New England Conservatory

[Manos]

Anyone know anything about this school? I saw that Gary Chaffee teaches here, and I have been seriously considering going to a music school with a focus on drums. I'm still looking at my options, especially the less-expensive ones (ie, not Berklee). If it's even a decent school, it would be worth whatever it took to study with him -- at least to me.

[jonthibault]

Anton Fig went there, albeit a long time ago, and has always praised it highly.

[peter c]

Harvey Mason is a graduate, I believe.
I think it could be a fine alternative
and you'll still be in the 'circle'.

I'm sorry that when I was at Berklee,
I did not hunt Chaffee down. He had a
profound influence on a lot of drummers
like Kenwood Dennard, for instance.

Plus, there's all the MUSICAL back-
ground that you will get too.

<font color="#a62a2a" size="1">[ May 04, 2004 11:28 PM: Message edited by: peter c ]</font>

[blake1]

Is New England cheaper now than Berklee? It used to be more expensive. Great named teachers but not so good teaching abilities from several friend's experience.
The best part of N.E. is that people are there to develop there own skills as opposed to Berklee where they develop the student to survive in the commercial world. Also, you get a much better balance of music. (Post war music, baroque, classical, micro-tonal and jazz) Berklee is almost exclusively pop music but have the really nice studios to play in, the film score dept and synth/computer labs.

My favorite composers came from New England, but the Berklee Students seemed to be better all-round PLAYERS. Seemed like N.E. didn't work on basics as much and so there were holes in player's playing.
After being away, I see that the composers really have a great advantage in the long run and those are the guys that you get the work from. Btw: those 2 schools are just down the street from each other so it's almost like going to 2 schools if you play your cards right. GET TO KNOW THOSE PLAYERS from the other school. That's how I payed my student loans off. They gave me some nice gigs!

I'm not too sure about Chaffee. He used to teach privately when I was at Berklee so I never did take lessons with him. I took lessons privately from Alan Dawson during summers in High School and one year after Berklee however.


Boston is a great town to be a student. I wouldn't really recommend to stay there since it's a student feeding student atmosphere.