Bachelor of Music in Performance: Bass

As a bass player majoring in performance at Berklee, you will learn the skills, concepts, and methodology required to demonstrate professional-level proficiency on your principal instrument. You’ll achieve this through private lessons, which include proficiency-based final exams, bass labs, and performance studies classes.

You will complete a performance portfolio, including a juried senior recital (supported by recital preparation lessons and classes) that meets current professional performance standards. Most students also engage in extracurricular and cocurricular concert performances, and each performance major participates in ensembles and public performances in the college’s recital halls and venues such as the Berklee Performance Center.

As a performance major, you’ll take specialized courses in ear training and harmonic applications designed to develop your improvisational skills; you’ll also participate in classes given by visiting master performers. Through these activities and interactions, you will develop an aesthetic and critical understanding of the meaning of quality performance, and you’ll be able both to define quality using technical and interpretive musical criteria and to apply those criteria to your own work and to that of others.

In addition to your bass courses, additional activities available through the ensemble program may include private lessons and group sessions with performance scholars John Patitucci and Victor Wooten, clinics with a wide variety of visiting artists, recording sessions, and on- and off-campus concerts, festivals, and tours. All of these experiences will help you develop a sufficient theoretical, conceptual, and philosophical background in the area of bass performance such that you will be ready to work effectively with others and adapt to changes in the professional music environment.