'Songs' Find Home in Adams

The 26-year-old teacher of Harvard’s newest music class doesn’t notice students coming in as he discreetly dances to Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies.” Playing from his iPod, the song fills the room. When class starts, he stops dancing—for the most part, at least—but the iPod never goes away.

The students of this music class are more likely to study Bob Dylan and Michael Jackson than Beethoven and Mozart. In fact, Backstreet Boys is on the syllabus too.

“How Songs Work” is a non-credit seminar led for the first time this Spring by Adams House resident songwriter and tutor, Matthew J. Coriel ’05. The class meets every other Monday in the Coolidge Room of Adams House. Over the course of six seminars, Coriel hopes to give students the tools necessary to appreciate and understand popular music in a more analytical and nuanced way.

“We don’t all go to the ballet. We don’t all go to the symphony,” he says. “But all of us have songs on our iTunes playlists. We all listen to music but know almost nothing about how it’s made.”

This “modest little series,” as Coriel calls it, is designed for anyone—with or without a musical background—who wants to better understand the function of the various elements of a song. Although the first class included a fair number of aspiring student lyricists, the focus of the course will be on listening, rather than on writing.

“Once you have an understanding of what goes into making these songs and how they reveal themselves, you get more out of it,” says Coriel. “Even the stuff on the radio.”

To prove his point, Coriel plays “I Want it That Way” by the Backstreet Boys to open the class. As a handful of people sing along under their breath, Coriel explains its cyclical structure and demonstrates how listeners must project their own experiences onto the lyrics in order to connect with the song.

In the eyes of the students, Coriel’s class fills a void in the current curricular offerings. “There’s no actual classes in songwriting or on popular music in the music department,” says Daniel A. Masterson ’12. “Just being able to do it with some advising is pretty cool.”

Though the course is not affiliated with the Music Department or any other academic branch of the University, Coriel was inspired to create ”How Songs Work” in response to the proposals of the Task Force on the Arts. He decided to take the initiative to make a concrete step toward the goal of augmenting the arts at Harvard.

This ambitious step has garnered much encouragement from members of the arts community. According to Coriel, he has received positive feedback from the Dramatic Arts and Literature Departments, as well as from Humanities Professor Stephen J. Greenblatt, chair of the Task Force on the Arts. Jack C. Megan, director of the Office for the Arts and a member of the Task Force, was especially pleased that Coriel decided to take action.

“It’s exactly the kind of thing we were hoping for,” says Megan. “Our report was not the final declaration but in fact the beginning of a discussion of what the arts could be at Harvard. We were hoping it would spark creative thought in some of the most creative members of the community.”

Especially at a time when Harvard’s financial standing is sure to delay some of the Task Force’s larger proposals, Coriel’s class proves that the University can still provide an innovative arts curriculum despite an economic downturn. “Of course the economy is impacting everything that this university is doing,” says Megan. “But I think that continuing to seed new intensive, high impact engagements with teaching artists remains important.” Smaller initiatives like this seminar can maintain the momentum that the first report generated and provide students with new opportunities to interact with the art world.

According to Megan, Harvard will host a number of artists in residence in the next few years. These professionals will take a page from Coriel’s book, teaching small seminars involving their craft. Executive director of the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts and renowned double bassist, Edgar Meyer, will visit campus as early as this March. And last Friday President Faust announced that Harvard will also welcome Wynton Marsalis and John Adams as guests in coming years.

Although “How Songs Work” signals a bright future for arts education at Harvard, the future of the class itself is still undetermined. Coriel would like to continue to offer it next year, perhaps even spreading it across two semesters. His real goal, however, is to inspire the introduction of a similar class into the Music Department.

“If we can create a precedent for a course like this happening and people being interested then maybe we can get Harvard to get the real people to teach it,” he says.

Although he was cautious about how soon a class like this might be created, Megan agrees. “Composition is already a significant part of what happens in the music department,” he says. “I would be optimistic that in time, the creation of lyrics could be as well.”

“But I don’t know if that means we’ll ever have a Professor Beyoncé Knowles on the faculty,” he warned.

Until then, we’ll just have to settle for the Matt Coriel version of the “Single Ladies” dance.

—Staff writer Charlton A. Lamb can be reached at clamb@fas.harvard.edu.