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Faculty

The members of our faculty are more than teachers. They’ll be your mentors, your collaborators, and your instant list of more than 500 industry contacts. They are experienced and talented professionals in their field—and bring a thorough knowledge of music to the classroom that comes from a rich professional background in the music industry. They also bring an energy that will inspire you to push your talents and thinking beyond what you thought were the limits. You’ll find yourself transferring their influences to your ensemble rehearsals, performances, recording sessions, and gigs. In addition, the student-teacher ratio averages 8 to 1. Which means you’ll never feel like a number.

Find a faculty member

Rob Thomas, Professor

DEPARTMENT : String Department

"There is a big, all-inclusive, alternative strings styles movement, and I represent one corner of that movement, which is this idea that we should be able to play, go toe to toe, with any jazz instrumentalist. The violin is a frontline instrument; it can fit right in. The more of us that learn how to do that, the less it's going to be considered a fringe element. Hopefully, what I teach transcends the idea of playing jazz on the violin specifically. To paraphrase something Jean-Luc Ponty said years ago, I've always thought of myself as a jazz musician who plays strings as opposed to a string player who plays jazz. I'm trying to put a universal jazz vocabulary onto string instruments."

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Maeve Gilchrist, Instructor

DEPARTMENT : String Department

“In general, the bar is very low for harp playing in contemporary music. It’s perceived as such a pretty instrument—associated with an ethereal, wispy kind of sound—so people are easily impressed. For that reason a lot of players stop at a certain level, or are satisfied with very little. I feel rhythm has a lot to do with that. I don’t want my students to play to low expectations. The contrapuntal, textural, and rhythmic possibilities of the instrument far outweigh its harmonic disadvantages, and it’s important that they are fully explored. I tell my students, ‘Don’t settle for anything less than the absolute best. And don’t be afraid of putting yourself over your head in musical situations. Making mistakes is your path to finding your own voice and your own way of navigating your instrument.’"

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Patrice Jackson-Tighlman, Associate Professor

DEPARTMENT : String Department

"I’ve played classical repertoire since I was little. Some think that if you play something often enough, it could become boring or repetitive. But every time I play a concerto, I find something new. And I ask myself, ‘How can I relate to this audience? How can I play this part differently?’ If I do that, then the audience will respond."

 

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Julianne Lee, Associate Professor

DEPARTMENT : String Department

  • Diploma, Conservatoire Superieur de Paris
  • B.M., Curtis Institute
  • M.M., New England Conservatory
  • Plays violin and viola
  • Member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra
  • Performances with members of the Guarneri String Quartet, Joseph Silverstein, Australian Chamber Orchestra, and KBS Symphony Orchestra

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Joe Walsh, Instructor

DEPARTMENT : String Department

 

"I was the first mandolin student at Berklee in 2003. There were no mandolin teachers here at the time I applied. But I wanted to come to Berklee to have someone show me all the ways I should be thinking about music—even if I ended up studying with a saxophone teacher. You can learn a lot from any instrument. That attitude is present in the String Department, where you find a mandolin player studying with a fiddle player or a cello player."

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Owen Young, Associate Professor

DEPARTMENT : String Department

  • Cellist
  • Member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and various chamber music groups
  • Performances with James Taylor and numberous classical and non-classical artists

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