Kim Perlak

​

Premier Guitar

"Kim Perlak: Berklee's Guitar Department Chair"

04.09.19 

Excerpt:

“The importance that the Berklee College of Music has had on the development of the guitar in the last half of the 20th century and beyond cannot be overstated. Ever since the Boston institution first offered guitar as a principal instrument, in 1962, it has been a breeding ground for some of the world’s great players—from improvisers like Bill Frisell and Emily Remler to highly technical rockers like Joe Satriani and Steve Vai to idiosyncratic singer-songwriters like Bruce Cockburn and St. Vincent. A walk past Berklee’s main campus, on Boylston Street, finds throngs of students with their guitar cases and gigbags, suggesting the instrument’s continuing prominence at the school.

Given all that, it’s surprising that in almost 60 years Berklee has only had four chairs of its guitar department. When Kim Perlak took this position last fall, she became the first woman to do so, and the first classical guitarist, as all three of her predecessors—Larry Baione, William Leavitt, and Jack Peterson, in reverse chronological order—had been jazz-oriented. But, presiding over about 1,000 guitar students who play in many different styles, Perlak is hardly the stuffy classical pedagogue.

A native of Western Massachusetts, Perlak, who is in her mid-40s, developed an affinity for the classical guitar at an early age. That’s thanks to sophisticated teachers and time spent in the Berkshires, where she was exposed to the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood, the orchestra’s summer home. While Perlak solidified her technique and repertoire in the 1990s and ’00s—she has a BM from Stetson University, an MM from the Yale University School of Music, and a DMA from the University of Texas at Austin—she expanded her musical thinking and came to develop a voice on the classical guitar that’s modern yet firmly rooted in tradition, not to mention an openness to collaborating with musicians from outside of the classical world.”