Skip to the bottom for a more condensed form of the following petition. If you don’t mind reading a long story about my personal experiences leading up to now that made me feel a petition was necessary, feel free to read below. Please keep in mind that while I mostly mention rock and metal in this petition, I want to see any and all genres that aren't being represented to be represented, rock and metal is just the area that I am most familiar with as a student at Berklee. Please by all means share your experiences and let Berklee know what genres you think deserve more representation at the college.

Berklee College of Music is advertised to students and the public as being a school of contemporary music that is welcoming of/educates in all styles of popular music. Almost all education of musical style in the context of playing with other musicians is facilitated through the ensemble department, which is described as “offering the largest selection of ensemble opportunities of any other college in the world”, “offering ensembles in a wide variety of genres, styles, sizes, and configurations”, and “designing [those ensembles] to hone your essential performance skills and techniques”, as quoted from the Ensemble Department’s webpage (berklee.edu). The issue with these claims is that they do not follow up on this promise, and make day to day life for most musicians that are not of the jazz background a living hell. 

My name is Shawn Gaskill, and in a lot of ways, my story is not different from a lot of others at Berklee. I’m a metal guitarist primarily and have been during my entire time as a musician. I am not very familiar with the genre of jazz and enrolled at Berklee College of Music to better myself in many styles, including jazz, so that I could leave Berklee as a better performer. This is what set Berklee apart from most schools for me, especially in their advertising of it. I attended both the Guitar Sessions program in 2018 and the Aspire: 5 Week Performance Intensive in 2019, before getting accepted to Berklee in 2020, and in that time, I got the impression from the experiences that Berklee provided me that they were accepting of metal as a genre, and would truly help me learn how to do other genres if I expressed the desire to learn. Unfortunately, this has not been the case in the Ensemble Department since my arrival to Berklee as an official student.

During my first semester at Berklee, I had to do an initial audition that serves as a way to place me into an ensemble of my skill level, called a ratings audition. Students of the college are very familiar with these, and a lot of students, myself included, feel that they do not serve the purpose that they are intended to serve. This is because the ratings audition only assesses elements of the audition in the style of jazz. For any musician at Berklee that isn’t a jazz performer, this creates a very unfair situation, since a very large number of musicians at Berklee are not strictly jazz musicians, and to make matters worse, the ensemble department does not give any real advice or feedback to help you learn how to play or improve in the style of jazz. They expect your private instructors or someone else outside of their department to teach you the style, despite the fact that they’re expecting you to know it, which means in order to do what you want to do in terms of ensembles, you have to sacrifice your time in other places where you could be learning things that would be directly beneficial to your own growth as a musician at Berklee, in your style, as you usually pick private instructors that will help you improve in your specific style at Berklee, since that’s likely why you’re at the school in the first place. If your style is jazz, then you’re in luck. If not, then you’re bound to struggle to get into the ensembles you want to get into, as for some inexplicable reason, most rock exclusive ensembles (rock ensembles that aren’t a mixture of various different genres) are only available at rating 4, which suggests that if you’re a rock guitarist that’s a rating 1 or 2, or even a 3, then playing your style is a privilege and not a right, whenever you’re paying them for your education; not the other way around.

In correlation with the ratings struggle, the Berklee ensemble department doesn’t offer much diversity in its ensembles, despite claiming they have the largest and most diverse ensemble offerings in the world. At the same time, they offer up to 50 of the exact same ensemble type and rating, which makes all claims of diversity laughable. The types of artists I see get affected the most by this issue are rock, pop, classical, and metal musicians, therefore making it very easy to spot that it’s mostly non-jazz musicians that are struggling horribly to play the type of music they want to play. Most of the time this is because the college doesn’t offer it, even though the style of music can be incredibly popular. Even if it isn’t popular, there should be a place for everyone to go, so if there isn’t a spot for someone’s main style, there is something horribly wrong with the system. Classical and Metal musicians arguably face the largest struggle in regards to ensembles at Berklee, as there are only six classical ensembles, two of which are film scoring orchestras, and then only two dedicated metal ensembles, listed under the style of rock as the Hardcore/Heavy Metal ensemble. These numbers were pulled from the course catalog for the upcoming Spring 2022 semester on the Boston Campus. It is also important to note that the only reason why these two ensembles for metal exist is because the professor who runs them noticed that Berklee accepts a lot of metal musicians and then never gives them a place to perform, so he chose to run it out of the good of his heart. Metal musicians have been complaining about the lack of metal ensembles for a long time, and I’ve personally been in the office of the department chairs several times and told them about the issue, to which they claim that they’re working on adding more and that they understand that it’s an issue that’s present in the system. I was told this information about a year ago and nothing has been done, which tells me the response was solely performative, and that they haven’t been working on it at all. 

