Adam Bern

Hi! Nice to meet you! My name is Adam Bern and I am a violinist, composer, arranger, band leader and teacher based in Brookline, MA. I hold a B.M. in Classical Composition from the Berklee College of Music (as well as B.S. in Engineering Physics from Cornell University and an M.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology from a previous life in the sciences). I have extensive experience teaching in a variety of settings, as a private instructor, tutor, and classroom teacher. Currently, I am focusing on private instruction in classical and jazz violin, Scottish and Irish fiddle, Western music theory, and composition, which are my main areas of expertise. If you are interested to learn more about private instruction, please feel free to reach out! I look forward to hearing from you!

Here’s a little bit more about me and my own musical journey. I began to learn classical violin at the age of 5. I loved classical music and I loved playing the violin, but the truth is I really hated practicing! It wasn’t until I discovered Scottish and Irish fiddle music that I got really invested. I started practicing like crazy, performing, gigging, even winning some competitions along the way for my fiddling (for example, the 2015 mid-atlantic open Regional Scottish Fiddle Competition run by Scottish F.I.R.E and winning “Best March, Strathspey, and Reel” at the open US National Fiddle Competition.) I later joined a band called FLAN, which mixed funk and R&B with Latino music traditions while I was living in Atlanta in 2018, which greatly expanded my musical horizons. At the same time time I was in a doctoral program in Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech, which was my main gig, and it wasn't until Oct of 2020 at the start of the pandemic, when I began to examine my own journey that I was hit with the realization that I needed to pursue music in its entirety for my life to make sense. I decided to leave my doctoral program and within eight days I had applied to the Berklee College of Music. A few months later, in Jan 2021, I was enrolled in Berklee. My experience was as exciting as it was overwhelming! I was able to study anything from jazz violin to Arabic violin, both of which I did, jazz arranging, and even classical composition, which I discovered a deep passion for and eventually chose as my major. I’ve been fortunate to win some recent awards for my writing: I was the most recent recipient of the Berklee Composition department’s Jeronimas Kaçinskas Award for outstanding achievement in composition and won second prize in the prestigious 2024 American Prize Ernst Bacon Memorial Award for the Performance of American Music. I am now an active musician and teacher in the greater Boston area, and I love what I do, and haven’t looked back! If you’re curious to learn more about me as an artist, you can visit adambernmusic.com.

My first lesson is a "meet-and-greet". We talk about what we want to learn and how we want to go about doing that, and figure out an appropriate level for the student. Based on that lesson, I like to tailor the curriculum of the lessons. In my lessons, I try to provide a nurturing, collaborative, and communicative learning environment where students feel safe to try new things and make mistakes. After all, that’s how we learn! Between working on technique and creativity, the ultimate goal of my lessons is to foster a passion for music in the student. I believe that each student has a unique and beautiful journey in music, and as a teacher, I consider it an honor to help facilitate that journey.