Berklee College of Music: Cyber Funk U
IF YOU WANT TO FIND Torbin Harding at Berklee College of Music, head down to the glass-enclosed music-synthesis labs on the first floor of the school’s Massachusetts Avenue building, in Boston. Harding, a 22-year-old senior from Shrewsbury, Mass., who aims to be famous, spent virtually every free moment last semester in the labs, up to his shoulder-length hair in computers and synthesizers, software and samplers. “A hundred and thirty hours in the lab last semester, every night from 7 to midnight, and that’s outside class time,” Harding says. If the school had let him, Harding would have camped out among the technologies and never left. In these electronic wonders, Harding sees a path to stardom, a chance to change the music world. “I want to use technology to push popular music to a higher level,” he says unabashedly.
In the lab, Harding experiments, improvises, writes new music to accompany his poetry. The software and synthesizers hand him a freedom he had dreamed about. “I found I was able to make rhythms that were new and exciting,” he says. “I could write whole songs starting with a drum beat.”
He started a new band at Berklee called the Secret. He and his keyboardist, Steve DiGregorio, share a two-room apartment on Commonwealth Avenue, where they use the kitchen as a bedroom and write songs rather than cook. The band hasn’t started to gig yet, so Harding subsists on $1.25 slices of pizza from Little Stevie’s, near Berklee, and lets others worry about his tuition.
“My parents consider me an investment,” Harding says seriously. “They don’t say that to me, but they’ve joked around. They know I’ll be working hard at music for the rest of my life, and that music has the possibility of a big payoff. Plus, I have a lot of confidence in myself.” The discovery of music synthesis fueled Harding’s hubris.
When Harding, the son of a Worcester, Mass., pediatrician, arrived at Berklee in the fall of 1990, he was a self-proclaimed Deadhead, a guitarist just back from an exciting but short-lived East Coast tour with the Tribulations, a rootsreggae band. He had come to Berklee in hopes of reviving his music education, which he had put on hold when he dropped out of the University of Hartford’s music program a year earlier to load trucks. “A teacher told me I wasn’t ready to learn Bach and Beethoven,” Harding says. “He was right. I wanted to play frat parties.”
At Berklee, he hoped to meet some new players, start a band, expand his guitar skills, resuscitate his passion. Since he’s arrived, Harding has shaved the sides of his head and discovered the brave new work of cybermusic. He views himself as an outsider, a pioneer who believes he has insights into new avenues of musical expression. He has no time for girlfriends or socializing. His music consumes him.
Harding first enrolled in Berklee’s guitar program, taking lessons with Berklee’s guitar-department chairman, Larry Baione, who, Harding says, encouraged his individualism: “He brought out the me in me.” And then Harding promptly transferred.
“I realized I was a freak among players,” Harding says. “No one else there was influenced by roots reggae, the Grateful Dead, Stravinsky. I had a hard time finding players who were into the music I was writing.”
Harding’s eclectic vision is a fusion of hardcore rap, heavy rock, tribal rhythms and what he calls “conscious composition.” He is influenced by the serial music of Arnold Schoenberg and finds inspiration in the classical masters. He has also attended all three Lollapalooza concerts. “That says something about my tastes,” he says.
He had no intention of majoring in music synthesis, Berklee’s haven for the nerds and techies. Music created with samplers or drum machines pissed him off. It was, he believed, a rip-off of other people’s efforts. “I liked real people playing real instruments,” Harding says.
Then he met Elaine Walker, who served as a synthlab monitor at Berklee, during his year off and told her of his disappointments. Walker immediately spotted a candidate for conversion. “The work she was doing was completely cutting edge,” Harding says. “She kept telling me to check it out, that using the technology, you can do everything yourself, the composing, production, the recording. Now I feel like the music I write is pushing the boundaries. It’s a really exciting time to be a musician.”
For a kid who’d started playing in garage bands at age 12, who’d consciously eschewed soccer and tennis to pursue a music career, Harding felt a synergy with the technology, as if he’d been headed in this direction all along. “It gives you more options, makes you want to experiment more,” Harding says. “It’s about choices.”
Harding’s choice says a lot about the metamorphosis engulfing Berklee today. The old rules are finally giving way to a shifting paradigm. What’s happening isn’t brand-new. The music-industry shift from analog to digital electronics has been underway for more than a decade. But now, more than ever before, immersion in the technology dictates future success. The music business simply no longer accommodates the Luddites who cling to the old methods of arranging, producing and recording. And while other schools watched from the sidelines, Berklee bet its future on technology 10 years ago, and now with the table stakes higher than ever, the bet is a clear win.
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