There are also a very large amount of players that deserve a higher rating than they have, which is an issue that is very common amongst non-jazz musicians. As I stated before, there are roughly 50 sections of the same ensemble, that ensemble being Mixed Styles 2. Other ensembles, such as the other mixed styles ensembles after it, and the small band jazz ensembles, can have upwards of 20 to 30 sections. Ensembles for some other styles like metal barely have one or two sections, as mentioned in the paragraph above. I was told that there is a reason for that and it wasn’t always like that. I strongly believe I have found the real reason why it is like that. The reason is because there are so many people that are falsely given bad ratings because of one reason or another, whether it be a faculty member who has a bad attitude towards your style of music, a faculty member that doesn’t even play your principal instrument, or simply a bad performing day. A lot of Berklee students are rating 1s and 2s entering, and oftentimes don’t move above a 3 or a 4, which facilitates the false need to have so many of one type of ensemble. Because Berklee seems to pride itself on keeping students that don’t primarily play jazz down in the lower ratings, the need to create 50 of the same ensemble has been created, because apparently it’s too hard to ask Berklee to create different types of ensembles that lower ratings can enjoy, or to let some lower rating people get the ratings they actually deserve. 

Berklee students are told to play whatever represents them musically, but when non-jazz musicians do that, they get bad ratings. When they play jazz, they get much better ratings, which proves that the audition itself only tests for jazz elements, and that Berklee views non-jazz musicians as being below jazz musicians, which is completely false. It also proves that Berklee wants you to express yourself and play what you want to play, so long as you play what they want you to play. 

There are also various concerns regarding some faculty members of the Berklee ensemble department. In my first semester at Berklee, I had a professor who spent a whole hour berating me in front of the class over a simple question I had about noise gating in regards to production. It was a remote semester where I was writing and producing a metal song for my Mixed Styles 2 ensemble, so it was a relevant question. He tried bypassing my question entirely, and I respectfully kept on him because I needed to do it for my homework for his class, and I wanted to do my assignment well. He began yelling at me in front of the entire Zoom class for an entire hour and ironically was accusing me of wasting his time, when he was the one who was spending the hour yelling at me for asking questions. He proceeded to tell me that successful/professional people don’t ask questions, and that I have a bad attitude and that nobody would ever want to play music with me because of it. All over asking a question. I went to the chair of the department and only got a “I’m sorry this happened to you”, and the professor to my knowledge never got reprimanded. I can tell this is common in the lower rating ensembles at Berklee because other students have come forward with their own stories, and other students have entirely decided to withdraw from Berklee because of professors that are like this. It is wrong to let this continue to happen, and it is time we make them end it and reprimand all professors that act out of line from this moment forward. 

The last issue I would like to discuss in this petition in regards to rock and metal musicians at Berklee is the lack of sufficient-sounding ensemble rooms and performance venues. I rehearse at least once a week in Berklee’s ensemble rooms in the 150 Mass Ave. building, and occasionally in the 1120 Boylston, 921 Boylston, and Fordham Road facilities. I will mainly be discussing the issues with the 150 Mass Ave rooms, since I use those ones the most, and additionally houses the most ensemble rooms, and are the ones that students most often use. I spent the entire semester in Fall 2021 rehearsing with a metal ensemble in the 150 building, and there were always major issues that kept us from rehearsing properly, mostly due to the fact that the room acoustics are designed for “quieter” styles of music, such as jazz. For rock and metal players, and other players that play styles of music that are loud and rely on amplification and/or distorted guitar sounds, none of the rooms appear to work for us in the slightest. There are various reasons, but the most obvious ones that could be fixed include amplifiers that are broken or have not been properly maintained in a very long time, having amplifiers that mostly cater to jazz and classic rock musicians, and therefore aren’t designed to have a ton of distortion run through them, having a PA system that constantly creates feedback loops whenever vocalists try to use them in a room with a lot of distorted guitars or loud instruments, and having PA speakers that are obviously broken and haven’t been fixed. The 1120 rooms are better, although the amps in them are also very spotty, and a lot of the rooms are far too small for louder styles of music, so they are rooms that we don’t get to use very often. There are maybe four or five suitable rooms in that entire building, which is not something that is fair to the many rock and metal artists on campus. The Fordham Road and 921 Boylston rooms also have their fair share of issues, including again, the lack of proper and functioning amplification, the distance students would have to go to get to these rooms, and the lack of suitable PA systems to run vocals and other sounds through. A lot of metal musicians use digital amp modelers to get their sound, mainly because they sound absolutely amazing. But the issue is that they cannot be easily utilized in the current environment because there is simply no way to guarantee that it will sound good or even function at all. Berklee students pay a lot of money to use these facilities, and I would like to know where our money is going, and why we can’t get facilities to practice in that don’t sound abysmal and actually function for the styles of music we play?

