Ted Pease, 2009 April 24
Ted Pease, drummer and retired Berklee College of Music faculty member, discusses his early career including his time as a Berklee student in the early 1960s, as well as members of the faculty at that time including Alan Dawson, Joe Viola, and Bob Share. He describes his early years teaching at Berklee as well as the transitional period the school experienced in the late sixties and early seventies, caused by rapid enrollment growth and a shift in the curriculum to include other genres beyond jazz. He also discusses the origins of Berklee publishing, his evolution as a composer, the benefits of the Berklee Composition department, and twentieth-century and modern classical composers.
Drummer, composer, and educator Frederick Taylor “Ted” Pease (1939-) started his musical training on the piano around age five and began practicing drums around age fifteen. He obtained a degree in English from Cornell before moving to Boston in 1961, where he attended Berklee School (later College) of Music. He started teaching at Berklee in 1964 concurrent with his senior year, and he would go on to teach for over forty years. Pease chaired the Arranging department and later the Professional Writing Division, and helped create the original major in Jazz Composition in 1980. He also authored several texts in the field of jazz composition and arranging that remained in Berklee' curricula for decades, and co-led the Berklee Faculty Concert Jazz Orchestra with Larry Monroe. Pease retired in 2008.
