Category:Music

Musings of a 21st-century Composer

Marti Epstein

This is what it’s like to be a composer: I am always thinking about the piece I am currently working on, the pieces I will write after this one, the piece I am supposed to write next year. When you…

Dexter Gordon on Rittenhouse Square

Daniel Picker

When I walk across the Square, or even beside it, I see those winding sycamores beyond the black wrought iron fence, the garden and grass and trees, the fountain I know in the center, rectangular, and the benches along the…

Berklee Alumni Column Introduction

Joely Cromack-Kluko

“No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living right now.” - Alan Watts

Berklee Alumni Column #3: John Keyes

Joely Cromack-Kluko

This month, I had the opportunity to speak with LA-based professional drummer John Keyes. John’s passion for music began at age two and has thrived since, with no end in sight. His consistent drive throughout middle and high school led…

Berklee Alumni Column #2: Angie Polizzi

Joely Cromack-Kluko

February is the perfect month for love songs, which is why I’m especially excited to introduce you to Angie Polizzi. A 2024 Berklee graduate from Long Island, NY, Angie is a rock-pop singer-songwriter with a knack for lyricism and personal…

Berklee Alumni Column #1: Nicole Domagala

Joely Cromack-Kluko

This month, I had the pleasure of talking with 2024 Berklee alum Nicole Domagala. Nicole made for an intriguing first interview. Having completed a pro-music degree with a minor in production, she is a perfect example of the vast range…

On the Formation of Clouds

Brian Turner

Late in 2017, with a breeze off the Bay of Bengal stirring through the tongue-shaped leaves, I sat under an ancient banyan and listened to the voices of birds I couldn’t name while that banyan moved imperceptibly closer to the waters of the Indian Ocean.
I recorded the birds in the branches as they called out to one another. I recorded the birds as they flew away and as they rowed their wings through the morning air and as they made their way into canopies of light and shade. I thought about where I was on this planet, and just how lost I was in my life. ...

Escape Velocity

Joel Peckham

It’s already been two months, my mother says, can you believe it? I can and can’t. But we are always moving even when we think we’re not, the earth spinning at 1500 feet per second while orbiting the sun /
at 100,000 feet per second while the sun and the earth and all the planets in the solar system whirl around the center of the Milky Way at incredible speed Even this, our galaxy among its cluster of galaxies, moves through space, sliding toward a central point. It is a wonder...

Tuning in to Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony

Katherine Dacey

“Not since the first Manhattan performance of Parsifal [in 1903],” Time magazine declared, “had there been such a buzz of American anticipation over a piece of music.”[1] That piece was Dmitri Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, also known as the Leningrad,…