New Cornell course ignites students’ songwriting talents
Students interested in creating pop and commercial music found a course just for them when the Music Department offered a new course called Contemporary Songwriting.
“It’s been a long time coming,” said Assistant Professor of Music Christopher Nakielski.
Nakielski, whose father was in a bubblegum pop band that produced the hit song “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy,” often found himself backstage as a child with performers like The Temptations, Elton John, and Bruce Springsteen. Then, when he got older, he toured with a Chicago band for five years, playing on large stages and collaborating with band members to create new music.
“My whole reason for going into music in college was to get better at playing classical music so I could go back and just write and play rock music. Well, that just didn’t materialize,” Nakielski said with a laugh. “One of the reasons we don’t have more contemporary songwriting schools is because people in academics, in formalized academia, don’t have doctorates in rock stardom or contemporary songwriting.”
Nakielski is out to change that at Cornell. He moved forward with the idea of creating the class after seeing a late-night trend in Armstrong Hall.
“One by one, I would see all these people waltz in here with guitars, portable keyboards, or portable recording setups and just find a corner of the building to write songs when I was here late grading papers,” Nakielski said. “I thought to myself, and I would later bring it up to my department, what are we doing to serve these students?”
The first Contemporary Songwriting class took place in Block 4 with majors from throughout the college. Over the course of 18 days, the students learned how to craft an original, contemporary song from beginning to end. When each day was only spent in one class, students were able to focus solely on creating one or two polished songs. In the mornings they focused on writing lyrics and in the afternoons, melodies.
“The class was a fun, friendly environment where we shared lyrics and song ideas,” said sophomore Marcus Christion, a psychology major. “Every day started with writing exercises in different forms with different prompts and even some of our own prompts. We learned to create fluid writing to help with actual songwriting.”
At the end of the 18 days, students didn’t take a traditional exam. They traveled to Chicago to record their song at a professional recording studio–one that just produced songs for two bands in the Top 40 on the Billboard charts.
The final songs were all very different. Different genres. Different topics. Different styles.
“Students of all different walks of life became instantaneously comfortable with one another in one room,” Nakielski said.
The music professor said the goal wasn’t to pump out a hit song or kick off a rock-star career but to experience working with an engineer and use high-end equipment.
“My song was about a breakup, something relatable to people and, in my opinion, easy to write about as it is usually something most have experienced or seen. In Chicago, we split into groups by genre, and we had allocated time to record our songs and have the producers mix and master them,” Christion said.
Nakielski is offering the course again in Block 8 of 2024. He plans to continue teaching the class once a year.
“I want the students to gain appreciation for what they are doing and to know it’s as pure of a form of art as anything else we do, like classical singing, it’s just different.”
As for the future, some non-music majors are now taking more interest in the arts on campus with a few of the Songwriting class students joining the chorus or considering careers on the engineering side of producing music.
Header photo: Michael Ossai (left), Audrey Pagel (top center), and Erin Fitzgerald (right) work with Cornell Artist Instructor of Voice Ben Laur (front center) who served as an in-house studio musician for students in the Songwriting course. Photo courtesy of Assistant Professor of Music Christopher Nakielski.
