Ed Blomquist

Assistant Professor

Affiliated Departments

617-747-8469

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Ed Blomquist is an assistant professor in Berklee's Music Business/Management Department (since 1994) and is also associate counsel for the Pulitzer Prize–winning Christian Science Monitor. His improvising band Underwater Airport has played twice at the Berklee Performance Center, and has received three Berklee Faculty Recording Grants. His prior band, the Free Range Experiment, also received a Berklee Faculty Recording Grant. His most recent Faculty Recording Grant was for recording improvised music for piano and electronics. His musical projects Underwater Airport, Nulmatica, Rivers and Skies, and the Free Range Experiment, and music listed under his own name can be found on Apple Music, Spotify, CD Baby, and elsewhere.

Courses Taught (1)

Music Publishing

MB-335

Career Highlights

Former attorney at Carroll Associates, representing numerous recording artists, songwriters, music producers, and independent record labels
Former record reviewer for Sound Choice magazine
Extensive songwriting, recording, and performing experience
Sings and plays oud, guitar, bass, modular synthesizer, laptop, iOS devices, flutes, and hand percussion, and produces with Ableton Live

Awards

Five-time recipient of the Berklee Faculty Recording Grant

In Their Own Words

"I want my students to grasp the conceptual basis of the domain we are studying, and to develop a problem-solving approach to the discipline."

"As a lawyer with over 30 years experience and a musician for most of my life, I am deeply aware of how relationships create opportunities and challenges for both creativity and commerce. I seek to instill in my students a sense of how the psychological and human aspects of the business impact everything they want to do."

"I teach in the Music Business/Management Department, which prepares students for careers in the business side of the music industry, as opposed to the performance side. That's not to say that they can't be performers as well, of course. My students could go to work for a record company; they could work for a publishing company; they could become an artist manager. I've had students who are at Apple, working for iTunes. I have other students who are lawyers at Warner Brothers."

"I think that the role of the music business professional is to support artists and art, as opposed to the goal being to take music and turn it into profit. To me, there's a difference of commitment and motive that's absolutely critical. I think that's part of the explanation for why the music industry is in such bad shape, because it's been a profit center for people who really don't care about music at all."

"I try to get this idea across to my students in several ways. I play them music every class. I talk about music all the time. I talk about the motivation. I try to highlight the people who are doing the right kind of job. You see it mostly in the indie realm, artists like Ani DiFranco. I'm a big fan of artists who do their own self-promotion and serve as their primary business engine."

"I have a very philosophical orientation, trying to find big-picture meanings, and I also use very strategic kind of thinking. I want my students to take away the sense of being able to really think in a dynamic way. I want to them to be able to solve problems through a multi-layered process of questioning assumptions."