A music school built for jazz when everyone else taught classical
In 1945 an MIT graduate named Lawrence Berk quit his job at Raytheon and opened a small school on Newbury Street in Boston. Nearly every music school then trained classical players; his taught jazz and music for radio and dance. It grew into Berklee, whose alumni have collected more Grammys than any other college's.
The original name was Schillinger House, after Joseph Schillinger, whose system of harmony and composition Berk had studied. Early students were mostly working professionals, many of them veterans of the Second World War. Berk preferred teachers who played for a living rather than academics, a habit that brought in trumpeter Herb Pomeroy in 1956, who stayed forty years, and later performers such as Pat Metheny and Joe Lovano.
In the mid-1950s the school, renamed Berklee, had 150 to 200 students and began drawing people from abroad, among them the Japanese pianist Toshiko Akiyoshi and the Turkish producer Arif Mardin. From 1957 a record series called Jazz in the Classroom pressed student work onto LPs with scores, capturing early efforts by players like John Scofield and Gary Burton.
The curriculum kept chasing whatever musicians were actually playing. Berklee offered the first college major in guitar in 1962, starting with nine students, and it became the largest instrumental major there. It awarded its first bachelor's degrees in 1966, became a college in 1970, and gave Duke Ellington its first honorary doctorate a year later. Firsts followed for electric bass, film scoring in 1980, music synthesis, songwriting and hand percussion. Mandolin and banjo only became principal instruments in 2006.
Berk's son Lee Eliot Berk took over in 1979, and Roger Brown succeeded him in 2004. A campus opened in Valencia, Spain, in 2012, and in 2016 the school merged with the Boston Conservatory. A 2017 Boston Globe investigation described widespread harassment on campus; Brown apologised to more than 1,200 students and said eleven faculty members had been dismissed over thirteen years.
Source: Berklee College of Music
