During the first part of her musical
education, Valerie Thompson followed a path similar to that of many
aspiring young concert musicians. She began playing cello in elementary
school, took private lessons, performed in her hometown Kansas City
Youth Orchestra and, during her senior year of high school, played
with the orchestra at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. When
it came time to choose the college where she would continue her studies,
though, Thompson decided against furthering her classical training
at a traditional conservatory. Instead, she opted for the string department
at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, an institution far better
known for producing such jazz and rock musicians as Diana Krall and
Melissa Etheridge than string players.
"While I loved classical music,
I wanted to do something new and innovative," Thompson says.
"Playing in these huge orchestras, where there are 100 string
players, I didn't feel my voice was being heard, and I felt there
were ways I could make music where my voice would be heard."
Though she continued practicing the
classical repertoire at Berklee, Thompson focused on studying Irish,
Scottish, and French folk music, as well as zydeco, the born-on-the-Louisiana-bayou
fusion of the blues and French Creole music. The program for her senior
recital this past spring included the first movement of the Elgar
Cello Concerto, a set of Irish tunes performed with a fiddler, a zydeco
song accompanied by a band, and a set of French folk dances. Such
a musical smorgasbord may be unheard of (both literally and figuratively)
in the string programs of most music schools, but it's fairly
typical (except perhaps for the Elgar) of Berklee's string department.
There, the emphasis is on musical exploration, improvisation, and
the practical considerations of life as a working musician.
"The vast majority of Berklee
string students have made a conscious decision to break with the training
they've had so far, because they think there must be something
more," explains string department faculty member Mimi Rabson.
"They're working on different stuff in their lessons based
on what is interesting to them at the time."
Call it the Berklee way. "String
departments in colleges and conservatories are based on a Western
classical model, and if students in that department want to learn
any other idiom, they have to go outside the department," says
Matt Glaser, a noted jazz scholar who has been chair of Berklee's
string department since 1981. "I wanted to make a department
that incorporated and respected the musical values of jazz, various
American folk styles, blues, rock and roll, and country."
That Glaser managed to create such
a department is noteworthy, both because of the string program's
musical diversity and because it exists at all. Although violin playing
had been taught at Berklee since its founding in 1945, the school
did not have an official string department until alumnus Randy Sabien
established it in 1979.
Even then, when Glaser took over
for Sabien two years later, there were fewer than 20 students in the
string program. "I didn't have the title of department chair,
and I also didn't have much sense that there was a coherent department,"
he recalls.
In the
Groove
Glaser's arrival coincided with
the school's desire to upgrade the string program. He was asked
to recruit faculty, develop a curriculum, and make his students more
a part of Berklee as a whole. Although it still is the smallest department
at Berklee (which has an overall enrollment of 3,400), there now are
close to 90 students studying in the string department. Glaser notes
that this number rivals the size of the student body at many conservatories,
and the string program at Berklee shares other characteristics with
them as well. Students take required courses in harmony and counterpoint
and hone their playing abilities in private lessons, small string
groups, and larger ensembles that draw on students in other instrumental
departments.
Those ensembles, though, include
country music, Afro-pop, James Brown cover bands, and when they're
finished with their course prerequisites, students can move on to
such classes as Rock Improvisational Techniques and Music of Africa,
Latin and South America. "There are skills that classical musicians
are lacking, [for example] to be able to be really locked in to a
rhythmic groove that's happening," Glaser says. "We
want to be the place where that kind of focus also takes place, and
that would be something that you would not get in a conservatory."
"Most music schools offer a
classical program, and if they offer something outside of classical,
it's jazz," Thompson says. "Berklee was very clear
that it's a contemporary music school. That's what appealed
to me, because they offered something in between."
The string department's growth has
brought new teachers, who in turn bring new class ideas
and areas of musical expertise. Glaser, a jazz and folk violinist,
recognized the need to have classically trained teachers as the program's
foundation, even though classical music plays a relatively small role
in the overall instruction. To that end, Glaser has recruited such
teachers as violinist and violist Melissa Howe, an Oberlin graduate
with a doctorate in music and cognition from Boston University, and
Sandra Kott, a New England Conservatory of Music—trained violinist
who previously had been concertmaster of the Portland Symphony and
the Atlanta Opera Company.
