You can now get a degree in Black music and culture from Berklee College

Berklee College of Music introduced a new degree program this month in Black music and culture within the Africana Studies Division. The program examines both the historical and cultural significance of Black music, with a special focus on gospel music.

Rev. Emmett G. Price III, founding dean of the Africana Studies division, played a pivotal role in launching the new program that examines how artistry, industry and culture intersect. The Rev. Price — also a Boston Public Radio contributor and co-host of GBH’s All Rev’d Up — joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to share more about the program’s vision and how it will shape the next generation of musicians. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.

Arun Rath: This is super exciting. I’ve got to ask you because you’re the founding dean of the Africana Studies division, tell me about the thoughts that went into realizing that there was an additional degree that you had to add. What was the thinking behind pulling this together?

Rev. Emmett G. Price III: Well, absolutely. Let me give you back a little bit of history.

Back in the late 1960s — 1968, when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated — students around the nation begin activistic actions and activities to suggest that their curriculum was limited around the expressions, around the history, around the culture of Blacks and African Americans. And so, from there, Black studies, African American studies — and, as a result of that, Africana studies.

Africana studies looks at the African diaspora and the impact, the influence of the people and the cultures that come from Africa through the diaspora — through the Caribbean, South and Central America, into the United States and then beyond.

When I was hired to Berklee in 2021, the vision was to continue some of the work that had been done. We’ve had phenomenal faculty members who have been doing work in contextualizing the music that was taught here. But there was no real area that really focused on the various genres, the various cultural contextualization.

What we did [was] we built this new major in Black music and culture, which is diasporic. We started with gospel music because many of our students actually come from a liturgical or, you know, church-related background where they first get access to instruments and lessons and whatnot.

And so we said, “How do we benefit these spaces and places, leveraging the fact that much of Black music — particularly in the United States of America — came from the spirituals and/or came from gospel music?”

So it’s really a starting place for us. We’re headed to hip-hop culture next, and on and on with these various tracks or areas of emphasis. But we are so excited, and I’m glad that you’re excited.

Rath: I’m super excited! We’re going to get you back on to talk about every single one — and next time, hip-hop — but let’s talk about gospel for right now. Something that’s fascinating is how this program is integrating not just the music and the culture and the study of it, but the study of the industry as well.

Price: Yes. So, gospel music has a phenomenal industry going back even before the 1920s. But in the 1920s, when the Rev. Thomas Dorsey came into light and began doing what he did in terms of composing songs. He really built an industry around conventions — around selling music, publishing and all those things — that have blossomed into a multi-billion dollar industry.

When we think about folks like Kirk Franklin and Yolanda Adams and some of the gospel artists and those — like Aretha Franklin, who have influenced other genres of music through this tradition. It makes sense that we just can’t look at it through the artistry, but also the industry that surrounds that — but then also the impact, the influence on culture.

It’s hard to find a television commercial now that doesn’t have a choir behind them, or to find a concert that doesn’t have a choir behind them. Some of the aspects of religious music — Black traditional religious music, that gospel music — have influenced the world over and over again.

We’re looking at it as holistically as we can, and we have a dynamic faculty who can do just that.

Rath: Talk about that influencing of the world because it was fascinating to hear you talk about Africana studies and how it sort of spans both African American studies and Africa studies. Talk about the world impact of this and how it goes both ways.

Price: Yes, absolutely. You go to Nigeria, you go to Ghana: one of the growing areas within the creative industries and within enterprises of creative expression is gospel music. You go to the Caribbean: gospel music. You find that those traditions — of course, from Indigenous folks and folks who are inhabitants there — take on a different look, a different feel, a different cultural milieu, as it were.

And so the realization that folks from other countries, other nations, other continents were looking at what Black folks in the United States were doing in terms of how we took our pain and turned it into hope and how we took the depressed state of turmoil and confusion and chaos and made that into redemptive possibilities through our musical aspects — through our creativity. That is an inspiration to people all around the world.

It’s very similar to what happened with the spirituals, what happened to the blues. You go around the world, and what we know as R&B, or rock and roll, or rock music, or all the various manifestations were inspired by the artists who originally sang spirituals and originally sang blues.

That legacy has transferred across the world — and we want to study it, we want to understand that, and we want to pay homage to these brilliant and resilient and hopeful folks who have given us this legacy to actually study and a repertoire to continue to perform.

Rath: It’s fascinating to hear you talk about the success of gospel music, and it’s just striking me, hearing you talk about it, how a lot of the history of African American music and culture is a struggle to have the means of production, right? To get your music out, to break into the industry.

With gospel, though, you have the church behind you. You have a structure already.

Price: Yeah. I mean, the church has been a phenomenal infrastructure and influence in many ways. I mean, the church becomes the backbone, as well as the foreground, for not only performance but also for encouragement — a platform for learning, a platform for support.

You know, many of the historically Black colleges and universities were founded in basements of churches. Churches continue to send young people to college. And so that background and that tradition of education within the ecumenical — and in the aggregation of Black churches across the denominations and across expressions — is a powerful entity that we cannot minimize.

Rath: That sounds like a pretty new approach to music education, integrating all of these different aspects, all these things that intersect. What are your hopes for how this might shape music education?

Price: Well, I think one of the things that we do focus on at Berklee College of Music is innovation, in knowing how to bring together faculty who understand, who are part of the traditions and who can teach that.

What we’re trying to do is not only stimulate a new methodology and a new expansive look at these historical legacies, but we’re also trying to influence how we can take things that have always been — you know, gospel music has been around for generations — and to honor them with the honor that is due. But also to extend it, to stimulate new activities within the industry.

Berklee is part of a new entity called the Gospel Industry Coalition, which is also moving into the area to influence and impact the industry so that we can say, “Hey — we have a whole new generation of young folks who are coming in. Not just musicians but they are producers, they are engineers, they’re composers, they’re arrangers, they’re business folks.”

We want to make sure that this industry not only stays alive, but it thrives into the next generation. With all the technological advances and all the things that we’re excited about — even with A.I., and all those phenomenal things that are going on — we can be at the table, as well, as we expand the creative industries around the globe.