New Department Chairs and Trustees at Berklee

New Chairs

Some new faces are at the helm in three Berklee departments this year. The Brass Department welcomed to the chair position acclaimed trumpeter Sean Jones, who recently put out his seventh album as a leader on Mack Avenue Records. Jones holds degrees from Youngstown State University and Rutgers University, spent six years as lead trumpeter for the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and has performed or recorded with artists such as Herbie Hancock, Joe Lovano, Dianne Reeves, Wayne Shorter, and Nancy Wilson, among others. In addition to delivering clinics and master classes throughout the world, he has taught at Duquense University and at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and he serves as the artistic director of the Cleveland and Pittsburgh jazz orchestras.

“I’m honored to be given the opportunity,” Jones says of his new role. “I don’t feel that my job is to rewrite what has been done,” he adds, nodding to the fine work of outgoing chair Tom Plsek, who served as Brass chair for 25 years, “but to add a few new ideas that will stay true to the traditions of the Brass Department while making it the preeminent program for brass studies in the world.”

David “Doc” Wallace is chairing Berklee’s String Department after serving as a professor at the Juilliard School and a senior teaching artist with the New York Philharmonic. An award-winning composer and champion Texas fiddler, Wallace is also a Grammy-nominated performer who has been broadcast as a soloist or chamber musician on NPR, CBS, ABC, PBS, and more. The New York Times has described his solo work as comparable to “Jimmy Page fronting Led Zeppelin.” As a music educator, he is a curricula author or consultant for performing arts institutions such as Carnegie Hall, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Chamber Society of Lincoln Center, among others. He is also the author of Reaching Out: A Musician’s Guide to Interactive Performance.

“Creativity is an integral part of craft,” Wallace says. “I’m passionate about empowering string players to improvise, to compose, and to explore the full musical diversity available today.” He adds, “I’m thrilled and thankful to lead a dynamic, renowned department that prepares today’s musicians to lay full claim to their creative and artistic birthrights.”

In the Professional Music Department, Sean Hagon ’06 has returned to his alma mater to take the baton from previous chair Kenn Brass. Hagon formerly served as director of the School of Continuing Education for the New England Conservatory (NEC) for the previous five years. Prior to his time at NEC, Hagon was director of music at the Pingree School. Additionally, he has composed for film and radio, and for television series on networks including PBS, the History Channel, and Fox Sports Net New England. In the early 1990s, Hagon played in the Boston-based rock group Last Cry, which landed on the Billboard Top 100 chart with the song “In the Name of Love.” Hagon has held the chair of the Music Technology Committee of the Massachusetts Music Educators Association and has previously received an Exemplary Music Educator Award from Berklee.

“Music gives us the freedom to explore, to dream, to live, and to inspire, and ultimately makes us more of ourselves instead of more like everyone else,” Hagon says. “The diversity of the human experience increases our capacity to understand and appreciate everything else. This human experience is Berklee.”

New Trustees

Over the past year, there have been several additions to Berklee’s Board of Trustees. In future issues of Berklee Today, we will introduce each of them.

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot and Susan Whitehead were re-elected to Berklee’s Board of Trustees in December 2013. Lawrence Lightfoot is a sociologist and a professor of education at Harvard University. She has authored numerous articles and monographs, and penned eight books. Her book Balm in Gilead: Journey of a Healer won the 1988 Christopher Award for literary merit and humanitarian achievement.

In 1984 she was named a MacArthur Foundation fellow, and in 1993 she was awarded Harvard’s George Ledlie Prize. Lawrence-Lightfoot has received 26 honorary degrees from colleges and universities in the United States and Canada. In 1998 she was the recipient of the Emily Hargroves Fisher Endowed Chair at Harvard University, which upon her retirement will become the Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot Endowed Chair. This will make her the first African American woman in Harvard’s history to have an endowed professorship named in her honor.

When asked about her involvement with Berklee, Lawrence-Lightfoot said, “For a long time I have been a great admirer of Berklee College of Music. I think it is a gem of an institution, singular in its identity and reputation.”

Susan Whitehead currently serves on the boards of several organizations and comes to Berklee with a wealth of knowledge in the field of higher education. She is the vice chair and a lifetime board member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT and a life member of the MIT Corporation and chair of the Biological Engineering Visiting Committee.

Whitehead received her juris doctorate degree from Cardozo School of Law and her bachelor of science from Cornell University. She is a former trial attorney and served as an assistant district attorney in New York City and in private practice in Boston. She also worked for the ACLU in Jackson, Mississippi, and directed a clinical program at Brooklyn Law School.

As a Berklee trustee, Whitehead looks forward to working on organizational development and strategic planning for the college. She says, “Berklee is a world-class institution on the move, full of phenomenal people who will accomplish a lot under Roger Brown’s leadership.”