Faculty
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Darol Anger, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT : String Department“We have students coming from a classical music background who are interested in playing various vernacular styles—jazz and fiddle music, blues, pop—and then we also have fiddle players who learned by ear or through various traditional routes and who are interested in expanding their theoretical knowledge. That’s two very different approaches, although after a couple of years it all evens out. Usually they wind up expanding their taste buds a little bit, so they’re interested in more styles. There’s a string style for every country, usually four or five.”
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Kathleen Flynn, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT : Voice Department"Technique is being able to sing freely and with ease, so that your body can really obey your artistic ideas. What goes into that is a lot of study, a lot of rigorous and occasionally tedious repetition of exercises, so they become muscle memory, so that when you're in a performance, you're not thinking, Is my jaw tight? Is my tongue loose enough? Are my ribs expanded? You're only thinking about communicating with your audience."
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Wesley Corbett, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT : String Department"I found my way to the banjo completely by accident, through the roots of the banjo. We did an African percussion workshop at a Suzuki workshop that I was at. I started doing that as well as playing piano, and then from that started playing the kora, which is a West African traditional harp. It's basically a grandfather to the banjo. And then I heard Béla Fleck when I was 16 and just went banjo-crazy."
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Ben Houge, Assistant Professor
DEPARTMENT : Film Scoring"Even if some of my students don't go into careers in video games, I think these are important concepts. How to structure nonlinear media, the applications for that go beyond video games. We're having digitally mediated interactive experiences all around us every day. Going through the subway turnstile, there's audio feedback; increasingly, we're seeing interactive kiosks in advertising contexts or shopping venues, museum installations, things like that."
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"The genius of the Ear Training curriculum is that it's incredibly well designed, while not biased towards a particular style of music. And the rigorousness of it is impressive, as well, pulling in a general freshman population and bringing them up to a really high standard after four semesters. In my classes I try to give my own twist to the curriculum and always make sure the students create music, rather than drill exercises."
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Richard "Gus" Sebring, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Brass Department"To sit onstage in Symphony Hall among the most refined orchestral musicians in the world is an incredible experience. Players at the highest level demonstrate a complete mastery of instrumental technique, an amazing degree of finesse, consistency of intonation and rhythm, and a lyric, deeply emotive radiance."
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Darren Barrett, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT : Ensemble Department"My time at Berklee was extremely nurturing. The atmosphere was so inspiring, everyone working so hard to really be able to play at the highest level possible. Antonio Hart and I were roommates for a period, and did a lot of playing together, and grew together. In 1988, my curiosity was piqued by electronic music, programming, and synthesis. I dedicated time learning how to program drum machines and synthesizers, and started learning how to produce popular music."
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Tim Ray, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT : Piano Department"One of the things I try to communicate to my students is the idea that when you're in school, you try to absorb as much as you can in terms of music and styles and just open yourself up to as broad a spectrum as you can. Because you never know when an opportunity will come along that's going to take your career in a different direction. That's what happened to me. When I was in college, I thought, 'I'll just be a jazz piano player,' and then all these other things came up. The next thing I know, I'm doing all these great things, traveling all over the world, playing with all these incredible musicians, but not necessarily playing jazz all the time. So I try to open myself up to all these different opportunities."
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Rob Thomas, Professor
DEPARTMENT : String Department"There is a big, all-inclusive, alternative strings styles movement, and I represent one corner of that movement, which is this idea that we should be able to play, go toe to toe, with any jazz instrumentalist. The violin is a frontline instrument; it can fit right in. The more of us that learn how to do that, the less it's going to be considered a fringe element. Hopefully, what I teach transcends the idea of playing jazz on the violin specifically. To paraphrase something Jean-Luc Ponty said years ago, I've always thought of myself as a jazz musician who plays strings as opposed to a string player who plays jazz. I'm trying to put a universal jazz vocabulary onto string instruments."
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Mark Simos, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT : Songwriting Department"I don't stand in front of the class dissecting students' songs. That style of critique reinforces the false notion that there is just one way of writing a good song, oriented towards following mainstream conventions. What about the song that's going to come along every once in a while—like John Hartford's Gentle On My Mind—that breaks every single rule and is a brilliant song?"
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