My 15 YOS is attending the five week program this summer, not on scholarship. Thus far, It’s been a disaster. We flew from Wyoming last year to attend a one week day session clinic to try things on for size. That was a much better organized program with more students that surprizingly included actual players. We thought, how could we go wrong, so made arrangements to attend the five week program this summer. What we discovered is that there were virtually no returning students as fifteen year olds. The program is comprised of entering junior and senior high school students. There is very little structure associated with the program for musicians, being almost entirely focused on singer songwriters with big dreams of making it on AGT. As a skilled jazz percussionist, there is zero educational value for rhythm players at Berklee Five Week. The check-in to dormitory and upstart for the program is chaotic and actually takes four days before anything educational even starts, leaving a lot of idle time on students hands that, in my sons case, lead to a great deal of disappointment and homesickness. To say you get off on the wrong foot is an understatement. The classes are rudimentary for advanced players and include almost no performance opportunity, but rather a bunch of theory lecture oriented classes and survey percussion style discussions that are essentially film reviews of different percussion methods. What a joke! There is only thirty minutes of private lesson per week and the “jazz ensemble” class is a fundamental exercise in blues play. They don’t even work on jazz standards! This is not a program for fifteen year old kids. Two students have already been kicked out of school for alchohol and other violations to the code of conduct. In the orientation presentation after check-in, we were advised that 11 kids had to be shipped home last summer due to code of conduct vilolations.
So…my son is a drummer right. Having access to ensemble rooms that include instruments is pretty important for performance with other players. There are very few ensemble rooms available for players to actually play together in a band, and those rooms are available to recording artists, the public and full time college students, making them very difficult to be reserved. If you are fortunate enough to get a session reserved for an ensemble room, be prepared to spend $50 per hour to have access to a damn drum kit where other players can play with you! Bottom line: my son has been reduced to renting a cojon so he can at least find some opportunities to jam with some kids in the hallways of the public areas in the dormitory. I’m giving it a few more days to see if I can make any progress with a bewildered faculty that is utterly befuddled that my son isn’t having the time of his life, yet does very little to try and remedy the situation. This, before I fly out to exit my son from this worthless program.