Performances + Events
For almost a century, conservatory students worldwide have studied academic subjects separately from their musical studies, the intellectual aspects of their education siloed from what each young musician practices, creates, or performs. “A traditional conservatory curriculum,” says Richard Giarusso, New England Conservatory’s Dean and Chief Academic Officer, “requires students to do many different things in parallel tracks.”
Yet the world in which students pursue music degrees today is radically different from that of a decade ago, let alone a century. While tradition remains important, a rapidly changing world requires an equally dynamic approach to musical education.
Today at NEC, first-year students are experiencing a reimagined curriculum, one that intentionally connects elements that were once taught separately.
Launched in fall 2024, NEC’s Integrative Curriculum emulates a Venn diagram more than the traditional curricular checklist, connecting the classroom to the practice studio and the concert hall, and connecting students to themselves, to one another, and to the world around them. The whole musician — the individual artist and their potential — is nurtured in an experiential and project-based learning environment.
Launched in fall 2024, NEC’s Integrative Curriculum connects the classroom to the practice studio and the concert hall.
Launched in fall 2024, NEC’s Integrative Curriculum connects the classroom to the practice studio and the concert hall.
“There’s really no field of endeavor that’s better suited to project-based learning than music,” Giarusso says. “Because what a student is doing with a piece in a private lesson, or in a coaching or an orchestral rehearsal, is essentially the definition of project-based learning. Musicians, by virtue of what we do, are already in many ways hardwired to think like this.”
Designed to maximize points of overlap to foster a holistic approach to education, the Integrative Curriculum was informed by many discussions among students, faculty, and alumni over the past five years. In one such conversation, “students basically came up with the Integrative Curriculum,” says Andrea Kalyn, NEC’s president, explaining that the curriculum’s design sought to activate the very notion of practice, preparing today’s music students for today’s world.
Reimagining NEC’s curriculum began with experimentation — in core theory classes, first-year experiences, and integrated song studies. In 2022, faculty began to incorporate team-teaching into some elective courses, including “Performance and Analysis,” a class, co-taught by music theorist Andrew Schartmann and violinist Miriam Fried, where performance is directly connected to the theory through which students understand music.
From these experiments, faculty and administrators worked together to redesign the curriculum such that undergraduates progress in an experiential way through a four-year journey in which their academic and musical studies overlap. The Sophomore Learning Community – just one of several distinctive elements in the new Integrative Curriculum – serves as a bridge that leads students from foundational learning to independent, project-based learning and exploration. Described as a “sandbox environment,” this unique fourth-semester course teaches students to work collaboratively to design and develop projects, drawing on and connecting knowledge and skills developed in their first three semesters — including oral and written communication, modern research strategies, and musical analysis through applied creative thinking. “It’s about creating contexts for students to start to realize how all of those pieces fit together,” Giarusso says, “and ensuring that students have an opportunity to cultivate an awareness of the way their work exists in the world.”
Traditionally, senior recitals mark the culmination of an undergraduate degree, but NEC students now have the opportunity to synthesize their individual artistry and four years of learning in a capstone project — “a unique statement of their own artistic identity,” as Giarusso describes it. For some, this project may take the form of a recital, while for others, it may serve as yet another bridge, linking their undergraduate experience to the next phase of their creative lives.
“Our curriculum increasingly is giving our students the opportunity to think about their emerging artistic identity, not just as it satisfies the expectations of a traditional conservatory training, but as it is meaningful to them in their own emerging identity as young professionals,” Giarusso says.
“This is an education of professional, social, and cultural relevance,” adds Kalyn, “one that gives NEC students agency over their futures. With the opportunity during their undergraduate studies to practice for the creative lives they’re only just beginning to imagine, students can have confidence in their vision and their purpose.”
“I think this is the future of having a well-rounded and informed conservatory education,” says violinist Sophia Szokolay ’19, ’25 DMA, who took Fried and Schartmann’s Performance and Analysis class in 2023.
“We want to be sure that whatever students do when they leave this place, they are prepared to be creative and to find ways to build upon their experience here, and to build upon their identity as artists to develop successful and fulfilling professional lives,” Giarusso adds. “Their role as artists is not just to play or create music to delight the ears of listeners, but to engage with big ideas and to change the world.”