I have also seen many rooms with a lack of amplifiers in general, such as the B41 room in 150 Mass Ave that my ensemble performed in recently. There were only three or four amps in the room, all of which had various issues, likely due to not being maintained. I have heard through the grapevine that the amplifiers in this building in both the ensemble rooms and performing venues have not been maintained in 20 years, which seems to hold up being that every amplifier I have ever played through, with the exception of one or two of them, sounded absolutely abysmal for the type of music we were playing. The PA system in the room is also horrible, as I’m fairly sure one of the speakers in the room is absolutely shot, since it was clipping very often, which is something that hadn’t really happened on that scale in any of the other facilities I have played in at Berklee, which is a fair comparison because every room seems to have the exact same model of PA system and speakers. If the speakers weren’t broken, it’s very apparent that the PA system doesn’t have enough headroom for rock and especially metal, since I have played much smaller venues in my time as an artist, and their systems sound far better than Berklee’s, and they don’t have nearly the amount of money that Berklee has coming in on a yearly basis. The room itself doesn’t appear to have been the issue, as it is spacious to allow for the bass frequencies to not be overly present, despite the fact some light reverberation could be created due to the space. I’m no expert on room acoustics, but I can definitely say that even if the room has some imperfections, it would not lead to an abysmal sound. The lack of proper gear caused our sound to not be as good as it could have been, which is not at the fault of our ensemble members or professor, but rather at the fault of Berklee not giving us the tools that we need to put on a good show. There are definitely ensemble rooms that are way too small for metal, rock, or any sort of loud music with a lot of bass, and while this isn’t as easily fixable, it is something that Berklee could very well think about the next time that they build an ensemble facility. There is also surely enough money on Berklee’s part to begin rolling in these changes over the next year and beyond, because students have been paying a ton of money to attend Berklee, and there was recently a tuition increase, so they should surely have some extra cash on hand to begin maintaining their equipment and working on giving us a suitable space to play music in. 

So this leaves many questions for me and other students. Here are the most important ones I expect to have answered and resolved as a result of this petition.

• Why can’t the college add more ensembles for metal, rock, classical, and any other genres of music that are grossly under-represented at Berklee and get rid of some ensembles that have 10+ sections, especially since a lot of times those do not always get filled, and either rely on professors to fill in, or by forcing students to take the ensemble for no credit and holding their scholarships over their heads.
• Why has the ratings audition process and system not been updated for all genres, and why is it that after many complaints about this, nothing has been done about this issue that has plagued students at the school for a very long time.
• Why are the ensemble rooms/performance venues so horribly managed and maintained when students pay $40-60k yearly on average to go to Berklee? Where is our tuition money going, and why have things not been fixed in a long time? If Berklee wants to boast about being the “#1 College for Contemporary Music in the World”, then surely they can invest some money to give the students that pay them amazing practice and performing facilities, so that they can go out there and change the world with their music, which is their goal according to them in their marketing materials. If the Ensemble Department is not being given enough funding, the chairs of that department should be telling Berklee that they need a bigger budget to make things good for its students, rather than just ignoring the problem. If they are unaware of this issue currently, they now should be with this petition outlining it for them. 
• Why is it that after a whole year of coming to the offices of both chairs I and others are still having issues? I have been told that the department is working on things to make it better, but if that’s truly the case, then why haven’t I seen even the slightest amount of change since Fall 2020?
• What is so difficult about mine and other student’s requests that makes them unresolvable in an entire year’s time, especially those that are/have been very common amongst students at Berklee?
  Why is it that professors who have been ableist towards students been let go without any consequences?
• Why is it that instead of directing students to the places they need to be directed, the ensemble department seems to feel the need to tell us to figure it out ourselves by asking people outside of the ensemble department?
• Why is it that the ensemble department expects people outside of the Ensemble Department to be proficient in the Ensemble Department course offerings and procedures?

If any of you have any experiences that you would like to share in regards to this, please do so by all means! After we receive a sufficient number of signatures, I would like Sean Skeete, Tyrone Chase, Erica Muhl, and Lacretia Flash to get together with each other and myself to resolve this issue once and for all. Berklee is too special to us as musicians to let this issue go unresolved, and I won’t allow it to, even if I have to spend the next 4 years of my education trying to do so. I encourage anyone who is comfortable to reach out to the ensemble department with their individual issues does so, so that it becomes apparent that it isn’t just an isolated issue if it isn’t clear enough already.