Performances + Events
Today’s working musicians benefit from versatility. They have the confidence and skill to “answer the phone and say yes to any gig,” violinist Eden MacAdam-Somer said, whether that involves arranging a song by James Taylor for a wedding, reading charts, improvising, or learning something by ear. The 21st-century musician is whom Gunther Schuller had in mind when he created the Third Stream Department at NEC during his tenure as the Conservatory’s president from 1967 to 1977. Today, that program is the Contemporary Musical Arts Department, which MacAdam-Somer chairs, alongside Assistant Chair Farayi Malek, and where, MacAdam-Somer said, “we are seeking to train what Gunther Schuller referred to as the compleat musician.”
“When I got here, the big CMA course was a Saturday afternoon extension course,” said Hankus Netsky, the department’s longtime co-chair, who now serves as its advisor. “It was the path into the program.” Having met Schuller and Community Services Director Webster Lewis while playing in Philadelphia’s all-city jazz band, a rehearsal of which the two attended on a recruiting trip, Netsky transferred to NEC as a sophomore in 1973, the year after Ran Blake co-founded the Conservatory’s Third Stream Department with Schuller.
Netsky and MacAdam-Somer are ever-enthusiastic about students in NEC’s Preparatory School and Adult Education programs gaining exposure to the college’s CMA curriculum. NEC’s Expanded Education Department recently named Erin Hogan chair of its CMA program.
A vocalist by training, Hogan taught herself guitar by playing along with records by Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and The Beatles, and learned trumpet and trombone, too, out of curiosity. Hogan sang in a jazz-combo program during her undergraduate years at DePaul University, an experience she described as a “canon event” in terms of musical discovery. Hogan earned a degree in vocal performance from DePaul.
After college, she participated in the Silkroad Ensemble’s Global Musician Workshop, which has been been held during recent summers at NEC, and enrolled in Boston University’s graduate vocal program, outside of which she hung out at various recording sessions, attended the city’s Celtic Music Festival, had a regular gig singing at the Church of the Advent, and served as a Compassion in Action Fellow for the Namchak Foundation, hosting Tibetan Buddhist meditation “learning circles” for College of Fine Arts students in the basement of Boston University’s Marsh Chapel.
It was during one of the Global Musician Workshops that Hogan received an affirming piece of advice. “No one is going to make the music that you want to make except you,” Silkroad Ensemble bassist Edward Pérez told her. Though she was on the path to a career in the opera sphere, Hogan said “part of my musical soul was in a different place.”
Hogan has since taught private students at Club Passim, where Baez and Dylan performed when the venue was Club 47, and taught a workshop at Boston Conservatory in the aesthetics of folk singing. She’ll release a single in November called “By the Time it Gets Dark,” which she said is a “nod to Sandy Denny’s influence on my artistry and singing.” Hogan worked on the single with co-producer Melissa Ferrick, a Boston-based singer-songwriter, and with Julie Last, who served as an engineer on Joni Mitchell’s 1991 Night Ride Home.
Students “need aural skills to flourish across genres,” Netsky said. “Erin is somebody who does all of these things herself. She is a 21st century musician.”
In her role as chair of the CMA program in NEC’s Expanded Education Department, Hogan is in the process of developing such offerings as an Irish ensemble, global music classes, and a songwriting course. Above all, she said, she’s working to “build bridges and create partnerships with the greater Boston community and within NEC to strengthen and clarify the program’s identity, while expanding opportunities for Prep and adult students to grow with and through the program’s offerings.”
“There is so much opportunity for growth within CMA, particularly within Expanded Ed,” NEC Prep Director Sean Buchsbaum said, adding that current Prep students have inquired about musical styles beyond the ones they’re studying.
“We have a lot of students — in both Adult Ed and Prep — who are interested in music that is in addition to what they may already be studying,” Christopher Bush, NEC’s director of Adult Education and Summer programs explained. “Erin is starting to connect with other department chairs to see what that would look like.” She’s also connecting NEC to the musical circles in which she travels.
Learning other musical languages “will definitely improve the overall musicianship of any student,” Bush said, invoking Schuller’s idea of the “compleat musician.”
Beyond the attention to what Blake called “the primacy of the ear” — a reference to his point that “music is an aural art” — Hogan is moved by what breaking down barriers and collaborating across styles can accomplish. “You’re learning to be an empathetic musician,” she said, adding, “I want to create a community.”
To that end, she said, “we can learn Bach and Björk.”
Learn more about NEC’s Expanded Education Department and its offerings.
