Contemporary Music Is Our History: A Sonic Timeline Listen to 75 songs that made Berklee what it is today.
Berklee's Latin motto, Esse quam videri, can be translated as to be, rather than to seem. This call to be true to one's self and one's art has not wavered since Larry Berk founded the school 75 years ago. The idea was simple, yet revolutionary: study not just the music that's been made, study the music that is being made-study the history of music, but also make music history.
To take stock of where we've been, we couldn't think of a more fitting tribute to the school, from its genesis as Schillinger House to present-day Berklee College of Music, than to create a playlist featuring one song from each year of the school's existence. The songs here showcase not just an impressive list of notable alumni (though it is that) and a collection of accolades (it is that, too)-nor are they meant to be an exhaustive record of Berklee's contributions to music over the past seven and a half decades-but rather, they are 75 stories about those who have shaped and been shaped by the Berklee universe. Many of the featured artists are alumni or have been faculty members, or were presented with honorary doctorates.
Listening to these songs, you will hear something like an audio version of a time-lapse camera, hearing big band shift to bebop and fusion, sitcom themes to iconic film scores, the music of the African diaspora to the traditional music of India, Spain, Mexico, China, and many other places.
Taken together, the list shows that where we've been can indicate where we're going, and ultimately, how studying contemporary music becomes music history.
1940s
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s
2010s
The 1940s Click the image to learn more and listen to the song.
1945Charlie Parker, Ko Ko
1945 Charlie Parker, Ko Ko
Brass students on the steps of Schillinger House. In 1945, Lawrence Berk purchased a three-story building at 284 Newbury Street and opened it as a new music school. An MIT-trained engineer who had left a stable job at Raytheon to pursue teaching music full-time, Berk never expected to start a school at all. Talented kids seemed to find me and I got busier and my best students became teachers and that's how the school started, he told the Boston Globe in 1993. Berk named it Schillinger House, as a tribute to his musical mentor, Russian music theorist Joseph Schillinger. (Nine years later, he'd rename the school Berklee, after his son, Lee Eliot Berk.) It was the first institution of higher education in the U.S. to be founded on the study of jazz, the popular music of the era. In November of that year, saxophonist Charlie Parker recorded Ko Ko, one of his early masterpieces, with Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Curly Russell, and Max Roach. The session, Parker's first as a leader, is considered by many to be the first time that bebop-a new form of jazz characterized by rapid tempos, improvisation, and instrumental virtuosity-was ever recorded. The bebop movement had a profound impact on Berk as he built a music curriculum that would become known around the world for its focus on contemporary trends and styles.-Nick Balkin
1946 George Gershwin, I Got Rhythm
1946 George Gershwin, I Got Rhythm
Lawrence Berk at the blackboard with students Dick Nash '48, Frank Vivino '48, and Tommy Furtado '49. Note the Schillinger graph in the upper right of the blackboard. Beyond its emphasis on jazz and popular music, Lawrence Berk's curriculum, per a school catalog from 1946, was tailored to serve a broad range of careers, from the writer of popular songs to the symphonist, from the arranger of tunes for dance band to the orchestrator of television and moving picture scores, from the composer of radio jingles to the creator of tone poems. Berks notebooks from this era reveal Schillinger's influence on the school's early academic development. A cult figure among music theorists, Schillinger devised an unorthodox compositional approach that used mathematics to generate melody, harmony, and rhythm, as well as graphs, rather than traditional notation, to organize musical elements. The Schillinger System, as it was known, attracted such notable students as Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Oscar Levant, and George Gershwin, whose jazz standard I Got Rhythm is featured below. Anyone who meant anything studied with him, said Berk. Inspired by Schillinger, Berk pioneered a new approach to music education by creating an organizational system for the elements of jazz and other modern music styles. In doing so, he created a model on how to prepare students for careers in contemporary music. -Nick Balkin
1947 Louis Armstrong, Mahogany Hall Stomp
1947 Louis Armstrong, Mahogany Hall Stomp
Louis Armstrong Boston provided fertile ground for the postwar jazz scene to take root, and it bloomed in 1947: Louis Armstrong, arguably the most influential jazz musician of the 20th century, played a triumphant concert at Symphony Hall, and Wally's Cafe Jazz Club, the first Black-owned jazz club in New England, opened its doors (inspiring the Hi-Hat, a whites-only club, to integrate). The stretch of Mass. Ave. between Huntington and Columbus was, by the late '40s, Boston's answer to 52nd Street in Manhattan-with not only the Roseland, but the Savoy Caf , the Hi-Hat, Wally's, and a handful of smaller clubs, Boston Magazine wrote in a 2006 article. Wally's has since been a boon to the development of local artists, hosting figures such as Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, and providing a venue for the city's up-and-coming musicians-including Esperanza Spalding B.M. '05 and Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah B.M. '04. At the same time, the school that would later bec
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Contemporary Music Is Our History: A Sonic Timeline Listen to 75 songs that made Berklee what it is today.
