Faculty
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Alison Plante, Assistant Chair
DEPARTMENT : Film Scoring"Knowing how to collaborate is so important. Music for media—whether it's games, interactive media, film, or television—doesn't stand alone; it works with the other elements and that means that you're working with other people. We promote collaboration in a lot of classes in our department and in extracurricular activities, and we're continuing to broaden the possibilities for collaboration in the curriculum."
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"There is a thread in this music. What they have in common is these little rhythmic cells, things that are actually from Africa and other ancient places. This is in Brazilian music, in Afro-Cuban music. It's in calypso, it's in New Orleans music. So there is a little musical DNA that's in all of them. It's like cooking. If you understand what curry does, what salt does, what pepper does, what garlic does, what olive oil does, you can play with food. I tell that to my students in every class: I don't want them to play rhythms; I want them to play withthe rhythms."
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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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Helen Sung, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT : Piano Department
"Here at Berklee I teach private lessons to piano majors. I'm very impressed with my students. They're all very gifted and from all over the world: Korea, Cuba, Sri Lanka, Canada, the U.S., etc. They each come from very different backgrounds and training, yet here they all are at Berklee wanting to learn more about jazz. This really speaks to the global impact of this great American art form."
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"I'm teaching MP-320, Producing for Records. Really, it's a full semester with one goal. The first half, they do demos of a couple of songs, and the second half, they do a full recording. That means a little detours with different songs, maybe, or trying out different things, but in the second half, they get their studio time, and they get really focused. They pick their own artist. It's got to be a Berklee song and a Berklee artist. It's all connected with the engineering class and the mix class. It's a project with three different courses involved, so they're all integrated and coordinated."
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Simon Shaheen, Professor
DEPARTMENT : String Department
"What I'm bringing to Berklee is my experience as a Western classical musician, Arab traditional musician, and this eclectic fusion of music from around the world, which I grew up with. I speak five languages because I grew up with it; it's not like I learned in later stages. So it's part of me. Berklee is the place where I can bring all this experience, because the idea is not to create compartments of music, but to open the walls and let all these experiences seep into each other."
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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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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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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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