Lessons from an imperfect teacher

Influenced by Salvador Dali to Miles Davis to Madonna, and with a deep love of Japanese music, Kent Macpherson is a man with many muses.

The talkative Hawkes Bay native has been a lecturer in the music department for the last four years at Waikato Institute of Technology (WINTEC).

But Macpherson doesn’t turn up to class each week day to teach music. In fact the Hamiltonian father of two very rarely plays any instrument in class.

‘I’ll play the piano maybe, to show the difference of sound between chords’ he interjects.
Never setting out to be involved in education, Macpherson claims teaching found him. Without sounding arrogant, Macpherson said it is his twenty plus years experience as a composer and artist that landed him the job at Wintec.

Teaching audio post production, sound design, audio technology and music production to students twenty years his junior, it’s his humanness and vulnerability his students connect to.
Describing Kent as an irreverent character who you can’t really “pull the wool over” the students all agree it’s his passion for wanting them to be purposeful about their music that resonates with them.

‘I’d like to think I’m a fair teacher’ professes Macpherson.
‘Hard. But fair. I’m direct. I’m a professional and I expect my students to be the same. I expect them to have a purpose for every sound they create

‘I want my students to justify their music. ‘Don’t play one note before you’ve got a reason for the note before it

‘Salvador Dali said “Don’t strive for perfection because you’ll never reach it”. My students say ‘What’s that got to do with music?’ I say ‘Nothing. But it’s art. It challenges normal approaches. It’s an idea. I want my students to take their ideas and put that into sound. I want them to take an idea and realise it’, he explains.

‘He’s like a human record store’ claims one of his third year students.

‘He has all these musical stories which you could say are his “albums”. Kent has this vast collection of knowledge about songwriters, singers, instruments, different types of art, philosophies, history. His experience is really good for us to learn from, to feed off’ she states.

I quote a different Dali quote to her. Does this describe Kent Macpherson to you?

‘Without a doubt’