Film Scoring
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Claudio Ragazzi, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT : Film Scoring"I believe in the complete musician. I think in order to make it in the real world you have to have a specialty like film scoring, orchestration, or production, but you also need to know how to play your instrument, you need to read. Twenty-something years ago I was graduating from Berklee. Then I went to play music, then I went to record, then I went to film scoring for almost twenty years, and now I come full circle back to Berklee as a teacher. So I think if you really want to make it as a professional musician, you try to be, as much as you can, a complete musician, someone who can perform, write, orchestrate, arrange, produce, do film scoring, do theater, do ballet, do other forms."
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Joe Smith, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Film Scoring"A film scorer needs a diverse musical vocabulary to be able to write different musical harmonies for different kinds of projects. You're obviously not, for example, going to write the same kind of score for Mrs. Doubtfire as you would for Silence of the Lambs—both of which Howard Shore did."
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Ruth Mendelson, Assistant Professor
DEPARTMENT : Film Scoring"One of the greatest reasons for having talent is to be of service to others, so I want my students to trust their intuition and imagination to come up with ways to make a living within that. Part of creative conviction is to understand: Who are you really? What are you doing on this earth? These are very big questions, but with the privilege of being an artist comes the responsibility to address them. Otherwise, how do you grow into yourself?"
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Richard Davis, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Film Scoring"I try to emphasize the idea that we're constantly making a series of decisions, and that the goal is to satisfy a dramatic intention. In an orchestration class, I can't teach kids what notes to write. I can't stand over them and say, 'Write this note and this note,' or 'You must use this combination of instruments here.' But I can show them how to identify styles, genres, or gestures they're making through the music that the audience will relate to. I can show them how to make decisions about what instruments, what combinations, to use to achieve a certain effect. It's decision-making and overall concept that I tend to emphasize."
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Kari Juusela, Dean
DEPARTMENT : Professional Writing Division"Professional Writing has to do with all the music that is composed. We try to encompass all the styles that are happening today, all the way from contemporary classical to hip-hop. Although we work with older music, our focus is on what's happening now—which keeps us on our toes. There's been a real blending of musical styles, and Berklee is a perfect place to do that because we have so many faculty experts in all these areas."
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Michael Sweet, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT : Film Scoring"Video game audio is a multidisciplinary field; it's so varied and massive in scope, with about six disciplines combined into one. On one hand, you have to be the John Williams: you have to write the music. But on the other hand, for it to work with the video game, there's also the logic of how all that music is going to work together in the game and how that stuff interacts. For composers, you have to wrap your head around some new concepts that you don't encounter as a linear film composer. Those things include branching and looping, and being able to transition from one place to another very quickly. In a game, you have to plan for all the variances of how a player might actually be interacting with the game."
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Eric Reasoner, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Film Scoring"I try to give my students practical working knowledge—to not only understand the concepts but to see how it all comes together. I'll show examples of feature film projects that I've worked on; I'll bring films into the classroom and tear them apart and say, 'Now, here's where we start. Here's how we build the music cues for this particular scene. Here's how we go about editing them.' Just showing students the overall process flow."
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Andreas Bjorck, Assistant Professor
DEPARTMENT : Film Scoring"The actual end result—the music—is what you need to be thinking about; whatever tools you use are just tools. Just because you're working with a computer, you're still trying to create art. You have to treat technology as an instrument that's no different from spending six hours a day in a practice room practicing your guitar. Whether it's a computer or a mixing board or a guitar, you have to make it kind of sing and play for you."
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Sheldon Mirowitz, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Film Scoring"There are two parts to creating. One is exploring and the other is culling. If you confuse them, then you won't get anywhere. Mick Goodrick once said to me, 'When you swim, there is stroking and then there's gliding. And if you only stroke you won't be able to swim, because you won't get anywhere. You need to be able to glide in between strokes.' There's a period of time when you are capturing the things floating around through you, and you have to be very careful not to be judgmental at that point. There is also the point when you need to be critical and throw things out, but if you go there at the wrong point in the process you'll simply muck it up."
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Don Wilkins, Chair Emeritus
DEPARTMENT : Film Scoring- B.M., Berklee College of Music
- Composer for feature films Sixteen (a.k.a., Like a Crow on a June Bug), Mission Hill, The First Killing Frost, and Academy Award nominee Urge to Build
- Composer for television series Hometown and Breaking Ground and co-composer for America by Design
- Music supervisor on over 200 short subjects, including Academy Award winner Karl Hess: Toward Liberty and nominee Kudzu
- Film music editor for network television specials and contributing arranger for network television movies River of Gold and Maybe I'll Come Home in the Spring
- Clinician on film music for National Film Board of Canada, Women in Film-New England, and IAJE