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Kenwood Dennard, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Percussion Department"People say it's not what you know, it's who you know. But I say, don't you think it's how they feel when you're around that's most important? It was Charlie Mingus who showed me the importance of influencing the other members of the band. When I played with Mingus, he made me sound better just by being onstage."
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Ernesto Diaz, Assistant Professor
DEPARTMENT : Percussion Department- Experienced percussionist in many styles including jazz, world beat, r&b, Caribbean, and others
- Clinician for the Department of Art and Culture of the IBA Agency
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David DiCenso, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT : Percussion Department"As musicians, we need to be great at multitasking. To open up your imagination is a form of multitasking. A drummer who's playing a groove—supporting a band—has to go beyond the strictly technical and physical places to find that great feel. One way is to focus, close our eyes, and imagine something related to what we're playing. That's going to inject feeling into our groove that's a little deeper than what it was a moment ago."
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"Before I came to Berklee, I had two great mentors, both of them really good musicians and teachers. One brought an awareness of how the instrument should be played; he stressed control, relaxation, keeping solid time, getting a great sound. The other helped me nurture my musical intuition and the creative spark by turning me on to the great improvisers of our time. Both mentors stressed musicality as the only viable starting point. This is what I strive to impart to my students. There has to be a musical idea first and foremost! There are times when I will stress the importance of the mechanics (technique), but only as a means to make better music. As Joe Hunt, one of my teachers at Berklee, used to say, ‘Technique is a vehicle which makes it possible for your musical idea to come across.’"
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Larry Finn, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Percussion Department"Being a drummer is like being a professional athlete in that you have to be in shape both physically and mentally. A lot of people, when they see a drummer playing a repetitive groove for three minutes, might not realize how hard that is to do. It's difficult to put the whole package—good technique and a musical approach—together."
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"I work with my students to think musically, not just think about playing the exact notes or the exact time. Whatever you're laying down as the primary timekeeper, to make the time and the musical sense correct, it needs to have a musical purpose. When I teach a student to play a Bach piano piece on a marimba, for example, I first get them through the notes—to know how to read the music and use their hands mechanically. Then I ask them to play it musically—to make it breathe so it's not just notes and mechanics. I want my students to be aware of their dynamics, their musical presence, and the texture of what's going on around them."
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Ian Froman, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT : Percussion Department"I don't teach a standard drum lesson with books and exercises. I use a very conceptual approach: Open up your ears, listen to yourself play every single note, and be responsible for those notes so you can make mental—versus physical or technical—changes to your playing. If you play something you don't like, you can identify it and delete it from your playing. If it's something you do like, you can expand on that."
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Joe Galeota, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT : Percussion Department"I focus on oral tradition, mostly call-and-response type learning. It's a bit like ear training. The majority of my classes are African music. I'll introduce the rhythms or the songs, and they have to learn them by ear. After we do that for a while we work on how it gets translated into Western notation. It's very informal, something like an apprenticeship."
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Robert Gullotti, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Percussion Department"I want to get students to be very efficient in the practice room, focused and disciplined. So I have developed some ideas that help the student—and myself—to focus more while they practice. I have them know exactly how long they're going to practice. So if a student has an hour and a half, and I give them six subjects to work on, I want 15 minutes each subject, then put it away until the next day. Even if you're just about ready to get something pretty well, if the 15 minutes is up, you put it away until the next day. That way they don't waste any time practicing. That tends to help them on the bandstand to stay focused."
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Skip Hadden, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Percussion Department"I like to be able to see the students from when they enter—like in the audition process—to when they're in the classes, to when they graduate, and then, years later, they'll come back and knock on the door, and I'll see what they're doing or I'll read about them in magazines. Because I've been doing it for so long now, I've seen a couple generations of students go out and do well."
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