What the Six Steps Mean at Berklee

In UNDERSTANDING COMICS, Scott McCloud lays out the six steps of a complete creative process. McCloud demonstrates how an artist can gain an understanding of, and access each echelon over a long period of study, but also how these steps apply to each work of art. Clearly, one cannot be said to have mastered any form of art without full knowledge and utility of each of these steps, so I want to do a little comparison of some of the majors at Berklee to see which ones are the most complete by this model (and to reassure myself about my own selection of major) I'll start with a brief account of my own progress through the steps as a musician.

My story begins with my decision to start playing the bass guitar. I had been listening to Primus records, and one day decided, that I just had to learn to play that wacky stuff. I got a bass and began emulating the sounds I heard, learning by ear alone. I picked up a lot of nimble fingered licks and flashy slap bass, and thought I was really on to something. I had grazed step 6, the surface. Here my course meandered. I went directly to step 3 and tried to create my own idiom. (The fact that my initial inspiration was Primus should tell you that I was chiefly interested in sounding completely different than anyone else) This attempt had mixed results, because I wasn't going for a musical idiom, but for a bass guitar idiom. So though I thought I was breaking new ground, I was working on a tiny little patch of dirt. It didn't take me long to realize that there were less obvious, but more important aspects of playing the bass I would need to master to actually get any gigs, such as playing tastefully, and with consistent time. These just below the surface techniques represented step 5, the craft of playing bass. Soon, I began actually writing songs, and step 4, structure, became important. (I had also made an unconcious decision about step 2, form, but that had not yet occourred to me.) Musical notation and communication, song forms, and prosody all started to slowly manifest in my repertoire. Finally, I had some real room to experiment with idioms. At Berklee, I have managed to learn -indirectly until this class- about the importance of a concept/story/message as the foundation of a song. I have now used both steps 1, Idea/Purpose, and 2, Form, as the basis for my work. I have discovered that it is possible to write a pop song that is a comment about the art form itself (that is, beginning with step 2.) This has given me extraordinary freedom, becase if I can't summon a good Idea for a song, I can write the song just for the purpose of the song. Now this can't be done effectively if it is too obvious, but think about how we all created art projects based on a single concept of visual art. I could use the solipsism inherent in any story as the basis for a song, as a comment about the song, but It won't work if the lyrics are literally a discussion of the meaning of the term.

So what does this all mean for Berklee students in various majors? Well, I have chosen Songwriting as my major, and as I have shown, writing songs not only enables me to excercice all six steps, but demands that I use all of them to be truly succesfull. Having lyrics helps, because I can use actual words to state my purpose, but lyrics are not neccesary to convey a rich emotional message, or even to make a subtle comment about art. This makes me think that any of the writing majors must have the same depth of artistry. (with the possible exception of film scoring. Unless the artist has written his own movie, he has to deal with someone else's Idea/Purpose, and might be ultimately subject to a director's creative control)
MP&E majors concentrate mostly on surface, but must have a complete grasp of the structure, idiom, form, and purpose to do their job well. Educators can't teach what they don't know. The one major that seems to be the most difficult path to step 1 is performance. A performer who never writes any music can never get closer to the core of the apple than the idiom. However, the most revered musicians are those who are known as performers, but also write music based on an idea or form that that allows them to take their craft to new levels. John Coltrane writing "Giant Steps" Is a great example. No one thinks of Coltrane the composer, but "Giant Steps" is one of the boldest statements in art, about art. The weight of Coltrane's "commentary" is staggering, it gave us all a new concept of what music, and art in general are.

Having said all this, the more important point is that the best music is created by groups of people who specialize in different steps. Very few of us can be like Coltrane, the jack of all steps, and master of at least one, and even he didn't do it all by himself. Collaboration between performers, producers, writers, and bandleaders is the best way to cover the entire spectrum of creativity, and is uniquely musical.