Kimberly Ashton

Higher Education Writing

Berklee Today •

Berklee's New Program in Morocco Explores an African Musical Tradition

The partnership with the Gnaoua and World Music Festival that helps musicians dig deeper into their artistry and bridge musical cultures.A quarter-century ago, Essaouira was mostly a quiet old port on the coastal edge of Morocco, out of the way for anyone not looking for it. Those who made pilgrimages there were mostly artists and musicians, including the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Carlos Santana, who came to explore a style of music that’s said to be a musical wellspring from which the blues and...
Berklee •

With Sight and Hearing Gone, Alumna Pianist Remains Committed to Music

A yearslong collaboration among three alumni keeps Cydnie Breazeale, who is deaf and blind, connected to music—and to each other.In 1994, just before Cydnie Breazeale ’18 began studying at Berklee, she could, with the help of powerful hearing aids, make out the notes she was playing on her piano. But two months before her first day of classes, her hearing suddenly and completely disappeared. 

It was the second sense to leave her. When she was a small child, what little vision she was born with...
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...
Berklee •

When Mom Has Midterms

Two new books by Berklee Online CEO Debbie Cavalier help children adjust to family life when a parent goes back to school. Bonny Baez does his Berklee Online course work while his son, Wes, plays in the background.In many ways, Bonny Baez’s day is not much different from that of thousands of college students: He works a part-time job, does several hours of school work, and then, in the evening, he cooks dinner with his wife and their 3-year-old son, enjoying some family time together before retu...
Berklee Today •

Kurt Maas Award Builds Bridge with Berklee

Now in its 10th year, the biennial competition honors the legacy of Maas '65. The top prize is a scholarship to Aspire: Five-Week Music Performance Intensive. Marco Pignataro recalls being in the audience this summer when German jazz guitarist Elias Prinz and his trio took the stage at Munich’s Isarphilharmonie concert hall. Prinz, a 23-year-old student at the Jazz Institute at the University of Music and Performing Arts Munich, had just won first place in the institute’s renowned Kurt Maas Jazz...
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 •

Jim Lucchese Talks About Being an 'Artists' Advocate' and How He'll Approach Berklee Presidency

In a letter Jim Lucchese wrote to the chair of Berklee’s Presidential Search Committee last spring, he starts with a disclaimer. His life’s trajectory “seems more certain in hindsight than it did at the time,” he writes. But a theme comes through: He’s been continually searching for ways to support artists who’ve had the courage to live creative lives. Lucchese, who becomes Berklee’s fifth president in January, doesn’t really consider himself one of these artists despite his decades of gigging i...
Berklee Today •

Foundation Has Awarded Berklee Students Over $5 Million in Scholarships Since Inception

The Latin Grammy Cultural Foundation, along with prominent artists, awards over half a million dollars in scholarships each year to students focusing on Latin music. Berklee students win the majority of them.Itzel Reyna’s obsession with jazz started suddenly. She was 16 and had no background in music when she went to see a documentary about the genre. What she heard in that Mexico City movie theater sounded to her like freedom.“Jazz was really like a revelation,” Reyna B.M. ’19, now 30, says.She...
Berklee Today •

Courtney's Got Talent

Courtney Harrell ’01 remembers being about 11 or 12 years old when her mother, a gospel singer, started calling her up to the front of church congregations: “She would point to me, and just say, ‘Come up here,’ while she was singing, and toss me the mic.”

Her mom would do this at Faith Tabernacle Assembly, the Dorchester church where she and Harrell’s father were co-pastors, and at the many churches where she was a guest singer. “That was her way: She just threw me in the deep end,” Harrell say...
Berklee Today •

Taking Root

In October of 2019, Abraham Granado and his father left their home in Valencia, Venezuela, to begin what would turn out to be a two-day journey to Colombia so that the teenage drummer could audition in Bogotá for Berklee.

