argentina, which is very different from the music in Colombia. Students get to truly understand the diversity of the Spanish-speaking world through the lens of music."
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Sally Blazar, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Liberal Arts Department"Especially with first-year students, a lot of what I'm doing in addition to teaching English is introducing them to college, to a different way of thinking and interacting with others. I have a background in ESL, as well as literature. This background has led me to approach language—in academic essays, in literature, in speaking—as a means of communicating."
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"The trick is to present the material in a way that is unique to Berklee. There might be classes with similar names at other institutions, but they're going to be nothing at all like what students are going to get here, because pretty much every problem in math involves music in some way. We calculate the frequencies of notes under various tuning systems, looking at the math behind it. In economics and statistics, most of the articles we read are related to the music industry."
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