With Greece as the setting, new technologies took center stage at the third Berklee International Network Summit.
By Emily Singer and Rob Hochschild
(August 3, 2000)
Education, philosophy, and music are subjects that have long occupied the Greek mind. Go to Athens and you think of teacher-student dialogues that set the tone for modern thought. In Delphi, you recall the legendary open-ended wisdom of the Delphic Oracle. And in Piraeus, the sounds of the sea provide a natural symphony. How fitting, then, that those three locations also provided the setting in May for Berklee and its international partners to contemplate questions about the future of contemporary music education.
As representatives from the 14 member schools of the Berklee International Network came together in Greece for their third summit, the themes of continued cooperation and technology frequently reappeared as keys to maintaining the growth of music education programs around the world. These ideas surfaced not only in a series of Socratic roundtable discussions, but in several videoconference sessions that linked Greece with the United States for meetings, classes, and one brief yet momentous jam session.
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President Lee Eliot Berk addresses the crowd in Athens (on screen) during the opening reception of the BIN Summit. |
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The week-long summit began on May 21 with a kickoff reception that used video conference technology to bring together summit participants in Athens with a Berklee contingent in the David Friend Recital Hall in Boston. One of the highlights of the program came at its close when two musicians in Boston and two musicians in Athens performed "Stella by Starlight." It was a bicontinental collaboration that impressed onlookers in both artistic and technological terms. It was also symbolic of the way that educators cooperated on a range of issues throughout the summit, and brought home the point that new technologies will present new educational possibilities.
"What we're seeing is the dawn of a new beginning for Berklee and our international partners in terms of educational offerings," said David S. Mash, Berklee's vice president for information technology. Berklee and Philippos Nakas Conservatory, in Athens, experimented with the technology throughout the week. Berklee faculty members Mike Williams and Yumiko Matsuoka stood in front of cameras in Boston to teach classes to Nakas students, and Nakas professor Petros Kourtis taught a percussion class to Berklee students and faculty.
Leonidas Arniakos, managing director of Nakas Conservatory, expressed interest in making use of the videoconferencing technology for future distance learning, and announced that the Greek Ministry of Education has pledged to support the project.
"I feel like we're beginning an odyssey of music technology," said Berklee Board of Trustees member Watson Reid, who was in Boston during the opening reception.
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Fourteen BIN partner schools were represented at the summit. |
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The reception consisted primarily of a series of interviews conducted with representatives of each BIN school, giving them a forum to discuss recent news and plans for the future. Berklee Executive Vice President Gary Burton interviewed half of the BIN representatives via videoconference and Associate Vice President for International Programs Larry Monroe, who was in Athens, interviewed the rest of the BIN group.
Many BIN representatives talked about plans to expand facilities and academic programs and one school, Fundacio L'Aula de Musica, in Barçelona, announced its effort to establish a BIN-like network of music schools in Spain.
Berklee established BIN in 1993 to create mutually beneficial relationships between itself and other centers of contemporary music education. Under Monroe's direction, the network has grown to 14 partner schools:
- Fundacio L'Aula de Musica, Barcelona, Spain;
- Philippos Nakas Conservatory, Athens, Greece;
- Rimon School of Jazz and Contemporary Music, Tel Aviv, Israel;
- Pop & Jazz Conservatory, Helsinki, Finland;
- American School of Modern Music, Paris, France;
- Seoul Jazz Academy, Seoul, Korea;
- PAN School of Music, Tokyo, Japan;
- Koyo Conservatoire, Kobe, Japan;
- Jazz & Rock Schule, Freiburg, Germany;
- International College of Music, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia;
- Escuela de Musica Contemporanea, Buenos Aires, Argentina;
- Academia de Musica Fermatta, Mexico City, Mexico;
- Conservatorio Souza Lima, Sao Paulo, Brazil,
- Berklee College of Music, Boston, Massachusetts.
Hosted by Nakas Conservatory, summit meetings were formal and informal, held in locations both small and large, in meeting rooms atop archelogical sites and mountains overlooking the ocean. Conversations continued as summit participants strolled near sites such as the Acropolis, which quite fittingly translates into English as "The Summit of the City."
Funding for students and using the Internet to link together and share resources between BIN schools were among the issues that partner school representatives raised.
Page two: Looking for Answers from the Oracle of Delphi
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