Lawrence Berk
Lawrence Berk (born December 10, 1908 in Boston , † December 22, 1995 ibid) was an American music teacher and composer and founder of the Berklee College of Music .
Berk began working professionally as a pianist (and composer) for dance bands at the Ritz Carlton Hotel and for bands in nightclubs in Boston at the age of 13. He studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , where he trained as an engineer. During the 1930s he was a composer and arranger at CBS and NBC in New York, where he also studied the composition methods of Joseph Schillinger (1895-1943), a mathematician and composer of Russian descent, whose methods accordingly had a mathematical basis and thus also delivered very unconventional harmonies. He became one of only twelve licensed instructors. The method was u. a. used by Glenn Miller ("Moonlight Serenade" is said to have been an exercise in the Schillinger system), Tommy Dorsey and George Gershwin (on "Porgy and Bess"). In 1945 he founded the famous Berklee College of Music in Boston for arrangers and composers of contemporary swing and popular music . At first he pursued the goal of giving music lessons based on the Schillinger method, which was still taught in Berklee in the 1960s. The school, which started with three students, was accordingly initially called Schillinger House. This led to the development of the world's leading jazz university, which was headed from 1979 by his son Lee Eliot Berk as his successor, after whom he named the school - and because of its proximity to the elite university Berkeley.
Web links
References and comments
- ↑ Lawrence Berk , U.S. Social Security Death Directory (SSDI), accessed October 13, 2018
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Berk, Lawrence |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American music educator |
| DATE OF BIRTH | December 10, 1908 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Boston |
| DATE OF DEATH | December 22, 1995 |
| Place of death | Boston |