NEC Musicians Contribute to the Boston Hope Hospital Music Project

Collaborating with musicians across the city—many of them NEC alumni—NEC's Community Performances & Partnerships was honored to participate in the Boston Hope Hospital Music Hope Project.

Boston Hope Hospital opened in mid-April as a temporary field hospital in the Boston Convention Center, designated to care for COVID-19 positive homeless adults. CPP worked with twelve NEC students and alumni to create almost four hours of musical content that was shared with patients as part of their healing process.  While the hospital closed in late June, the project is currently exploring ways to share the overall content with other hospitals and healthcare providers.

Boston Hope Music was led by Dr. Ron Hirschberg (Chief Medical Officer of Boston Hope Medical Center) and Dr. Lisa Wong (Arts and Humanities Initiative at Harvard Medical School), and collaborating members of the Boston Hope Music team included NEC alumni Kristo Kondakçi '13,'15 MM and Gabriela Diaz ’03, ’05 MM.

Diaz spoke with WGBH's Open Studio with Jared Bowen about her involvement with the project: “The most amazing thing about music is that it has the capacity to be whatever you need it to be. If you're going through a lot of really tough emotions and you don't quite know how to process them, or talk about them, music can be the thing that helps you access those emotions.”

The Boston Hope Music project will be featured tonight, July 9, at 7 p.m. ET on All Together Now, in a segment that includes a performance by NEC alumna Denyce Graves and NEC faculty Cameron Stowe.