Jeanne Bamberger

Bamberger retired from MIT as Professor Emerita of Music and Urban Education in 2002. She taught briefly at the Harvard Graduate School of Education before moving cross country to Berkeley, California, in 2005, where she has been affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley, since 2010. At Berkeley, she is teaching in the Music Department a course called “Music Cognition.”

In 1985, she launched a pilot program called the Laboratory for Making Things in a local public school that brought MusicLogo, Legos, and toys into schools and trained teachers to help students use them. The students were encouraged to move back and forth between making things with hands-on materials (pulleys and such) and making things using Logo and MusicLogo. The emphasis was on how these two worlds were different from one another while also informing one other. She subsequently created and directed the Teacher Development Program in the MIT Department of Urban Studies, targeted at MIT undergraduates wishing to teach math and science in inner city high schools.

Bamberger's music course syllabi in the 1980s and 1990s included using MusicLogo to learn about music. Because the kind of real programming that was part of MusicLogo was not readily accessible to teachers or young students, an easier-to-use software Impromptu was born and its accompanying book, Developing Musical Intuition.

From 1975 to 1995, she was in the Division for Study and Research in Education. There, she taught a course with Donald Schön called “The Role of Metaphor in Learning and Design” and another one (by herself) called “Developing Musical Structures.” She became an Associate Professor in MIT’s Humanities Department in 1981.

Bamberger worked in Papert's Logo Lab in the Department of Computer Science from 1972 to 1975. Together with a colleague Hal Abelson and a student Terry Winograd, she developed MusicLogo to allow students to actively participate in the learning of music making. MusicLogo enabled students to write code to create tunes that could be immediately played out loud. Freed from the need to master musical notation or performance, students could then spend more time constructing tunes and reflecting on the process.

Bamberger was appointed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1970 to 2001, where she taught in the Music and Theater Arts Section. At MIT, she attended a day-long seminar in April 1970 organized by Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert, then co-directors of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, on "Teaching Children Thinking". Learning about Papert's development of Logo and Minsky’s digital music box, Bamberger was inspired to embark on a career combining music, computers, developmental psychology, and education to change how music was taught.

After a brief stint at the University of Southern California, Bamberger's first longterm academic appointment was at the University of Chicago where, between 1955 and 1969, she taught a freshman seminar in Art, Music, and Literature together with Leonard Meyer and Howard Brofsky. In Chicago, she became interested in the education of young children, and particularly in the Montessori method.

Jeanne was married in 1955 to Frank Bamberger, a computer programmer. They have two children: Paul Simon, who is a labour lawyer, and Joshua David, who is a physician in family medicine, taking care of homeless people. Jeanne and Frank divorced in 1974, and Frank passed away in 2018. Jeanne has three grandsons and one granddaughter through her two sons.

Bamberger went on to the University of California, Berkeley where she studied with Roger Sessions, receiving an MA in Music Theory in 1951. Upon graduation, she received a Fulbright scholarship to study in Paris, France. From 1951 to 1952, she attended classes with Olivier Messiaen and Darius Milhaud; a notable fellow student in Milhaud's class was Pierre Boulez. During this time, she also performed extensively as a piano soloist and in chamber music ensembles, focusing particularly on music by young American composers.

Bamberger went to New York City in 1943 to study with Artur Schnabel. The other two students in Schnabel's piano studio at that time were Leon Fleisher and Claude Frank. Bamberger attended the University of Minnesota and Columbia University where she studied philosophy with Ernest Nagel and Irwin Edman. She received her BA in philosophy and music from Minnesota in 1948.

Jeanne Bamberger (née Shapiro, born February 11, 1924) is the American Professor Emerita of Music and Urban Education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Adjunct Professor of Music at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include music cognitive development, music theory and performance, teacher development, and the design of text and software materials that foster these areas of development.