"Both of them are very fine
classical players who are open minded and trained in other disciplines
and understand what it means to be a classical teacher at Berklee,"
Glaser says. "You have to be able to help these people develop
technique without imposing on them specific repertoire needs."
"That was my role when I got
here, as a conservatory type who had taken a little bit of a left
turn," Howe adds. "I teach traditional [classical] studies
enough that if you had a violist who wanted to keep her feet in both
worlds, I could keep her going, but the emphasis in the school is
not in that direction."
Glaser also brought in Rabson, a
violinist and founding member of the Klezmer Conservatory Band, to
supplement the instruction in jazz and world music, and Eugene Friesen,
a Grammy Award-winning cellist and composer and longtime member of
the Paul Winter Consort.
On joining the faculty three years
ago, Friesen–who commutes to Berklee from his home in Vermont–established
the Berklee String Chamber Orchestra, an ensemble of between 30 and
40 musicians (its size fluctuates from year to year). The group performs
compositions for strings that are intended to allow for improvisation,
including orchestral arrangements of music of the jazz-oriented Turtle
Island String Quartet and jazz saxophonist Stan Getz.
"I love groups like that,"
Friesen says. "I love the collective humor, the kind of community
it creates. I love the power of it. I think there's not a finer
thing for a human being than to engage in music making with other
people."
For Glaser, the orchestra's
April 2001 performance at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in
New York City was a high point of his 20-year building effort. The
growth of his program from a small, undefined group of students to
a department large enough to support an orchestra reflects a change
in the music world that lends itself to his ecumenical outlook.
"Twenty years ago, it was possible
to know everybody in the world who was interested in jazz violin,"
Glaser recalls. "Now nonclassical violin playing, or what I often
call improvisation and groove-based string playing, has spawned an
explosion in the string world."
As a result of this trend, Berklee's
students include such young musicians as Sarah Wilfong, a Chicago
native who began her classical studies at age three and first worked
as a professional Irish fiddler at 12. As a freshman this past year,
Wilfong studied jazz–almost inescapable at Berklee–and pursued
her longstanding interest in bluegrass.
"I'd like to come out as
a fairly well-rounded player," Wilfong says. "So that I
can hold my own in classical, in jazz, in bluegrass, in Irish, in
general folk, in pop, so I can have something to contribute in any
of those situations."
"When I was growing up, nobody
thought that way," Glaser observes. "It wasn't a normative
way of thinking to master all these traditions."
This musical versatility also lends
itself to the role of the string department within Berklee as a whole.
String students are in high demand as accompanists for their peers
in other departments and typically log many hours in performances
and recording studios. "We have to address the particular needs
of string players within the department, but we also have to prepare
students for their instrumental roles outside the department,"
Glaser says.
"Berklee is a very blue-collar,
dirt-under-the-fingernails kind of school," he continues. "It's
about learning particular skills–can you do this, can you not
do this? I don't mean it in a disparaging way, I mean it as something
I admire tremendously."
The
Real World
To understand how the string department
functions within Berklee's "blue-collar" environment
as a whole, consider Recording Techniques for String Players, a class
that Rabson began teaching in the last few years to students in the
strings, engineering, and composition departments. "The engineers
find out the best ways to mike string players, the string players
get experience in the studio, the composer gets to have music played
and get feedback," she explains.
Even the string orchestra serves
a vocational purpose. "It's been very important for my survival
as a creative musician to be able to do this kind of work," Friesen
says. "If you don't know how to play in an ensemble, which
includes fluid sight reading, and using peripheral vision with a conductor,
and expanding your sense of ensemble to include many people in the
room, you can't do that kind of work. That's a very important
part of being a studio musician as well as surviving as a freelancer."
Glaser estimates that fewer than
a third of the students in the string program are performance majors.
The rest choose from the other majors Berklee offers, including music
production and engineering, music education, music business/management,
and so forth.
