A look inside Berklee College of Music's class 'The Music of Taylor Swift,' one of many new courses about the pop star arriving at schools like Harvard and Stanford.
It’s 3 p.m., and I’m locked in a staring contest with a jumble of black dots and lines. They scatter across a projection screen in front of me like a poem in a foreign language. Technically, the markings are music notes from Taylor Swift’s song “,” but professor Scarlet Keys — who’s leading a class of roughly a dozen students through a songwriting exercise — calls them Swift’s ticket to global success. “It's simple melodies that pay for swimming pools,” she says.
I’m not the only one having an epiphany. Shea Dewan, a second-year songwriting major who claims to have been a Swiftie since age 4, says she’s also seeing her discography in a new light. “The coolest thing for me that I’m really taking away from this is to not shy away from simplicity,” she says. “At Berklee, you get lost trying to make everything complex and special, but simplicity really does work.
In the following weeks, she and her classmates will use melismas, interjections, and other methods to craft original songs for graded assignments; otherwise, there’s no homework . The course will culminate in a collaborative songwriting project that will test their hand at Swiftian style: to create a rhythm you could “hand to a stadium,” as professor Keys puts it, and know they’d follow along with ease.
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