This week sees a great opportunity for Irish musicians as Boston's renowned Berklee College of Music comes to Dublin to hold workshops and award scholarships to promising students. BRIAN BOYDreports
THERE’S A BEAUTIFUL noise coming from the Dublin Institute of Technology on the Rathmines Road. Guitars, harps, pianos, flutes and violins are all being eagerly put to use as a small army of musicians inside the building takes part in a series of improvisation workshops. In one room, Jim Kelly, a professor of guitar, is talking about “instantaneous composition” and leading by example; in another, strings virtuoso Matt Glaser is coaxing a bass harmony out of a young Irish pianist, and explaining its importance.
Both Kelly and Glaser are just two of a number of lecturers/musicians from Boston’s renowned Berklee College of Music who have travelled over to Ireland for a week-long series of musical events known as “Berklee in Dublin”. All this week, Berklee has been welcoming musicians from whatever level of knowledge or type of genre into Rathmines DIT for a series of four-day improvisation workshops.
The opportunity to study with and learn from Berklee’s famous jazz-orientated faculty has attracted not just Irish musicians but those who have travelled from around Europe to attend. And, as always, Berklee is on the lookout for new talent. At the end of today’s session, it will award a series of summer scholarships in Boston to those who have impressed most during the workshops.
For tomorrow and Sunday, Berklee in Dublin moves over to Newpark Music Centre in Blackrock to audition and interview students from all over Europe for a series of full-time scholarships to study at Berklee.
THE ATTENDANCE FIGURES for both events will reflect Berklee’s status in music schooling. When it was founded in 1945, all other music schools were focused primarily on classical music. Berklee, however, offered a formal training in jazz – still an “outsider” musical form at the time – and while it is now regarded as the best jazz college in the world, it also offers courses in rock and other contemporary music forms, such as hip hop.
Its alumni include Quincy Jones, Keith Jarrett, Steve Vai, John Mayer, Aimee Mann and Melissa Etheridge. Its annual intake is in the region of 4,000 students and it has a faculty of around 500 professors and lecturers. To date, Berklee alumni have received 175 Grammy awards.
The school has strong links with Ireland. Its director of admissions, Damien Bracken, is from Dublin and is a graduate of TCD, while Riverdancecomposer Bill Whelan is on Berklee's board of trustees. In 2007, U2 guitarist The Edge was awarded an honorary degree by the college.
“My role in Berklee arose from my membership of the board of trustees at the school,” says Bill Whelan. “When I attended the Perugia Jazz Festival, I noted that Berklee was auditioning young students and awarding scholarships to the most gifted. I also noted at a graduation ceremony I subsequently attended in Berklee that there was only one Irish young musician graduating.
“I approached Roger Brown, the president of the college, and as a result Berklee sent a group of their staff to meet with educators here. I arranged meetings with UCD, Trinity, UCD, University of Limerick, Queens, Dublin Institute of Technology, Maynooth and the Royal Irish Academy of Music. I also arranged an event at my home for the college to meet with musicians, composers and teachers.
“In association with Newpark Music Centre , with which Berklee has had a long association, this upcoming initiative was started. It was decided that it should focus on improvisation, and invite young musicians from all disciplines (classical and trad included) to study an introductory course in improvisation over a period of a week, and then to audition for the college at the same time.”
Berklee has a strong overseas student representation, but Irish students are still a minority. Berklee in Dublin is an attempt to remedy this, not just by enticing students to study there on full scholarships but also by establishing more formal links. The idea is to create a constant flow of students and musical ideas between Ireland and Boston, with improvisation techniques being exported to Dublin and young Irish talent travelling to Boston.
Berklee has been holding auditions at Newpark Music Centre for the last 10 years, and Newpark music director Nigel Flegg says the links will become even stronger this September when, as expected, students taking the college’s BA in jazz (the first of its kind in this country) will be able to spend a year or two in Berklee as part of their degree programme. Berklee students will also be able to spend time in Newpark.
It’s not all about jazz though. Berklee’s assistant vice-president for international programmes, Greg Badolato, says the whole idea of the improvisation workshop is to recognise the musical strength of the host country, so he was pleased to see not just jazz students but also traditional, rock and pop musicians avail of the four-day stint at Rathmines.
“Improvisation may be largely associated with jazz,” he says, “but what we have been doing here in Dublin is offering the general techniques that are employed by improvisers and then demonstrating these techniques as they apply to various styles.”
When Berklee first opened, jazz was the most important and popular non-classical musical form, but in a much-changed and much-fragmented musical world, the school has now expanded away from its jazz base. In the 1960s Berklee began teaching rock’n’roll, and it has since created the first degree programmes in film scoring, music synthesis and songwriting. Over the last few years it has added hip-hop, electronica and video-game music to its curriculum. Tellingly, perhaps, a degree in music business/management is now one of its most popular courses.
SO WHAT AWAITS those Irish musicians who will be travelling over to Berklee, either for a summer course or a full-time degree course? One of the first Irish students to attend the college was flautist Brian Dunning.
“I think I was the first person to get Arts Council funding to study anything other than classical music,” he says. “I attended Berklee in the 1970s and it was a great experience. I had first heard about it from reading biographies of these really cool jazz musicians, and it seemed they all had studied there.
“It’s not just the college, it’s the city. In the same way that trad musicians meet here for sessions, the same happens with the jazz musicians in Boston. I was one of only two or three flute players there and we studied our principal instrument as well as harmony, listening and music analysis courses.”
Dunning left before completing the degree courses to release a number of albums with a band called Nightnoise and is now a member of Puck Fair. His music can be heard on the soundtrack to Martin Scorsese's film, Gangs of New York.
“I never got the piece of paper from Berklee,” he says, “but I was learning and playing jazz with some great people – and that was enough for me.”
