Performances + Events
As an undergraduate viola student at Oberlin College and Conservatory, Dr. Molly Gebrian ’06 MM, ’08 GD, enrolled in a neuroscience seminar on a whim.
“It was, hands down, the most fascinating thing I had ever learned about,” she says.
She decided to double-major in viola performance and neuroscience, but never saw the two fields intersecting. Music was her career; neuroscience was a curiosity. But as a graduate student at New England Conservatory, she realized she missed the duality and began looking for opportunities to continue exploring music and the brain.
Gebrian’s independent study often looked at improving her own practice behavior.
“When you’re practicing, you’re training your brain,” she says. “If you don’t really understand how your brain learns most effectively, you’re not going to use your time well.
“[What I learned] completely transformed my own practice and my own playing.”
Gebrian is now sharing her expertise on cognitive neuroscience — as well as techniques for improving practice routines — with the NEC community as the inaugural Teaching Artistry Scholar-in-Residence.
As part of the yearlong residency, Gebrian will engage with faculty and students, as well as professional musicians and music educators, through a variety of avenues. This semester, she is teaching The Art and Science of Practicing; next semester, she will offer a course on music perception and how the brain processes music. Gebrian is also dedicating six hours per week to meet one-on-one with NEC students who are looking for feedback on their own practicing, and who want to share these practices with their students.
“You can’t implement this with students if you don’t know how to do it yourself,” she says. “Everything I share is something I’ve used in my own daily practice for decades.”
That balance of personal practice and instruction aligns with the broader Teaching Artistry concentration. The program prepares NEC students to become music educators in a range of settings, from classrooms and private lesson studios to community programs and adult education.
Tanya Maggi, dean and chair of community engagement and professional studies, says Gebrian’s hybrid background aligns with the program’s expansive approach to teaching, which encourages students to think about music as a tool for connecting with people and for affecting change in the world.
“We recognized a need to bring in someone with a specialized area of research or practice—to have them embedded in the NEC community and be a resource for the broader Teaching Artistry ecosystem,” Maggi says. “Students are hungry to know more about this mysterious area of practicing. Many of us never learned how to do it effectively.”
Gebrian will also host several workshops, some aimed at the Teaching Artistry, Expanded Education, and Prep programs, others open to a wider audience.
Last month, she spoke to an audience of more than 100 NEC students and professors, Boston public school educators, and professional musicians as part of the Teaching Artistry@NEC Workshop series. Gebrian talked about how the brain learns, the importance of sleep, and how to use a metronome more effectively. She also explained the benefits of random practice over dedicating a large block of time to repetition.
“Your brain needs to learn the flexibility of switching between different skills,” she says. “That gives your brain an opportunity to forget things. When you come back to it, your brain has to remember it again and that further solidifies the skill.”
The Teaching Artistry residency builds on Gebrian’s long-term relationship with NEC, beginning with her time as a graduate student. Since 2020, she has been teaching workshops on the science of practicing at the conservatory, in addition to integrating concepts into her work as a viola professor at other institutions. But her research has always taken a backseat to her music. She read in her down time, wrote articles on vacation, and made videos for her YouTube channel during summer break. She published her first book, Learn Faster, Perform Better: A Musician’s Guide to the Neuroscience of Practicing, this past summer after years of research. As a Scholar-in-Residence, neuroscience will move to the forefront.
“I wanted to make this work more the focus of my career, rather than something I did on the side,” she says. “I’m now spending a lot more time on the science of practice and far less time practicing viola. It’s a very different balance than what has been essentially my whole life.”
Students also get to see one of the many avenues available to them as teaching artists and as NEC alumni.
“We like to bring back alumni to talk about their real-life experiences navigating the teaching artistry world,” Maggi says. “These interactions give students a chance to go deeper into an area that we don’t necessarily cover in a class, or that we might only introduce. Molly’s unique expertise in the neuroscience of practicing is an invaluable resource and we look forward to seeing the innovative ways in which our students and faculty integrate her work into their development as performers and educators.”
