Faculty
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Patrice Williamson, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT : Voice Department"I teach private instruction in the Voice Department as well as a couple of ensembles, an R&B class, and a mixed-style class, both with improvisation. I pretty much cover the gamut, which is a reflection of my own singing life. In fact, last weekend I had a jazz gig with my vocal trio Friday night, then Saturday morning I sang with my gospel choir for a special service, Saturday night I had a pop and R&B gig for a wedding, and Sunday afternoon I perfomed show tunes with my musical theater group."
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Prince Charles Alexander, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT : Music Production and Engineering Department"I want to create, in my classroom, an environment that closely mirrors my experience in the real world. I'm a former recording artist, a producer, an engineer. . . . I've managed, I've done tour support, I've done live sounds. . . . So I want to teach my students how to survive in the music business and put them in as many realistic situations as possible. If you're going to take advantage of this educational process, you need to investigate as many of those tangents as possible. You never know when one of them might be the one that opens the door.
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Paul Elmen, Assistant Professor
DEPARTMENT : Ensemble Department"Some students have never played in a band before, and that can be difficult. That's why I always use a recording of the songs that we're playing, to give them an idea of what it is to play together if they haven't done that in the past. You listen to how it all works together. We listen to the drums, we listen to the bass, we listen to the accompanying instruments. That helps them get towards that goal of playing together. And sometimes it'll take a few weeks before it starts sounding musical. I always tell them, our goal is for a concert at the end of the semester. We're working towards that—it's a little carrot out there for them, so that they have something to really think about achieving."
Read More"I'm teaching a Topics in History class called The American Music Industry. The course provides an overview of music business practices here in the United States, beginning with sheet music publishing and piano manufacturing in the 19th century. We then explore the birth of the recording industry in the 1880s and 1890s, the impact of film and radio on the music industry of the 1920s and 1930s, and the emergence of new recording techniques and new marketing practices in the post-World War II era. By focusing on these major paradigm shifts, students leave the class with a better sense of what's happening right now in the music industry, as digital distribution is changing the way we consume music. Students also develop a clearer sense of how popular music reflects the time period in which it's written, whether we're talking about pro-Union Civil War songs or early Delta blues recordings."
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"I teach a class I designed called Scoring the Moment. Every week students look at a classic scene in a movie. For example, I show them scenes of kisses from famous movies, and then I show a scene from a movie I did where somebody kisses, and then they score that kiss next week. When they come back and play it for me, then I play them what I did. The next week we do gun fight or we do abandoned or we do tornado. It's great fun to see what they do on scenes I've already done. And I tell them, if you're going to do this for a living, sooner or later, you're going to do one of those things."
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"I'm a founding editor (with writer, Rachel Yoder) of draft: the journal of process. The concept is that we have a published short story by two established writers, and we ask the authors for the first drafts to appear alongside the final pieces. Then we do an interview with the author about the process of creating that early draft and making it into the final story. We have Dave Eggers and Amy Bloom in the next one. The magazine reveals to students that people don't just speak into the printing press. There are about 10 drafts between initial inspiration and what the final published, polished product looks like. That gives students some confidence, because they see that mistakes were made, and the writers worked on it."
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Jan Donley, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT : Liberal Arts Department"I find that this age group really identifies with their own coming of age, so I focus on that kind of literature and get them thinking about all the different ways we come of age—those pivotal moments in our lives when we move in new or unexpected directions. What they read is a mixture of nonfiction and fiction; what they write is nonfiction. Personal narrative is one of the pieces that they do, but I also have them write about the literature they are reading. We often discuss songs and lyrics and consider ways to use these as source material."
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Jason Palmer, Assistant Professor
DEPARTMENT : Ensemble Department"I'm really into serial composition, improvisation based on numbers. We play songs based on sudoku games, just to get students to be able to recognize a chord structure. If they see a seven, then that means it's a seven in the scale. So it kind of connects their minds. The rules are, you can play one note, let's say the nine, as many times as you want, but you can't go to any other note except for, say, the six. So then they have to figure out what kind of rhythm they can add to the notes in order to make them sound like music instead of a robot. I did a commission about four or five years ago in New York, and I wrote a suite—two hours' worth of music-based on a sudoku game. It was great! It's fun. It's another way of thinking about music."
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Suzanne Cope, Assistant Professor
DEPARTMENT : Liberal Arts Department"I love that I can approach teaching from a perspective that includes music and creativity as a common ground. I had Regie Gibson come in today. He's a poet, very much in the slam musical influence, who is influenced by both music and the classic literature canon. He was talking about philosophers that I haven't thought much about since I was an undergrad, and Beowulf, which I hadn't read in ages either, and relating them to our students' experiences. And I thought, 'This is the importance of a great undergraduate education.' You have this baseline of what people are talking about, what the canon is. You don't feel like you're out of the loop. While I tend to focus on more contemporary authors and artists in my classes, I completely appreciate the need to be aware of the long history of art and literature and find the ways to relate it to what the students are doing creatively today."
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Bradford Gleim, Assistant Professor
DEPARTMENT : Voice Department"I'm a great advocate of technology in the classroom. All of my students record their lessons using their laptops, and we use those videos as learning tools outside of our lesson time. Then, also, I have students make a video on their own every week and send it to me, and sometimes I'll also Skype, because I believe that one of the pitfalls of private instruction is that we only see each other once a week. In those seven days in between, a lot of things could happen to change habits."
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