Hi, I’m Harry Chalmiers. I’m the President of McNally Smith College of Music.

In just a few days, we’re going to be starting our new year, and I want to welcome the new students in particular that are coming to this college. I want to congratulate you for making a great choice. I think you’re really going to be happy here. There are over 300 students that are coming here to begin their study, to create a life in music, and you’ve chosen McNally Smith. I want you to know that I, our faculty, our staff, and everybody in this community is here to help you succeed. So please, feel welcome, be excited, have a great time.

You know, I was walking to work this morning and wondering, “Why is it that I think you’ve made such a terrific choice?” I mean, honestly, I work here because I love this place, and I think you’re going to be very happy with your choice. But more specifically, why do I think that? What is it about this place that just feels so exciting to me? So I thought about it, and there were a few things that came to mind. The first one is imagination. You know, Albert Einstein said a lot of very smart things in his life. One of the most interesting things to me is he said that logic will take you from A to B, but imagination will take you anywhere. Feeding the imagination, creating an environment where imagination is celebrated, and it’s at the root of everything we do, is one of the things that makes McNally Smith a very exciting place to be.

A second thought that came to my mind is intelligence. McNally Smith College of Music is in Saint Paul, Minnesota. A lot of people seem to think you’ve got to be in New York City or you’ve got to be in LA, or maybe Nashville, if you want to be successful in music, but I don’t think that’s true. I think you have to have a great imagination. It has to be stimulated, fertile, creative, and you need to have intelligence. And at this college, we have, for example, our own Liberal Arts program that is rooted in art and music and creativity, and really helps you to develop the intelligence that is needed to make your imagination go somewhere that is really exciting.

The third thing that I thought of, oddly enough, also starts with an “I.” I promise that was not my goal originally. But we’ve got imagination, intelligence, and this is a place that is very intimate. There are only 700 students here, and they are all passionate about music. We are all working closely together to support each other, to build teams of creative people who can help each other out, who can help each other to learn, and who can help each other to succeed. So I really welcome you and congratulate you on making this choice. I think you’re going to be very happy here, because at McNally Smith it really is all about the music, and we are trying to do everything we can to help you make a life in music. Welcome.

In this video, Harry preforms one of his new songs. He invites his friend, Dessa of Doomtree to help him out!

Hi, I’m Harry Chalmiers. I’m President of McNally Smith College of Music.

As you might imagine, I think about teaching and music quite a lot. This morning I was walking to work, thinking, “What are the most important things that you need to learn to be a musician?” I think, without any close second, the most important – the central skills in learning music – are to learn to listen and to learn to hear. These are not exactly the same thing. Learning to listen is to really focus your attention on something. Undivided, not be distracted, but to actually listen to what’s in front of you. To hear it is another integrative skill. You’ve got to be able to understand and associate the elements you’re listening to. Hearing means really understanding it.

So, not surprisingly, in a college of music, you focus a tremendous amount on ear training – teaching people to listen and to hear. To make fine discrimination between rhythm and rhythmic change. Or to really understand the chord structure and hear all the notes in it. Or when chords move from one to the other – to hear chord progressions. To hear melodies, both to be able to take dictation and write down what you hear, or if you hear something in your head, to be able to translate that intelligently and accurately.

Training the ear is critical. If you’re playing in a band, to be able to hear your own part, but to hear it in the context of the whole band and not be stomping all over everybody, but to really make a real contribution to the whole. Listening and hearing are critical skills.

What I was also thinking about is how interesting it is to me that these are the same skills that are probably the most important things you can have in your life – in your relationships or in your profession or your career. Being able to really listen carefully to people, to give your attention to them, undivided, and not just be looking for cues to then launch off talking about yourself or what’s important to you, but to really pay attention, to listen, and to hear other people. You know, in relationships, in your career, in your life, in music. Maybe there’s a reason art and music are always so prominent and always so important to people – because they embody and express the same skills that are important in life itself.

Anyway, these are the kinds of things I’m thinking about when I’m walking to work.

Hi, I’m Harry Chalmiers. I’m President of McNally Smith College of Music.

You know, when I first started college, I went to Vanderbilt University and I majored in literature, but I kept having trouble getting up for those pesky one o’clock and two o’clock classes because I was really staying up all night playing guitar, writing songs. Music was what I really loved to do. So I announced to my parents that I was going to drop out of Vanderbilt, just before my senior year, and you can imagined just how thrilled they were with that. My mother worked for the state employment service and she got one of the counselors to come in and talk to me to try to discourage me from making a career in music. She meant well, but she was scared to death that I wouldn’t be able to make a living.

So this guy came in and he talked to me about how difficult it was. He had tried to be a professional musician – that was the idea. You’ve got to be relentless and mean, you’ve got to be practically a genius. He went on and on about how difficult it would be and what a bad move. I was listening to him, but I think what I was really hearing the whole time was something like this [plays guitar], because thats all I really thought about. I was thinking about music all the time. He tried to make the point, I remember very well, he said, “It’s all about survival of the fittest, and if you’re not really ready to get in there and kick and fight and play dirty, you’re just not going to make it in music. Only the strong survive.”

Well, I thought about that, and I think it’s not really true. In fact, I looked it up, and Charles Darwin had an interesting thing to say about the quote that’s attributed to him, about “Only the strong survive.” He said that it’s not the strongest of the species that survives nor is it the most intelligent. It is the species that is most adaptable to change that actually survives.

So the question is, if you want to be a musician, if you want to be a professional, are you prepared to adapt to change? How we write music, how we produce music, how we record it, how we distribute it, how we sell it – everything about it is different. Are you prepared not only to adapt to change, but are you prepared to lead the change? And to me, the central question there is, “Are you educated?” Do you have broad interests? Do you have deep insights?