Violinist Evan Price, who studied
under Glaser at Berklee before leaving the school in 1997 to join
the Turtle Island String Quartet, considers Berklee's pragmatic
emphasis to be its greatest strength. "It's reproduced a
microcosm of the music world as a whole, rather than the typical conservatory
approach, which is an isolationist view and not an accurate cross-section
of what the music world and the music business really are."
Breaking
the Mold
At the same time, it's also
an environment in which string players aren't always held in
high esteem. "Trying to integrate strings into the culture of
Berklee and the mindset of Berklee faculty and students, to get over
instrumental prejudices, that's an ongoing struggle," Glaser
acknowledges.
"I think a lot of students and
faculty have a predetermined vision of a string player that might
not be positive, that it's the saccharine string section or someone
who can't improvise. As students get better and play better,
that will combat those prejudices."
Glaser admits that the differing
levels of ability and wide range of musical backgrounds that string
students bring to Berklee pose a challenge for the department. "It's
not possible given the size of our department to level things, so
that only beginners are with beginners, and only advanced players
are with advanced."
Much of the burden of this disparity
initially falls on Melissa Howe, who helps put students who play by
ear with no formal instruction on more equal footing with classically
trained students who have little improvising ability. For example,
to push one student to play by ear, she might ask him to take the
first eight bars of Kreisler's "Preludium and Allegro"
and modulate it around the circle of fifths. To help a bluegrass violinist
translate his strong ear-playing skills to written music, she might
give him a recording of a two-part Bach keyboard invention and asked
him to transcribe it.
Once students have gained a solid
foundation in playing by ear and/or sight reading, they typically
go on to take private lessons with Glaser, Friesen, or Rabson to hone
their improvisation skills.
Glaser may play a jazz melody and
ask his student to play it back in all 12 keys, or have another student
learn a piece by ear and then go over it to analyze its nuances. At
the same time, the instruction in many ways remains conventional.
Friesen uses Bach to develop his cello students' intonation and
fluency on their instruments, and Rabson points out that the department
emphasizes a thorough understanding of harmony and theory.
"To be an improviser, to be
a spontaneous composer, you have to be able to think about all that
stuff," she says. "It's nice to see my students have
a larger awareness of what they're playing. After a few semesters
they're improvising on the right chords and the right harmony,
and if they're outside the right harmony they're doing it
on purpose."
The private classes, ensembles, and
courses available to string students at Berklee also allow them to
explore their own musical interests. "Many of the offerings in
the string department are very general, like boxes where we can do
different kinds of things," Glaser explains.
With the wide-open parameters Berklee
offers, though, picking an area of music on which to concentrate can
be difficult. "I feel like the last four years I've been
making up my mind," Thompson says. "You can get really confused
about what you want to focus on because there are so may options."
Fiddlin'
About
At first, Thompson thought she would
study jazz, a reasonable assumption given that Berklee's entire
curriculum is based on it. Despite the ever-present sound of saxophonists
playing jazz riffs in the practice rooms, though, she ultimately gravitated
to fiddle-based dance music.
Berklee's string teachers themselves
acknowledge that their students' far-ranging interests sometimes
exceed their own expertise. "I have a cellist who's working
on some Arabic music, which I only know superficially," Rabson
admits. "So I send her off to the library to find some CDs, and
she brings them into the class and tries to get information about
tuning, scales, and rhythms."
Although Friesen has worked with
Thompson on her classical cello playing, he grants that he was at
a loss as to how to help her pursue her interest in zydeco. "All
I do is make the space available for her to bring in whatever she
wants," he says. "As a consequence, she's developed
some techniques on the cello that are really unique in the world,
this kind of washboard-bowing technique."
In a sense, the strings department
at Berklee now finds itself challenged by its own success, as the
musical inclusiveness at the foundation of Glaser's philosophy
inspires students to pursue string playing into realms that even he
might not have thought possible.
"All of this is an ongoing process
that we're still working on," Glaser says. "It's
certainly grown in a variety of ways, in terms of curriculum offerings,
faculty size, student population, but it has a long way to go."
