Berklee College of Music

Berklee College of Music, founded in 1945, is an independent music college in Boston, Massachusetts with many prominent faculty, staff, alumni, and visiting artists. It has an enrollment of approximately 3,800 students and a faculty of approximately 430 (as of 2004). Berklee offers a fully accredited four-year baccalaureate degree or diploma. Degree program tuition is approximately $23,450 for the fall through spring academic year (as of 2006).

Berklee College of Music is not to be confused with the University of California's Berkeley campus.

History

Berklee was founded by Lawrence Berk and was originally named Schillinger House of Music, after his teacher Joseph Schillinger. The original purpose of the school was to teach the Schillinger System of musical harmony and composition. After expansion of the school's curriculum in 1954, Berk changed the name to Berklee School of Music after his son Lee Berk and as a pun on the name of the famous University of California, Berkeley (even today, the two schools are often misunderstood to be affiliated or part of the same institution). When the school received its accreditation, the name was changed to Berklee College of Music in 1973. Lee Berk never formally studied music, instead focusing on Business and Real Estate Law, however his daughter Lucy Berk is an alumna of the college.

At the time of its founding, almost all music schools focused primarily on classical music. The original mission of Berklee was to provide formal training in jazz, rock, and other contemporary music not available at other music schools.

Admission requirements for applicants include a minimum two years of formal music study on their primary instrument and/or significant practical experience in musical performance, a diploma from an accredited secondary school with satisfactory marks in college-preparatory courses, and, for degree candidates only, satisfactory scores on either the SAT, ACT, or TOEFL (for international students). While in the past it was only strongly recommended, for the 2007 Summer and Fall semesters and beyond, a live audition has been added as a requirement for admission. ^[1] This is a change from the school's open-admittance policy it used for many years. Berklee's acceptance rate for prospective students is now 32%.^[2][3]

Athletics

Since Berklee is a music school, athletics are not a focus of campus life. If students want to play sports, they can sign up for NCAA Division III athletics at Emerson College due to Berklee's membership in the Professional Arts Consortium.

However, in February 2006, several students (led by guitarist John Kingsley of Atlanta, Georgia) got together and organized the Berklee Ice Cats, an ice hockey team that is Berklee's first official athletic institution. The Berklee hockey team is expected to play in the New England Senior Hockey League in the 2006–2007 season, and in the American Collegiate Hockey Association (ACHA) in 2007-2008. The team practices in Rockland and West Roxbury. Berklee's debut into the world of intercollegiate sports was on September 16, 2006, against Emerson College for the inaugural Boylston Cup, emerging victorious with a score of 10-7.

In 2007, the Ice Cats signed on former Boston Bruins player John McKenzie as head coach.

Demographics and statistics

Berklee has a large percentage of undergraduate students from outside the U.S.—26 percent—representing more than 70 countries. ^[4] Women comprise 24.6 percent of the student body. This has made the creation of groups and associations by masculine students of this school, protesting because of the lack of concentration that some musicians have by the lack of the opposite sex. EBNC (Berklee Students Need to Nail, from its castilian translation), is a vulgar association created informally by latinamerican students, and has had a relevant contribution to the leisure live of its students. Domestic minority enrollment is African-American, 6.4 percent; Hispanic, 5.5 percent; Asian-American, 4.1 percent. The five countries that supply the largest percentage of foreign students to Berklee are Japan, Korea, Mexico, Switzerland, and Dominican Republic. The school's current president, Roger H. Brown, was inaugurated in 2004.

Berklee offers three full time semesters per year: Fall, Spring, and Summer. The Fall and Spring semesters are 16 weeks in length, whereas the Summer semester is compacted into 12 weeks.

There are 230 acoustic pianos and more than 1,000 guitar principals at Berklee. The average class size is 11. The holdings of the college's Stan Getz Media Center and Library include more than 20,000 recordings, 20,000 books, 17,000 musical scores, and 6,000 lead sheets.

Facilities

• 17 buildings in Boston's Back Bay neighborhood
• 3 dormitories in the Back Bay and Fenway-Kenmore neighborhoods
• A practice and rehearsal building in Boston's Allston-Brighton neighborhood

Majors

• Performance
• Composition
• Jazz Composition
• Music Production & Engineering
  Image:Berkleecenter.jpg

  Berklee Performance Center
• Film Scoring
• Music Business/Management
• Music Synthesis
• Contemporary Writing & Production
• Music Education
• Songwriting
• Music Therapy
• Professional Music

Notable alumni

Main article: List of notable alumni of Berklee College of Music

See also

• Category:Berklee College of Music alumni
• Category:Berklee College of Music faculty

Notes

1. ^ Berklee Admissions Requirements. Retrieved on 2006-09-21.
2. ^ College Board. Retrieved on 2007-04-02.
3. ^ Berklee Today: The State of the College. Retrieved on 2006-12-20.
4. ^ Berklee About Berklee. Retrieved on 2006-11-28.

External link

• Berklee College of Music official site
• Berklee College of Music Online Courses

de:Berklee College of Music fr:Berklee College of Music it:Berklee college of music mk:Беркли (музички колеџ) ja:バークリー音楽大学 fi:Berklee College of Music pl:Berklee College of Music