Kimberly Ashton

Higher Education Writing

Berklee Today •

A Rising Star

Puerto Ricans have a saying about themselves, an adage they’ve had too many reasons to repeat over the past couple of years: Puerto Rico se levanta. Puerto Rico rises. 

Hurricane Maria, the ongoing debt management, and this summer’s political protests have all concussed the island, but Puerto Ricans get up, dust off, and press on. 

Take Rubén Amador B.M. ’01, for example. When his contemporary-music school, Conservatorio de Artes del Caribe, folded in 2005, four years after its opening, Amador...
Berklee.edu •

Soldiers and Veterans Pursue Art and Degree Online

In the Iraqi desert in 2004, in between shifts at a small outpost the Marines established at an abandoned train depot to refuel planes, Lance Corporal Andrew Bonica was able to occasionally grab a few minutes on a spotty internet connection and plug into life back home.
During one of this portal’s brief openings, Bonica came across a guitar magazine that featured an ad for BerkleeMusic.com, the predecessor to Berklee Online, the college’s online extension school.
He had taught himself to play gu...
Berklee Today •

Charlie Rosen: Broadway to Berklee and Back

Charlie Rosen ’12 was just three years old when his parents noted his perfect pitch. Not long after learning his colors, he could say whether a piano sound came from a black key or a white one. His parents, both musicians, started giving him lessons and let him experiment with the assortment of instruments they had around the house, an assemblage that included his mother’s woodwinds and his father’s theremin and backyard pipe organ. As Rosen’s interest grew, so did the number of instruments in h...
Berklee Today •

A Natural Partnership

Years before he came to be the managing director of Philippos Nakas Conservatory, before he oversaw its role as one of Berklee’s earliest international partners and host of the college’s first study abroad program, Leonidas Arniakos spent his evenings surreptitiously disseminating rock and jazz over Greece’s airwaves.
It was 1976 and his pirate station was squatting on the radio dial among the four legal state signals. Every night, after coming home from his job as a mechanical engineer, Arniako...
Berklee.edu •

Berklee Alumna Uses Music Therapy to Help Heal the Wounds of War

Master Sergeant Michael Schneider retired from the Marine Corps in 2015 with the signature mental wounds now endemic among wartime soldiers. He had post-traumatic stress disorder, and a traumatic brain injury that damaged a 4-centimeter strip of his right temporal lobe.
“I needed something to get around that section and relearn pieces and refire brainwaves,” Schneider said in a podcast and article for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). “And music therapy was it.”
With the help of music t...
Berklee Today •

In the Game

Finding Félix Carcone on the streets of Paris’s 18th arrondissement is not dissimilar to how his clients find his game, The Live Thriller.“ I have my computer bag on the side, brown shoes, and coffee creamy pantalon. With a blue beanie hat,” his message said.
A message to one of his clients might read: “You’ll recognize me easily. Dressed in black. Nothing but black.”
The client, who in receiving the message becomes a player, doesn’t have an exact address for the game, but rather is told to show...
Harvard Law Bulletin •

Getting Ireland to Come Clean - Harvard Law School

Just 24 years old, Maeve O’Rourke LL.M. ’10 went to the United Nations with a bold and unprecedented case against the Irish government. Appearing in Geneva before the Committee Against Torture in 2011, O’Rourke argued that Ireland had allowed the enslavement and forced labor of thousands of women throughout most of the 20th century.
What she wanted, she told the committee, was for the government to acknowledge its complicity, to apologize and to pay reparations to the victims.
“I was writing som...
Berklee.edu •

'It Is Wildfire': Berklee Alum on How TikTok Is Reshaping the Industry

It’s hard to overstate how just important Spotify has become in making or breaking songs. A tune’s placement on the streaming service—especially early on—will largely determine its success in all other areas, from uploads to radio play to concert ticket sales.

But with 42,000 songs released on Spotify every day, and with so much hustle behind them, how can an artist get their tune to float into the rarefied heights of Spotify’s Viral 50 lists, especially without major-label money boosting its r...
Berklee Today •

Alumni Profile: Ishaan Chhabra ’10

Ishaan Chhabra was 3 years old when he heard something so wondrous that it stamped the first indelible imprint on his memory. It was the industry-changing soundtrack to the 1992 Indian blockbuster Roja that had made composer A. R. Rahman a household name across India.
“I just felt some sort of connect,” Chhabra said. “I hadn’t heard anything like that before.” At the time, Southern Indian films rarely made it to New Delhi, where Chhabra’s family lived. But by fusing southern and northern Indian...
Berklee.edu •

Graduate Program Allows Practicing Music Therapists to Develop into Leaders and Visionaries in Field

It’s easy to see why children with cancer often don’t look forward to going to Dana-Farber’s Jimmy Fund clinic in Boston. It’s where they get stuck with needles, where they take medications that make them feel badly. Considering these experiences, it can be tough to get kids to see the hospital as a fun and exciting place. But making it less frightening, and even enjoyable, is part of what music therapist Channing Shippen '11 does every day.

Whether it’s distracting kids during blood draws or s...
Berklee.edu •

New Concept Album Boils Down Mueller Report to Eight-Song Opera

Jammed with legalese, the Mueller report might seem unlikely inspiration for art, but for musician Henry Bloomfield ’13, buried in the tome was the stuff of a great album. About a year ago, he began mining songs from the report, finding rhythm between the redactions and lyrics within the citations. 

The result is his 29-minute operatic concept album Ongoing Matter, in which he sets the report to music over the course of eight songs that tell a story of loyalty and deception. Nearly all the lyri...
Berklee Today •

Breaking a Sound Barrier with Captain Marvel

Inked on Pinar Toprak’s wrist is a small nautical design encircling a number 1. The tattoo is a reminder to her that at any time she’s just one decision away from changing the course of her life. Like the decision she made at 17 to move to Chicago to learn English, or the one a year later to change her major to film scoring, or the one last year, to demo for Captain Marvel.
In getting that gig, Toprak B.M. ’00 became the first woman to score a superhero movie, as well as the first to score a fil...
Berklee.edu •

Berklee Offers First Online Five-Week Program

This July, Berklee will launch its first-ever virtual five-week program in partnership with Berklee Online—the largest provider of accredited online music education in the world—allowing students all over the globe to spend the summer taking their musicianship to a higher level. 

The program, Aspire: Five-Week Music Performance Intensive, is the college’s flagship summer program for high-school-aged students. Traditionally held on the Boston campus, which is closed for the summer, Five-Week thi...
Berklee Today •

With Feeling: For Cheche Alara, Musicians Need to Know They Are Artists First

When Cheche Alara, a multihyphenate artist who’s worked with everyone from Christina Aguilera to Barbra Streisand, talks to groups of music students, he often asks for a show of hands: “In the last year, while you’ve been at school [who’s heard] the word network?” Everyone’s arm shoots up. He’ll follow up with a question about the words brand and personal brand. Again, hands fly skyward. Then he’ll drop this question on the crowd: “How many times have you heard the word emotion?” The room grows...
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