Over winter break, Tufts acquired the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA), an official full adoption of the five-year combined degree program that awards students with two degrees — a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Bachelor of Arts or Science. Lesser known is the five-year dual degree program between Tufts and the New England Conservatory of Music (NEC), a music school in Boston dedicated to music education, composition and performance.
On Saturday, students from the NEC dual degree program played a short concert in the Distler Performance Hall in Granoff Music Center. The first part of the concert consisted mostly of classical music. First-year Tania Valrani and senior Sam Weiser played the first movement of "Centone di sonate" (1828) by Paganini, with Valrani on the guitar and Weiser on the violin. First-year Ari Brown performed Ravel’s "Ondine" from "Gaspard de la Nuit" (1908) on the piano, followed by a string quartet featuring a mix of full-time NEC and dual degree students. The latter portion of the concert after the intermission featured jazzier and contemporary music, and non-program Tufts students joined those on stage to play "Flight to Oslo" by Chris Potter. At the end of the show, Brian Aronow, a senior, played one of his original pieces.
There are only 10 students in the program currently, four of whom are first years, according to Matt Estabrook, a first-year in the program. The criteria for graduation is rigorous and time-consuming; students must complete 82 credit hours at NEC in addition to the foundational, distribution and concentration requirements to complete their Bachelor of Arts or Science degree at Tufts.
Estabrook, who played the tenor saxophonesolo in "Flight to Oslo," said that he appreciates the liberal arts education he gets from being at both the conservatory and the university.
“Being in the program allows me to study academia artistically and art intellectually,” Estabrook said, describing the intersection of his NEC major in jazz performance and his cognitive and brain sciences major at Tufts.
Valrani, a Spanish and Russian major, has also found that her education at Tufts enhanced her work at the NEC and notes that her language classes at Tufts has helped train her ears to accommodate quick changes in intonation and sound pattern structures.
However, the nine-mile commute from the Medford/Somerville campus to the NEC is not always an easy trip, according to Valrani. Completing the program requirements has challenged their time management skills and demanded a rebalancing of academic priorities. Valrani currently takes about seven to eight hours of class on Mondays and Thursdays, traveling from the Somerville/Medford campus to Boston about eight times a week on the Tufts-run SMFA/NEC shuttle, as she and other first years in the program currently live on campus.
For many students, the trip is well worth their effort; at NEC, they get to network with composers and other musicians — it's an opportunity, as Estabrook likes to say, to “jam with other students.” He's been able to find a good musical community at Tufts as well. Currently, he plays for a small ensemble called Water Walks that performs in small local venues.
Generally, he was attracted to both Tufts and NEC for similar reasons.
“Students are not super competitive at Tufts or NEC,” Estabrook said. “They really have the same collaborative spirit, be it through activism on campus or working on a new song together.”
More from The Tufts Daily
