IMPACT REPORT Winter 2023
21/22
Thank you for your support of New England Conservatory. As an educational institution, we have the opportunity to start anew every fall. The return of our students to campus generates a dynamic energy that continues throughout the semester, in turn inspiring and enabling their own creative growth. We thrive on transformation at NEC because our world is centered around the evolving art form that is music. Looking ahead, we are well prepared to shape a new era for NEC, and for music education. The core values that have continue to define our work: artistic excellence, community, and innovation. In this report, I am pleased to share examples of how your support last year animated these
values daily, preparing and empowering our students to create lives of artistic achievement, purpose, and significance. I am grateful for the many ways you make a difference at NEC. With your support, this next chapter at NEC will be one of boundless creativity and transformational impact. With appreciation,
Andrea Kalyn President
New Course Invites Students to Reimagine Beethoven Nicholas Kitchen, NEC faculty member and first violinist of the Borromeo String Quartet, was an enthusiastic pioneer in the use of tablets for reading sheet music. Not only did a digital format enable him and the ensemble to read from full scores, but it also allowed them to work from electronic versions of original manuscripts. He was studying Beethoven’s original manuscripts when he noticed a series of expressive markings. Intrigued, he wondered if they might offer new insight into the mind of the composer. He found that observing the ways Beethoven used the marks helped him imagine, and reimagine, the music in front of him. Kitchen realized the unique opportunity these markings presented for musicians and wanted to share it with his
paths Bartók considered before choosing the one with which we are familiar.
Nicholas Kitchen and student discuss possible interpretations of a Beethoven piano sonata.
students. With support from the Catalyst Fund, a 2020 initiative to encourage innovative learning projects at NEC, he developed Creativity and Manuscripts, a yearlong course he began teaching for the first time this fall. The course engages students in an intense process of
bringing their own interpretation and expression to the performance of a well-known piece of music. This semester, students selected various Beethoven works to perform and eventually record. In the spring, they will concentrate on his Missa Solemnis as well as the manuscripts of the Bartók string quartets, to see the many
Though the class studies various print editions, the primary focus is on Beethoven’s original manuscript. Students examine electronic files of the manuscripts, and the newly noticed dynamic and expression markings inform their performances. In this way Kitchen invites students to play some of the best-known music in the standard repertoire, but to tune into Beethoven’s more refined expressive markings to allow new approaches to surface. His goal is for students to develop their own interpretations of their selected pieces, either as a soloist or in an ensemble, record continued on back page >