The frontier between the two countries had been closed because of conflict, so the men took a 12-hour bus ride to a border checkpoint. From there, once in Colombia, they walked for a couple of hours to catch another bus that would take them on the 17-hour journey to the capita...
Berklee Today •

Rap and Roots

The Mayan people of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula breathe new life into their ancient heritage, with help from a Berklee alum.“Barrio Maya and Múul Paax are trying to spread the message that, ‘Hey if we don’t do something, a huge part of our culture is going to be lost: our language,’” Guido Arcella M.M. '15 says. Itzincab, a village of little more than four blocks nestled in Mexico’s Yucatán jungle, is named after an insect that has played a central role in the local Mayan culture for centuries. I...
Berklee •

Songs of Vice and Fire

After HBO’s blockbuster success Game of Thrones aired its final episode in 2019, the network looked into several spinoff ideas before landing on what would become the franchise’s follow-up, House of the Dragon. The show, a prequel, had to assert its own identity while also maintaining a continuity to the original series. Part of what kept the link strong between the two shows strong was the decision to have Ramin Djawadi B.M. ’98, who scored Game of Thrones (GOT) and composed its famous theme so...
Berklee Today •

Taking Up the Baton

President Erica Muhl describes herself as a radio person, not a playlist person. She likes to channel surf. She’ll jump from the classical channel to the one that plays ’80s pop and rock. From there, she might dip into some bluegrass, take a ride on the country air waves, or spend time with folk and classic rock favorites. Lately, her digital dial has been landing a lot on the jazz station.

It’s hard not to hear a bit of her own biography in the genres she likes. “Music, I think, was really a v...
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 Today •

A Wave of Talent

For the past four years, before the coronavirus disrupted life in South Korea, Jaeho Lim would head to SJA Music Institute on Saturday and Sunday afternoons to load up a large cart with a five-piece drum kit, a synth, a bass and guitar amps, and a PA system. He’d then push all of it several blocks down a busy street in Seoul, to the spot where SJA students would put on a free outdoor show. 
As a senior manager at SJA, Lim wasn’t technically obliged to do the weekend work, but he showed up anyway...
Berklee •

Using Technique, Students Say Goodbye to Performance Anxiety

Kenny Werner, who heads Berklee's Effortless Mastery Institute, teaches musicians how to break down the anxiety attached to playing music and to reconnect to their instrument from a place of comfort and expressivity.It wasn’t long after Jesus Burgos got accepted to Berklee that he got tendonitis. Driven by powerful feelings that perhaps he didn’t belong at the college, Burgos would spend hours on end practicing guitar so that he could arrive on campus “being the hippest cat I can.”

Instead, he...
Berklee •

Megadeth Bassist Dave Ellefson Shares Rock Solid Advice at Clinic

Standing before a crowd of students that was born long after his band Megadeth came to life, bassist Dave Ellefson took the stage at the Berklee Performance Center on July 27 and treated the audience to some hard rock before getting down to the brass tacks of metal.

“Are you ready to rock?“ he asked more than 200 Berklee and Five-Week Summer Performance program students, many of them decked out in T-shirts from Megadeth, Iron Maiden, and other iconic metal bands. Then Ellefson, backed by Berkle...
Harvard Law Bulletin •

Representing the Whole Child - Harvard Law School

When Vladimir Gongora, a deaf teenager who fled El Salvador, first met with Brett Stark ’12 two years ago in the Immigrant and Refugee Services Division at Catholic Charities in New York, the two had to draw pictures to communicate. Vladimir had never been taught to write or use sign language, and he needed Stark to help him win the legal right to stay in the United States.




Stark found him a special interpreter, one versed in communicating with hearing-impaired people without formal l...
Berklee •

BerkleeICE Series: Rich Goodstone and the Good Stuff of Bonnaroo

When Rich Goodstone and a few buddies came up with the idea in January 2002 to put together a new music festival, they dreamed of attracting 30,000 attendees, which would have been an incredible success for four guys new to the large-festival scene. But the numbers far exceeded their expectations. With no advertising, they put tickets on sale that March and sold 70,000 in two and a half weeks.
With their event that June—called Bonnaroo, a creole term for "good stuff"—Goodstone and friends hit fe...
Harvard Law Bulletin •

Siblings in the Struggle - Harvard Law School

The summer before he went to Harvard Law School, Bishop Holifield ’69 protested outside Tallahassee City Hall with his sister, Marilyn Holfield ’72 to persuade the city to reopen swimming pools it had decided to close rather than integrate.




Marilyn picketed City Hall with a sign that read “My bathtub isn’t big enough,” and Bishop organized volunteers to make phone calls to registered voters. Their concerted efforts paid off when the city voted to open the pools to all.


Since then,...