Lawrence Berk

Lawrence Berk ( b. 1908 in Boston, † December 22, 1995 ) was an American music educator and composer and founder of the Berklee College of Music.

Berk began at age 13 to work for dance bands at the Ritz Carlton Hotel and for bands in nightclubs in Boston professionally as a pianist ( and composer ). He studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he trained as an engineer himself. During the 1930s he was a composer and arranger at CBS and NBC in New York, where he incidentally had the time spread in the United States compositional methods of Joseph Schillinger ( 1895-1943 ), a Russian-born mathematician and composer (whose methods according to a mathematical basis and so also very unconventional harmonies supplied ), studied and one of the only twelve licensed instructors was .. in 1945 he founded the famous Berklee College of Music in Boston initially with the aim to give music lessons due to the Schillinger method (which even in the was taught at Berklee 1960 ) for arrangers and composers of contemporary swing and popular music. The school, which started with three students, was accordingly first Schillinger House. Hence the world's leading jazz college, which was led by his son Lee Eliot Berk in 1979 as a successor, he was named after the school ( and because of the name close to the elite University of Berkeley ) developed.