On any given afternoon, if you stroll down Massachusetts Avenue in Boston’s Back Bay, you’ll hear it before you see it: drums pounding two stories above, a saxophone bleeding through an open window on one floor, and somewhere in the building, a guitar playing what sounds like a blend of jazz and reggae. In its purest form, that is Berklee College of Music. Not a ranking, not a brochure. Simply sound emanating from every area of a campus that has been subtly transforming the teaching, learning, and performance of contemporary music for eight decades.
The school began as Schillinger House in 1945 with fewer than 50 students in a rented building on Newbury Street. It was founded by Lawrence Berk, an MIT graduate and pianist who quit his job at Raytheon to teach jazz and commercial music when hardly anyone else would. Enrollment had surpassed 500 by 1949. That number contains something worthwhile. Berk was attracting working musicians, World War II veterans, and an increasing number of international students who wanted to learn the music that was actually being played on radio, in theaters, and on television at a time when every serious music school in America was concentrating on classical training. He had no intention of constructing a conservatory. He was constructing something more akin to a serious artist’s trade school.
That sense of pragmatism never truly vanished. Berk deliberately chose to hire working musicians as faculty members rather than career academics, and this strategy has had a lasting impact on the school’s culture. Teachers such as drummer Alan Dawson, who joined in 1957, and trumpeter Herb Pomeroy, who joined in 1956 and stayed for forty years, were not instructing from a theoretical distance. They were individuals who had performed on the stages and during the recording sessions they were discussing in class. This distinction—practitioner over professor—may be the primary cause of Berklee’s graduates’ 310 Grammy Awards, more than any other college in the world.
It’s more difficult than it seems, but the curriculum kept up with the music itself. As rock and roll started to change American culture in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Berklee became the first college in the world to offer guitar as an instrumental major in 1962. In 2004, a course emerged as hip-hop became unavoidable. Each major—film scoring, music synthesis, songwriting, and hand percussion—arrived as a recognition that the music industry had changed and the school had to adapt, rather than as a trend-chasing move. In 1980, the first undergraduate degree in film scoring was introduced worldwide. In 1987, songwriting became the first major offered at the college level. In the context of higher music education, these choices were significant.
For a school that began with 50 students in Boston, Berklee’s 2012 opening of a second campus in Valencia, Spain, felt both natural and somewhat unexpected. Nearly 8,000 students from 97 countries were enrolled in all of its programs by the 2021–2022 academic year, with about 25% of those students being international. Looking at those figures, it seems as though the school Berk founded with commercial practicality in mind has developed into something truly global—not by pursuing prestige, but by continuing to be useful.
Some people were taken aback by the 2016 merger with the Boston Conservatory. At first glance, Berklee and a classical conservatory seemed like a strange combination. However, the combined institution has survived, and it’s easy to understand why: a school that began as an alternative to classical education eventually grew to the size of one of its oldest local counterparts. It’s still unclear if that will ultimately alter Berklee’s identity. The saxophone is still audible from the street, at least so far.
It’s difficult to ignore how Berklee has changed from what it was intended to be. One man’s belief that jazz and commercial music should receive serious academic attention led to the founding of this school for working musicians, which has produced graduates with 310 Grammy Awards, 34 Emmy Awards, 8 Academy Awards, and 7 Tony Awards. The math is practically ridiculous. Even so, the campus still has the feel of a rehearsal facility rather than a monument: practice rooms that run late into the night, corridors lined with instrument cases, and students debating chord voicings over cold coffee. Lawrence Berk most likely had this conflict between institutional success and true artistic restlessness in mind from the beginning.
