Performances + Events
Cellist Lily Stern ’25 NEC/Tufts aspires to be a “conduit of empathy.” That idea came to her during her final year at New England Conservatory, when she performed George Crumb’s 1955 Cello Sonata at a visual-artists retreat on Cuttyhunk Island.
“That was a very special moment,” Stern said, “being able to play a contemporary piece for an initially skeptical audience but feeling the transformation in the room. There is nothing more rewarding than sharing unfamiliar sounds and perspectives, facilitating a connection between audience and composer.”
Stern will explore the intersection of music and psychology, with a focus on empathy, this coming fall in Paris as a Fulbright-Harriet Hale Woolley Scholar. Throughout the 2025–2026 academic year, Stern will study with cellists Anssi Karttunen, who’s on the faculty at the École Normale de Musique de Paris, and Diana Ligeti, director of the American Conservatory of Fontainebleau.
“My project is centered on studying the cello works and lives of four French female composers: Marie Jaëll, Rita Strohl, Nadia Boulanger, and Betsy Jolas,” Stern said. Through the study of the composers’s lives and music, including interviews with Jolas, who’s 98, and the curation and presentation of an educational concert series in Paris that will be repeated in the United States, Stern aims to create for audiences “a more profound connection to the music and to the women.”
“Sharing more about who these people actually were and how that influenced their music is going to inevitably help audiences connect better to the composers and their music,” she said.
Stern, who studied at NEC with faculty cellist Yeesun Kim, praised the Conservatory’s Community Partnerships and Performances program, which helped her develop skills she’ll apply to her Fulbright project.
“They train students to effectively present programs to audiences,” Stern said, talking about Tanya Maggi, NEC’s dean of community engagement and professional studies, and the CPP staff. Through the Fulbright-Harriet Hale Woolley Scholarship, Stern plans to “dive deeper into the psychological aspect of enhancing audience engagement.”
Stern has performed with the Street Symphony, which describes itself as “a community of Los Angeles-based musicians creating performances, workshops, and new songs with our neighbors recovering from addiction, homelessness and incarceration,” and has taught on a volunteer basis through the Kenya International Chamber Music Festival.
In addition to her music studies at NEC, where she was awarded ensemble and community fellowships through the CPP program and presented programs in environments ranging from the Boston Public Schools to eldercare facilities, Stern was a National Merit Scholar at Tufts, where she was a research assistant in the Music Cognition Lab. She also spent a summer working at the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California.
This coming fall, Stern will take up residence at the Fondation des États-Unis, where she’ll live among other artists — “visual artists, dancers, photographers,” with whom she looks forward to collaborating presenting interdisciplinary programs.
While she graduated from NEC in May and won’t leave for Paris until September, Stern remains busily focused on the impact she hopes to have.
“I’m preparing to apply for Ph.D. programs in music cognition,” she said. “I hope to maintain an active performance career while also doing research.” The scholarship in Paris will “lay the groundwork for bringing my research into the concert hall” and combine her areas of interest and expertise, which have roots in her family.
“My mother is a psychiatrist and my grandfather was a pulmonary scientist/researcher at the University of California San Francisco,” Stern explained. “My father’s side is artistic. Through them music, sculptures, and paintings were a part of my daily life.”
“I wasn’t really sure what I was going to major in going to college,” Stern said, “and then I took Psych 101 and it just clicked. It came easily to me. But it also was very intuitive.”
Through studying psychology, Stern said, she could “understand people better.”
Merging her interests “was a natural progression from my family background and an innate curiosity about other people and cultures,” she said. “Empathy is a concept that I’m really interested in — it’s a value that I was raised with — both empathy and helping others. I am passionate about how empathy through music can be a powerful vehicle to make the world a better place.”
