Mark Simos

I am currently Professor in the Songwriting Department at Berklee College of Music. Those who find me on academia.edu (or Google me) will probably wonder if there were two Mark Simos's - and in a sense there were. Until 2001 my primary work was in the field of software engineering methods and reuse; I worked as a programmer, research scientist, methodology developer and trainer, organizational consultant, and eventually entrepreneur and company founder. During that time, I was principal author or co-author on a number of substantial technical reports funded by various government agencies. Some of those reports have been made publically available as downloads and are linked to here. I hope to get access to the other reports as time progresses.

In 2001 I made the shift to a focus on songwriting, and, in 2006, began teaching at Berklee.  I have published two books on songwriting pedagogy with Berklee Press: Songwriting Strategies: A 360º Approach (2014), and Songwriting in Practice: Notebooks, Journals, Logs, Lists (2018). In addition, I authored a chapter called: “The Performing Songwriter’s Dilemma: Principles and Practices,” in The Singer-Songwriter Handbook (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), ed. Justin Williams, Katherine Williams. In addition to these published works, I've written many hundreds of informal handouts, exercises, analyses of song examples, etc. as part of my teaching practice at Berklee and in outside teaching environments. I will gradually be uploading a number of these other papers and teaching materials in that area.

While I see many points of interconnection between my two career lives, on paper my work definitely falls into two very different domains. (But then - domains and their interconnection are what I used to study!) Though I remain interested in methodological and knowledge management issues that arose in the domain analysis field and the context of software technology development, my active work now is in the musical domain. Sometimes I like to say that I spent the first part of my career trying to get engineering types to acknowledge the presence of an intuitive and creative aspect in their over-systematized ways of thinking about technology development. In the second half of my career, I have tried to get artistic types to acknowledge that a little bit of being systematic and intentional about their creative work will not destroy their artistic integrity.  I remain in search of the Mencius "mind-heart" that unifies these ways of being in and contributing to the world.