I really recommend that you think of music school and that you think (I have to put in a plug here) McNally Smith College of Music is a great place to deepen your insights into music, how the industry is changing, how the music world is changing. The dinosaurs – a lot of them were strong, even a few of them were intelligent – but they weren’t able to adapt to change. Can you?

[plays guitar] Thanks.

[sings]
Holding my own, doing my part
Making the start for something I want
Sitting alone, feeling the dark
Sensing the distance from something I want

That’s a verse of a song that I’m writing now, just finishing up.

I was walking to work this morning, thinking about what it means to make a piece of art. To use sounds or use images or use words to make people feel something or make people understand something – to share something with someone in, hopefully, your own authentic voice. Something that really speaks of your experience and is an appealing voice, something you want people to be eager to embrace and to hear and to want to hear over and over again.

All my life I’ve been playing guitar and writing songs, and people will often say, “Wow, I wish I could play. I wish I could write. I used to play a little bit but I just didn’t have enough talent.” I think about that. They say, “What a gift. What a great gift for you to have that kind of talent.” And I think about that, and I think the gift is not the talent. A lot of people have talent. The gift is having the will to express that talent, having the strength of character, having the commitment, the dedication, to really want to use your talent and to develop it. To make sure that you’ve got the skill and you’ve got something to say. So, students that are wanting to be songwriters or wanting to be composers or performers – don’t rush off just yet to get everyone following you on Twitter or Facebook or MySpace or any of those things. Spend your time making sure that you’ve really got something to say. Remember, you’ve just got to work on this. You’ve got to work, work, work. Don’t work to promote yourself until you’ve done the work to really have something to say. Remember the talent is not the gift, it’s the will to express the talent. So that’s what I was thinking about.

Hi, I’m Harry Chalmiers, President of McNally Smith College of Music.

I was walking to work today and thinking about the fact that music students the world over always complain in studying music theory about having to follow rules, especially in the subject of harmony. They’re given rules about no parallel fifths, no parallel octaves, certain things you can’t do, other things you can’t do, and they have a litany of complaints: this music sounds old fashioned, it sounds like my parents’ music, it’s just dull and not interesting, why do I have to follow these rules? The best one of all is they say, “Composers don’t follow rules. Artists don’t have rules. They’re free spirits and they can say what they want to say.” And, you know, to a certain extent that’s true in that artists and musicians don’t follow somebody else’s rules, but you do wind up needing to create rules that make an environment in which your work, your message, can come across and can be interesting and compelling. But there are more reasons why, in music school, you have to follow rules, at least for a certain period of time. And that is that the composition of music is a craft. You have to learn control and you have to learn awareness.

Now, if we set up some arbitrary rules to start with, it doesn’t mean that you’re going to write music that has to sound like this, it just means that this is an environment in which you’re going to sharpen your control, build your awareness. If we say, “Don’t write parallel fifths, don’t write octaves,” and then you hand back to me an assignment in which you’re doing both of those things, what am I to assume? Either that you don’t know what a fifth is or that you don’t know what an octave is, and that’s not good, or that you’re writing these things without being aware that you’re writing these things, or maybe you’re just doing it to try to piss the teacher off. But, you’re going to get a low grade out of it and that’s not a very good trade-off.

The point is, it’s a little like lifting weights. You know, if you want to be an athlete or a boxer or something, you spend a lot of time lifting weights. You build your muscles by pushing against a resistance. This is a little bit like that. You want to build and flex your creative muscles against the rules so you’re building your control, you’re building your awareness. In a music college, rules actually rule.

Anyway, that’s what I was thinking about walking to work this morning.

Hi, I’m Harry Chalmiers and I’m the President of McNally Smith College of Music. This morning I was walking to work and thinking about technology in music remembering in the early 80′s I got a keyboard synthesizer with a sequencer that sat right up on top of it, drum machine, signal processing stuff, and a 4 track cassette tape recorder. And in my basement, with this equipment I could produce songs, complete versions with drums, bass, keyboard parts, background vocals, anything I wanted, guitar parts, and then mix it down into a cassette, that you could put into a car cassette deck and most people couldn’t tell the difference between that and something that came out of a recording studio. So technology really put individual musicians into the drivers seat.

What I was also thinking about was how many hours I spent in the basement by myself and how much more interesting and how much more fun it is when I’m doing this work with other musicians as well. There is a Japanese proverb, I’m sure you’ve heard it, and it goes something like “none of us is as smart as all of us.” It’s really fun to work with people even though we have these great tools today…what was true of just making music 25-30 years ago is now true of making your career. I mean, you don’t have to wait to be signed by a record label or wait for the corporate industry forces to accept you into them, you can make it happen for yourself…that’s what I was thinking about this morning.

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For those of you unfamiliar with the Artists House Music site, I suggest you go there soon and check it out.  I know of no better resource for information on helping musicians create and implement a strategy for building a life in music.

The site contains hundreds of informative interviews with artists, industry professionals, and educators that cover every imaginable topic on music business, legal issues, careers in music, marketing your work, production, education, and more.  It contains video presentations of masterclasses with such artists as Benny Golson, Clark Terry, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, Phil Woods, and many many other leading artists and entertainers.

Recently the founder and President of Artists House Foundation, John Snyder, was in the Twin Cities conducting interviews with members of the McNally Smith community, and these interesting and informative interviews are now available on this site for your viewing.  You can hear our highly acclaimed producer/engineer Joe Mabbot on recording technique; Senior Director of Industry Relations, Debbie Sandridge, talk about career opportunities in music;  Liberal Arts Division chair, Jan Weller, talk about our innovative approach to liberal arts education with a musical flavor; and much more.

Check it out:  http://www.artistshousemusic.org/