Liberal Arts

"Berklee students are a very diverse group, ranging from students who are very uncomfortable with academic learning to students who really enjoy reading and writing and discussing other things beside music. I've had some wonderful writers. I'm trying to encourage the students to think of themselves as creative learners, with no dichotomy between literature and music."

"I'm always teaching history in a way that plugs in with questions people need to ask themselves as human beings. It could be issues of heart and mind, how you live between passions and hatreds, and how emotion and rationality fit together. Whether we're reading something from the Hindu Vedas or a narrative of an African slave, the issues they deal with still are relevant. People will quite regularly give me a CD of a song they've created and say they've written it as a direct result of things that we learned in class."

"My job, I tell my students, is to be their guide, to help them articulate what they already know. For me, that's what the process of education is—it's the act of leading out. So I tell my students to think about a symphony. There is going to be an introduction, or an 'entry' in painterly terms. The leitmotif in a musical composition is a 'directional' in a painting. And then we have major movements, which carry the viewer's eye around the composition and lead us to a finale, which we call an 'exit.' When showing my students the importance of color and why we have to be careful about color, I'll say, for example, 'Red is almost a D major. You put that in the wrong place, and your composition will fall apart.'"

"Our curriculum takes what I call the Nautilus approach to songwriting. You isolate the muscle and work on it. Everything about the major, at least at the beginning, is about isolation. The first step is to separate the lyric component from the music component. Which isn't to say that we talk about melody without talking about lyric, or lyric without melody, because often you can't separate them. . . . Of course, we try not to lose the focus that this is about creativity. We try to emphasize as strongly as possible that all these technical tools we teach are simply in the service of the ideas and emotions that you're trying to convey."