The Berklee College of Music is an undergraduate institution in the Back Bay neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. The school has 524 faculty members and over 4,000 students from 80 countries.http://www.berklee.edu/about/facts.html Berklee was founded in 1945 with a program devoted primarily to jazz studies.http://www.berklee.edu/about/history.html In the decades since, it has developed a multi-disciplinary curriculum with twelve different majors.http://www.berklee.edu/majors/

The school has greatly expanded its programs and facilities in the last decade. Hip-hop was incorporated into the curriculum in 1999, and bluegrass was added in 2006. Berklee launched its online school, Berkleemusic.com, in 2002, and its second record label, Jazz Revelation Records, in 2003. The school also launched an internet radio station in 2007 and a cafe-style live music venue in 2008.http://www.berklee.edu/about/history.html

Berklee began as a jazz school because it was America's popular music at the time of its founding. The school was originally called the Schillinger House of Music after founder Lawrence Berk's teacher. Berklee was created with the intention of providing an alternative to other institutions, which mainly taught classical music.http://www.stateuniversity.com/universities/MA/Berklee_College_of_Music.html The school has developed a reputation for changing with the times; it added guitar as a principal instrument in the 1960's to address the growing popularity of rock music, and has continued to implement new forms of music as they became fashionable.http://www.berklee.edu/about/history.html

Berklee operates on a semester program and encourages students to pursue a four year degree or professional diploma. All of Berklee's majors are related to music in some way. Students can pursue a course of study that reflects their individual skills and interests; majors composition, music production and engineering, music therapy, music education, performance, music business, and film scoring.http://www.berklee.edu/majors/ The school seeks to provide a well-rounded education in both music and other areas of study by requiring students to take survey classes in a variety of musical fields and disciplines, as well as a standard liberal arts curriculum.http://www.college-admission-essay.com/berkleemusicadmission.html Berklee's faculty includes a number of prominent performers, engineers, and music business professionals, a number of whom have won Grammy awards and other honors.http://www.berklee.edu/news/89/berklee-alumni-and-faculty-win-13-grammys Athletics are not a part of student life, although a group of students did found a hockey team in 2006 that continues to compete.http://www.stateuniversity.com/universities/MA/Berklee_College_of_Music.html

1. John Scofield

2. John Mayer

3. Paula Cole

4. Mick Goodrick

5. Marco Benevento

6. Greg Osby

7. Steve Vai

8. Gary Burton

9. Roy Hargrove

10. Donald Fagen