Here is a bit of the history about how I came to write Lee Berk: Leading in the Berklee Way. I enjoyed a long association with Lee Berk that began when took a position at Berklee College of Music in 1989 when Lee was serving as the school’s second president. Joining the staff was my return to the institution I had attended as a student in the 1970s. I worked closely with Lee during my 26 years as a writer and editor for Berklee Today magazine, and we stayed in touch after he retired in 2004.

October 22, 2023   Mark Small, Susan Berk, and Lee Berk

This is the last photograph taken of Lee.

In retirement in the American Southwest, Lee continued to do philanthropic and pro bono work helping individual musicians, assisting in the founding an arts high school in New Mexico, and producing concerts featuring the countless musicians, both famous and less-known performers he’d met during his decades at Berklee. He arranged to bring me out for a solo guitar concert in October of 2023 when he was living in Phoenix. After the concert, his wife Susan and I had a conversation, and she asked if I would help her write a short bio— maybe 75 pages—about Lee’s Berklee legacy as a music education innovator. It was primarily to be a self-published project for family and friends. I signed on to help.

The morning after the concert, October 21, I bid farewell to Lee and Susan before heading to the airport for my return to Boston. We had the airport shuttle driver take a picture of the three of us before I left. Unknown to anyone in the moment, that shot (above) would be the last photograph taken of Lee Berk. Early the next morning, I heard from Susan Berk that Lee had passed away suddenly from a heart attack just hours after I departed. It was a great shock to me and sent waves across Berklee’s international community. In the weeks following, it became apparent that the little project Susan and I spoke about should instead be full-length book about his life. We needed to document Lee’s many incredible accomplishments as he led the way building Berklee into the largest and most forward-looking music education institution in the world.

Berklee Press and their distributor Hal Leonard formalized an agreement to publish the book, and I began researching and writing. I started documenting Lee’s personal and professional history through countless interviews with Susan Berk and their two daughters, Nancy and Lucy, plus a few of Lee’s longtime friends. I was given access to the Berklee archives as well as diaries and Berk family letters and correspondence to trace Lee’s personal journey from childhood through the end of his life. As well, I reached out to past and current Berklee administrators and faculty members who shared their recollections of working with Lee as he developed Berklee from a small, family-operated music school into a music education powerhouse.