Performances + Events
In his first year at New England Conservatory, cellist Alex Aranzabal questioned whether he was making a meaningful contribution to society through music.
“I didn’t feel my music was having an impact,” he explained.
Now in his last year at NEC, Aranzabal (’23 Prep, ’27) is driven by the artistic purpose he found in community engagement. His introduction to the rewards of connecting with individuals through music came at Common Cathedral, a Boston-based nonprofit whose mission “is to build community, provide spiritual care, and bridge the gap between unhoused and housed individuals.” The purpose he discovered in that community has been fostered by NEC’s Institute for Teaching Artistry (ITA), through which he’s pursuing a Teaching Artistry and Music Education Concentration.
In June, having previously held Ensemble, Musical Storytelling, and Community fellowships offered through NEC’s Community Performances and Partnerships program, Aranzabal participated in the ITA’s inaugural Community Ensemble Residency Intensive. In an ensemble with violinist Audrey Weizer ’27 and violist Peyton Crony called the Marigold Trio, Aranzabal performed for and interacted with people at Common Cathedral, two senior-care homes, a VA medical center, and a kindergarten class. It was in those interactions that Aranzabal found meaning.
From left: violinist Audrey Weizer ’27, cellist Alex Aranzabal ’23 Prep, ’27, and violist Peyton Crony outside NEC.
“Interacting with the community I’m performing for,” Aranzabal said, “is much more personal” than performing without one’s audience having a voice in a shared dialogue. While bringing music to a group of listeners is the first part of a connection, he said, “the second step is what the audience has to say.”
Aranzabal and his partners in the trio, which — along with a quartet of NEC students — was formed for the residency, sought from listeners reactions to the music they performed, which included Beethoven’s Op. 3, No. 1, and arrangements of “Over the Rainbow” and the fiddle tune “Magnolia One-Step.”
One audience member at Common Cathedral, a man named David, composed a short poem titled The Music of Waves in response to the Beethoven trio:
When we get the music of waves,
it moves the Earth.
When it moves the earth,
it makes the cracks.
The strings that make the waves
on the instruments.
It needs your fingerprints to make the waves.
“I want my music to connect with people on a very deep level,” Aranzabal said, adding that in turn he wants to understand audience members’ cultural values and who they are as individuals.
While Aranzabal was enhancing his commitment to community engagement here in Boston, vocalist Rosario Rivas ’26, ’27 GD was at the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music in New Orleans, where she and other musicians from NEC supported the organization’s teachers and performed for its student community. The residency, now in its second year, is also a program of NEC’s ITA.
Rosario Rivas ’26, ’27 GD works with a student at the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music in New Orleans.
Rivas, who studied in NEC’s Contemporary Musical Arts Department and earned the Teaching Artistry and Music Education Concentration before enrolling in the Conservatory’s Graduate Diploma program, helped students in the Marsalis Center’s piano lab. She’d previously served as a teaching assistant in NEC Prep’s Early Childhood program and, through her work pursuing the concentration, held a fellowship at Tunefoolery Music, a Boston-based “non-profit organization for musicians in mental health recovery.”
At the Marsalis Center, Rivas worked with 8- to 15-year-old students on their keyboard skills.
“These kids were in the music,” Rivas said. “Music is part of who they are. Music is just what they do.”
The students she worked with “all had really big personalities,” Rivas said, and their confidence bolstered hers. Watching and listening to them so enthusiastically make music, she asked herself, “If an 8-year-old can do that, why can’t I?”
Rivas is currently teaching early childhood classes for Hip Kids and pursuing such creative outlets as sewing and fashion, all while charting her musical path forward. She plans to release a single this coming fall and a four-song EP next year — the latter includes a visual element and was supported by an Entrepreneurial Musicianship Grant — and she has visions of performing here in Boston, in New York, and in her native Buenos Aires — the city, she said, that “helped me develop my artistic identity.”
Teaching will be a significant part of that.
“I’m working to put together a multidisciplinary studio,” Rivas said. “I want to give kids a safe space where they can try out all these art forms.”
Rivas credits NEC’s CEPS Department with helping her identify a professional path.
The department “helped me to find what it is I like to teach, who it is I like to teach, and why,” she said.
Tanya Maggi, dean and chair of Community Engagement and Professional Studies at NEC, welcomed that acknowledgment.
“These intensive community residencies give NEC students the invaluable opportunity to dive deep into the art of teaching and engaging with community audiences in Boston and beyond,” Maggi said. “Through the summer residency program model, students have the freedom to explore — outside the confines of the academic year — what it means to be embedded in the fabric of a community, using music as a means to build relationships. Both ITA residencies this summer saw so much learning and growth on all sides.”
